Hokey-Smoke, It's Like We're Actually In Berlin -- Well, Sort Of -- For Easter Week

Here we see (part of) the interior of the Great Hall of Berlin's Philharmonie, the (shall we say) unusual building built in 1960-63 -- under the watchful eye of then-chief conductor Herbert von Karajan -- to house one of the world's elite orchestras, the Berlin Philharmonic. Now imagine it even emptier. without anything on the stage floor, and mostly darkened, since at present the orchestra, like so many performers of all descriptions around the world, is unable to perform before live audiences.


Now imagine, in that empty, sparsely lit Philharmonie, Stefan Dohr, the Berlin Phil's principal horn since 1993 (the year he turned 28!), alone on the stage floor in casual dress (jeans, wasn't it?), playing this:



(Yes, that's Stefan! I'm pretty sure -- see the box below.)

by Ken

So here I was a few days ago going on and on about the treasure trove of riches providentially available to us online in our time of crisis, and now I'm spending half my time sharing a week's worth of Easter with the Berlin Philharmonic, absolutely free.

The other Stefan, de Laval Jezierski

It's a moment I won't soon forget, watching Stefan Dohr standing alone on the Philharmonie stage floor, talking to a live-stream camera about the music of Gustav Mahler and the "festival of horns" he bequeathed to the world's horn players in his symphonies, then playing the haunting horn call that opens the first of the two "Nachtmusik" ("Night Music") movements, the 2nd and 4th movements overall, of Mahler's five-movement Seventh Symphony. After Stefan told us that one thing he misses when he practices some of Mahler's great horn solos at home is the echo the composer sometimes provided, usually played by the 3rd horn, he raised his instrument and sounded this gorgeous horn call -- and lo! there were answering echoes! The camera showed us that they were coming from farther-up reaches of the empty Philharmonie, where Stefan's Berlin Phil colleague Stefan de Leval Jezierski could be seen manning his horn. Wow!!!

IN THE AUDIO CLIP WE JUST HEARD,
DID STEFAN ALSO MISS THE ECHOES?

I'm assuming it's Stefan playing the 1st horn part in that clip, from a Berlin Phil Mahler Seventh recorded live in May 2001 -- in the Philharmonie, of course -- under then-chief conductor Claudio Abbado. In the clip, yeah, I hear the echoes, I guess, but if I didn't know that they were there, I wonder. Since later we're going to hear a performance where the echoes seem to me just as clearly too loud, let's take another moment to hear the effect more the way I imagine Mahler imagined it:


New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live, Nov.-Dec. 1985

TO GET THE CAST OF CHARACTERS STRAIGHT --

Bear in mind that the Berlin Philharmonic is a democratically run orchestra, which elects its own chief conductor. Claudio Abbado succeeeded the mega-legendary Herbert von Karajan, chief conductor since succeeding Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1954, in 1989 and remained till 2002 (he died in 2014), when he was succeeded by Sir Simon Rattle, who stayed through 2018, even as he was assuming his new post as music director of the London Symphony in 2017, while the orchestra waited for Kirill Petrenko, who was elected to succeed him in 2015, to take the reins formally, which happened in 2019.

I WITNESSED THIS JUST THE OTHER DAY . . .

. . . via a free live stream from the Berlin Philharmonic's really interesting Digital Concert Hall (and then again via a DCH rebroadcast the following morning, which meant being up and logged in by 7am EDT; thank goodness I'm not in the Pacific zone!), so I could see it all the way through, clear-headed and without uninterruption, Episode 2 of the Berlin Philharmonic's Easter@Philharmonie Festival, this one devoted entirely to Mahler. It was a good show, as you might gather from the fact that I got up at the crack of dawn to rewatch the whole thing. I don't think I looked at my watch till near the end, at about the hour-and-a-half mark.

It's Sarah -- seen here with her horn!

I should make clear that the two horn-playing Stefans weren't absolutely the only live humans in the Philharmonie. I assume someone was operating the cameras and other equipment, and we had an English-speaking host, a Baltimore-born Briton, Sarah Willis -- in fact, yet another member of the Berlin Phil's renowned horn section. On this occasion Sarah was without her instrument, but we saw her in many of the clips that were shown from the orchestra's extensive video archive. (On Saturday, in Episode 3, we got to hear her play! See below.) Sarah has said in interviews that throughout her horn-playing life she has been informed that horn-playing is a man's job, and the fact is that when she joined the orchestra in 2001 she was its first female brass player.

Sarah explained that this week the Berlin Philharmonic was supposed to be playing in its annual Baden-Baden Easter Festival, but like so many performers around the world they've had to cancel all their public performances. So the Easter@Philharmonie Festival was created, drawing mostly on that rich video archive, but supplementing it with a bunch of neat insertions: performances and conversations taking place now, more or less. (I don't know whether these were live or newly recorded for the occasion.)

In the Mahler episode, in addition to Stefan Dohr's horn talk, there was an incisive performance by soprano Anna Prohaska (a frequent Philharmonic guest) and Israeli pianist Matan Porat of Mahler's devastating Des Knaben Wunderhorn song "Das irdische Leben" ("Earthly Life"). And there was an archival look-back at Claudio Abbado's tenure.

The archival Mahler performances were all worthwhile, and some of them outstanding. The program began and ended with finales from consecutive symphonies: that of the Fifth Symphony, conducted by the energetic Venezuelan Gustavo Dudamel in 2018, and the tempestuous nearly-half-hour one of the Sixth, conducted by Kirill Petrenko, who was to have conducted the work in Baden-Baden. The performance we saw was from this past January. It wasn't just finales. Two of the most lively performances were of "middle" movements: a beautifully controlled yet effervescent one by Andris Nelsons (now music director of both the Boston Symphony and Leipzig's Gewandhaus Orchestra) from 2013 of the third movement of the Second Symphony (based on Mahler's cosmically delightful Des Knaben Wunderhorn setting "Anthony of Padua's Fish-Preaching") and a buoyant, luminous one of the fifth movement of the Third by the talented young Swiss conductor Lorenzo Viotti from earlier this year (he was supposed to have repeated the symphony at Baden-Baden) with the boys' choir irresistibly bimm-bamm-ing while the women's chorus and mezzo-soprano Elina Garanča worked through the setting of yet another Wunderhorn song, "Es sungen drei Engel" ("There were three angels singing"). There was a complete performance of the Songs of a Wayfarer conducted by Simon Rattle in 2013, beautifully conducted and played, sung idiosyncratically (tending more toward various sorts of intoning rather than singing, with occasional phrases sung as a sort of effect) but clearly fastidiously thought out by baritone Christian Gerhaher. (Today in the DCH archive I heard him do a group of Mahler Wunderhorn songs that's almost all intoning.)


EPISODE 1'S ALREADY IN THE DCH ARCHIVE

By the time I finished double-dipping on Episode 2, I'd already discovered that Episode 1, which I'd missed altogether, is already available via Digital Concert Hall, still free -- I hope this means the rest will be following. There's a substantial amount of free content available as well, including all of the large collection of artist interviews, which are often more like real conversations, since they're conducted by members of the orchestra. There are also some free concerts. You do have to be registered for the site, but you don't have to pay anything unless you want to watch some of the regular paid content.

And for a 30-day period once you accept this offer from DCH, you won't have to pay at all. In consideration of the current world crisis, they're offering everyone a free 30-day pass for the site.



To get (and redeem) your voucher for a free 30 days, go to the Digital Concert Hall website.

By the time I finished rewatching Episode 2, I already knew I could catch up on Episode 1, and I did. Here's how it's described on the website:

The Berliner Philharmoniker were preparing their traditional Easter Festival in Baden-Baden when all public events in Germany had to be cancelled due to the corona virus crisis. For the first time, Kirill Petrenko was to have led the festival as chief conductor, including performances of Beethoven’s Fidelio.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be: like everywhere else in the world, the concert halls in Baden-Baden had to remain closed. In this situation, the Berliner Philharmoniker decided to offer their Digital Concert Hall audience an online festival consisting of archive recordings and film clips, as well as new interviews and small chamber music performances produced in the Philharmonie.

The first episode of the series focuses on the history and future of the Easter Festival founded by Herbert von Karajan in Salzburg in 1967 – and which moved to the city of Baden-Baden in 2013. In an interview, Kirill Petrenko talks about his plans for the coming years. In 2021, for example, Mazeppa will be the first opera by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to be staged in the history of the Easter Festival.

The Philharmoniker’s horn player Sarah Willis guides the audience through the episode which among other things includes orchestra members performing French chamber music. In addition, concertmaster Daniel Stabrawa recounts memories of the trips to the Salzach with Herbert von Karajan, and Albrecht Mayer, principal oboist of the orchestra, tells of unforgettable moments with Claudio Abbado, who is also to be seen in rehearsal excerpts from the Elektra production in Salzburg.

Crises sharpen awareness of those aspects of life that cannot be guided or controlled by the individual, that is, the entity known as fate. Not only Ludwig van Beethoven, the anniversary of whose birth is celebrated in 2020, but Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky too considered this again and again in his music. Kirill Petrenko already conducted a celebrated performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony at the 2019 Baden-Baden Easter Festival. The first episode of the Easter@Philharmonie Festival concludes with a recording of the same work from the Philharmonie. It is preceded by a conversation in which Kirill Petrenko presents his view of the work. Accordingly, at the heart of the symphony is the theme that for Tchaikovsky was “the dearest and the worst”: namely “how to face what is called fate”.

IN EPISODE 3, WE HEAR SARAH PLAY!
EPISODE 4, STILL TO COME, IS BEETHOVEN



Writing on Saturday, I've now seen Episode 3, in which Tugan Sokhiev, music director of the Bolshoi Theater, conducts Prokofiev, Ravel (with pianist Hélène Grimaud), and a grand performance of the above-mentioned Mussorgsky-Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition, and the now-92-year-old Herbert Blomstedt conducts Mozart (with pianist Leif Ove Andsnes) and the brass-popping Scherzo of the Bruckner Fourth Symphony. Among the new empty-hall features: With Bruckner on the brain, three Berlin trombonists play two Aequali, and our new old friend Sarah Willis, now packing her horn (hurrah!), joins three other Berlin horn players (our other new old friends the two Stefans -- Dohr and de Leval Jezierski -- and the Slovenian Andrej Žust) in an arrangement of a Bruckner Andante.

Today there were technical glitches, notably a transmission gap of about six minutes that began while we were hearing the two "1st concertmasters" besides longtime concertmaster Daniel Stabrawa (and there's yet another just-plain-"concertmaster"), Noah Bendix-Balgley and Daishin Kashimoto, who as Sarah pointed out are rarely in the Philharmonie at the same time, play part of the Mozart Duo, K. 424. It looks like I may be on dawn watch again Sunday!

Episode 4, which we now know will be devoted to Beethoven, is still on tap for Monday (at a guess, 1pm EDT -- UPDATE: no, it turns out to be 2pm EDT!) and Tuesday (presumably once again 7am EDT). As of now, only Episode 1 is already available in the DCH, but Episodes 2 and 3 are listed as "available soon." Presumably DCH is stretching out the roll-out with little likelihood of much other new material being added anytime soon. Today, with my free 30-day subscription activated, I watched in their entirety the Blomstedt Mozart and Bruckner performances excerpted in Episode 3, from the same Philharmonie concert this past January: a really bold and beautiful account of Mozart's grand Piano Concerto No. 22 with Leif Ove Andsnes, and an altogether outstanding-in-every-way Bruckner 4. Remember, this guy turned 92 last July!




TODAY'S MUSICAL BONUS

As I explained last time, I'm experimenting with tacking on a musical post to each post I write. The idea is that the musical bonus isn't necessarily related to the post itself. Today's is, though, and it seems kind of obvious. Generously as Mahler was represented in the Easter@Philharmonie Festival Mahler episode, its only representation of his once-most-cryptic-and-forbidding but now-performed-everywhere Seventh Symphony was horn principal Stefan Dohr's above-referenced sounding (with echo) of the first "Nachtmusik" movement, which I think epitomizes the symphony's profound strangeness and also uniquely Mahlerian wonderfulness.

So naturally we should hear the whole of the "Nachtmusik I" performances we excerpted earlier: from Claudio Abbado's second Mahler Seventh recording and Leonard Bernstein's third (counting his in-between video one with the Vienna Philharmonic). Or almost: From Lenny B we're hearing not the 1985 recording with the New York Philharmonic but the 1965, not because I don't love the 1985 one but because the 1965 one was not only perhaps my favorite installment in Lenny's first recorded Mahler symphony cycle but the recording through which I came to really love the piece — for me Lenny made more complete sense of this so-strange symphony than anybody else I've heard. Finally, as Sarah Willis pointed out, Mahler has been a large musical presence throughout the career of former Berlin Phil chief conductor Simon Rattle, and while I wasn't a fan of his pre-Berlin EMI Mahler cycle (nearly all with his former orchestra, the City of Birmingham Symphony), given that this is probably Mahler's hardest-to-make-sense-of symphony I was surprised how much I liked Rattle's CBSO recording (though surely here the 3rd horn's echoes of the 1st horn's solo are too loud).

As for the Solti and Scherchen versions, well, I was having trouble with two of the other clips and thought I'd have to replace them, and then I found these in the Sunday Classics archive (from a long-ago Mahler Seventh post), and I figured what the heck? By the way, Solti's 1st horn is the Chicago Symphony's legendary horn principal Dale Clevenger.

MAHLER: Symphony No. 7: ii. Nachtmusik I: Allegro moderato


Berlin Philharmonic, Claudio Abbado, cond. DG, recorded live, May 2001

New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded Dec. 14-15, 1965

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Simon Rattle, cond. EMI, recorded June 21-22, 1991

Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded May 1971

Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Hermann Scherchen, cond. Live performance, recorded 1965


Actually there's another item we could have heard as our bonus: the Mahler song "Das irdische Leben" ("Earthly Life"), which I mentioned soprano Anna Prohaska and pianist Matan Porat performed so incisively for the live-stream audience in the empty spaces of the Philharmonie. We've got a bunch of perfomances in the Sunday Classics archive, but that'll have to wait for another occasion.

Can You Imagine What This Crisis Would Be Like If We -- Or At Least Lots Of Us -- Didn't Have Access To Today's Onilne Resources?

Plus: Since the world needs music, I'm tacking
a bit on at the end of this post. Here's a tease:





Nobody could be more surprised than your humble author to find himself a practicing Zoomer.

-by Ken

I imagine that Howie and Noah have covered this by now. Nevertheless, let me note for the record how inexpressibly grateful I am, first, for the unbelievably vast range of resources for information and occupation now available online to those of us with decent online access, which is the other thing I want to express inexpressible gratitude for: that I do have such access. I have no idea how many people don't have such access; I just have this terrible feeling that there are a scary-awful lot of them. I try to imagine sometimes what this crisis, dreadful as it is, would be like without that access. It scares and horrifies me.

That said, count me astounded at the quantity and range of stuff being made available for me to read, watch, and do -- going beyond the expanded information and content universe the Intertubes have, in just a few decades, made us take for granted, to a new world of information, instruction, and entertainment which, at least for most of us, didn't exist even a few years ago.

While I don't think of myself as a Luddite or technophobe, I'm far from what you'd call can't-get-enough-new-technology type. I'm a confident e-mailer (hey, it's just writing and reading; I can do those!), but the whole social-media thing fills me with something bordering on dread and horror. I consort with Facebook only 'cause there's stuff and folks there I really do want to keep up on, and I shudder at the thought of going onto Twitter -- the only tweets I see are those for which I've been sent links by a trusted soul.

You can imagine, then, that I would never have imagined myself as even a candidate for Zooomerdom. When, from one week to the next, the leader of my clutter-fighting Meetup group Neatniks (or, more formally, "Hoarders No More"), took us virtual, I approached the first session, not really knowing WTF this Zoom thing is exactly, with intense unease. I got through it in a daze, but was grateful for the trian run when, in short order, my WW workshops also went virtual. By now they've both become fixtures of my life, and I've begun Zooming into a wider world. Just this afternoon, after doing another WW workshop (my third this week, with three different coaches, who've all figured importantly in what I've accomplished), I "attended" a slide-illustrated talk by the associate curator of the New York Transit Museum (one of my favorite places in NYC) on the history of transit signage in the city.


WHEN THE CORONAVIRUS BEGAN ITS LOCAL ROLLOUT --

Notices began to trickle into my e-mailbox, as I expect they did yours, from organizations and businesses I've had dealings with announcing at first the postponement of events or cutback in services, then increasingly cancellations and on-site physical closures. When the trickle started flowing faster, I had the presence of mind to create a folder into which I could dump the ones I'd read and wanted available for future reference and also lots of others I didn't take precious time to read but thought I might later want to.

At first the e-mails were basically informational announcements. Almost from the start, though, the announcements were including stuff to read or watch, and links -- lots and lots, and soon more and more links to a mind-boggling range of stuff to read and watch. It wasn't long before the onetime trickle had swollen to a flood, and my bluntly named "coronavirus" folder was overflowing to the point where it will now require a project in itself to distribute the contents into separate folders by category (which I'm still working out in my head), in order to have any chance to have some control over this material, and to retrieve any of it.


IMPORTANT AS THE MEETINGS ARE . . .

. . . for their stated purposes, they're godsends for the social contact they make a possible, at a time when social contact is the very thing we can't have. Granted, virtual meetups aren't the same as the real thing. Still, It's been wonderful to (literally) be able to see all those familiar faces at my Neatniks and WW gatherings -- and to meet up with new folks too.


AND ALL OVER THE COUNTRY TERRIFIC
PEOPLE ARE GOING ONLINE TO SURVIVE

I can't claim to have more than scratched the surface of what's out there. Early on I remember logging on to an entertaining audienceless performance in a series offered free, with the hope that we'll be moved to cough up some bucks, by Caveat, the politically charged comedy club housed (when it's offering actual performances, I mean) in a basement on the Lower East Side. Now, I can't keep up. For example, Brooklyn Brainery, where I've done a slew if interesting, offbeat, modestly priced classes in recent years, has virtualized its upcoming class schedule, and looking at the list the other day I spotted a class I'd have signed up for on the spot -- if it wasn't already full!

You say you've never heard of Caveat and Brooklyn Brainery? They're among the countless invaluably enterprising organizations which are now struggling to stay viable, and the thing is, anyone anywhere with online access can now participate in what they're doing. Ditto with all the museums and cultural organizations and . . . and, well, everybody.

All these orgs, large and small, are hungry for virtual audiences, and of course support. Brooklyn Brainery's Jen Messier, for example, put up this blogpost on March 15:

We Need Your Help!

The COVID-19 wildness has come at us all in NYC fast and furious over the past week or so. Like lots of other tiny businesses here, we have really small margins and depend on a packed schedule to cover expenses. Because we also have two storefronts, we have a lot of fixed costs, and this past week has been nothing short of devastating. My ultimate goal is to have nothing change once we all bounce past this phase - hell, to have even more classes to help our teachers make up any losses - but right now we're faced with a difficult situation where revenue has dried up almost entirely while expenses remain nearly the same. We'll of course be applying for the city's small business aid when available as well!

If you're able to and would like to help us during this financially tough stretch, we have a few options. Thank you so much!

1) Purchase a gift certificate to be used on a future in-person class: https://brooklynbrainery.com/gift-certificates

2) Try out an online class (more being added each day as we navigate this new world): https://brooklynbrainery.com/courses - just look for "online class" next to the class name

3) Sign up for a class further into the future: https://brooklynbrainery.com/courses

4) Join us as a virtual member to provide critical revenue for our fixed expenses at this time: https://brooklynbrainery.com/c…/virtual-supporter-membership

5) Grab a Brainery tote bag online (this is all we have to sell you!)

6) Share these options with friends!

There's really no good reason for me to be sharing this story rather than the thousands of others. It just happens to be something I'm looking at right now.

There's so much good work being done out there, and so much of it hanging by a thread. And of course this is happening everywhere. I feel horrible that I can't afford to help much, but for all of us this is a unique chance to get acquainted with stuff happening all over the country -- my guess is that any time you Web-surf you'll stumble across a zillion such opportunities, people and organizations who have gone virtual to survive, and are offering us all these riches.


BONUS: WE EXPERIMENT WITH TACKING ON
A BIT OF MUSIC, JUST FOR PLEASURE

I don't want to burden DWT readers, as I often felt I was doing with the old Sunday Classics posts, with the kind of music I love. But lately, as I've been writing a little, I've also had cherished pieces of music lodge in my head which I thought might be pleasant to pass along. And I thought maybe I'd tack one on every time I write a post.

One such is the overture to Leonard Bernstein's deeply delightful, verging-on-opera 1956 Broadway musical Candide. As I've mentioned in the past, this is one of those pieces which can seize hold of me to the point of listening endlessly -- 5 times, or 10, maybe 15. Just now, at a time when I think most of us could sure use an infusion of joie de vivre in our lives, I can't imagine a more sheerly joyous four, or four and a half, minutes' worth.

BERNSTEIN: Overture to Candide


Original Broadway Cast recording, Samuel Krachmalnick, cond. CBS-Sony, recorded Dec. 9. 1956

New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded 1960-63

Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded July 1982

London Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded December 1989

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, David Zinman, cond. Decca, recorded Feb. 3-4, 1996

London Philharmonic Orchestra, Andrew Davis, cond. EMI, recorded live at Glyndebourne, Apr. 27, 1997

In the event that the Candide Overture has the effect on you that it so often does on me, you can of course listen to it now as often as you like, and you don't even have to listen to it the same way, at least not the first six times. We hear, in chronological order (and also, you'll note, in order of fastest to slowest):

• First, the boisterous performance (of which we sampled the final minute at the top of the post) from the Original Broadway Cast recording conducted by that crackerjack theater conductor Samuel Krachmalnick.

• Then three performances, steadily more gradual, by the composer -- with orchestras in New York, within memory of the original Broadway production; Los Angeles, two decades later, and noticeably broader; and, finally, a bit slower still, London, from the studio recording made at the time of Lenny's famous London concert performance of Candide (available on video).

• A suitably sparkling performance from Baltimore conducted by one of the more satisfying (and versatile) conductors of recent times, David Zinman.

• And a wholly international performance, recorded live, with another English orchestra but this time an English conductor, and a fine one, (not-yet-Sir) Andrew Davis (now music director of Lyric Opera of Chicago), who provides a rousing kickoff for a gala concert staged in the theater at Glyndebourne celebrating the centenary of EMI.

The Privatized Internet — Entire .ORG Domain Registry Sold to Investment Equity Firm "Ethos Capital"; Registration Fee Restrictions Removed

Cover of a 2015 book glorifying the privatization of the Internet via "a unique and vibrant interplay between government and private industry." Nothing dollarable is safe.

by Thomas Neuburger

The love of money is a sickness with these people.
—Attributed to an Indian chief as he watched the Europeans move west.

Nothing dollarable is safe.
—John Muir, 1908

Buried in the recent impeachment and campaign news was this announcement from the Internet Society and Public Interest Registry (emphasis mine):

Ethos Capital to Acquire Public Interest Registry from the Internet Society

Public Interest Registry Will Continue Management and Mission of .ORG Under New Ownership

Reston, VA (November 13, 2019) – The Internet Society and Public Interest Registry (PIR) today announced that they have reached an agreement with Ethos Capital, under which Ethos Capital will acquire PIR and all of its assets from the Internet Society.  The transaction is expected to close during the first quarter of next year.

“This is an important and exciting development for both the Internet Society and Public Interest Registry,” said Andrew Sullivan, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Internet Society, the organization that established Public Interest Registry.  “This transaction will provide the Internet Society with an endowment of sustainable funding and the resources to advance our mission on a broader scale as we continue our work to make the Internet more open, accessible and secure – for everyone.  It also aligns Public Interest Registry with Ethos Capital, a strong strategic partner that understands the intricacies of the domain industry and has the expertise, experience and shared values to further advance the goals of .ORG into the future.” 

“Since the inception of Public Interest Registry, our mission has been to enable the .ORG Community to use the Internet more effectively and change the world for the better,” stated Jon Nevett, CEO of Public Interest Registry.  “That will not change. We have enjoyed a long and successful relationship with the Internet Society, and are thrilled that we will be able to continue – and expand – our important work with Ethos Capital while sustaining our commitment to the .ORG Community going forward.”

Internet names and numbers are controlled by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a private non-profit corporation. ICANN has been subject to being "gamed" by corporate interests almost since its founding, especially but not exclusively with respect to trademarks versus the rights of non-corporate entities to purchase and register unused domain names.

Some top-level domain names (TLDs) — .COM is a TLD, as are .ORG and .EDU — are not administered directly by ICANN, but have been assigned to other administrators. For example, in May 2019 ICANN granted exclusive "administration rights" to amazon.com for the .AMAZON generic TLD "after a 7 year long dispute with the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO)."

This is true of the .ORG generic TLD, a TLD much used by non-profit public interest groups. .ORG has been operated by the Public Interest Registry (PIR) since 2003. PIR is a Virginia-based not-for-profit created by the Internet Society (ISOC) specifically to manage the .ORG top-level domain.

But, as you can see by the announcement above, the Internet Society — because it apparently needed the money — has sold all control of the .ORG top-level domain to Ethos Capital.

Has anyone ever heard of Ethos Capital?

Who Is Ethos Capital?

It's a little difficult to get information about Ethos Capital, since they have such a small Web presence. They appear to be these guys, an African capital investment firm:

Ethos Capital offers investors long-term capital appreciation by investing in a diversified portfolio of unlisted investments managed by Ethos Private Equity, the largest private equity firm in sub-Saharan Africa.

So what is a sub-Sarahan Africa equity investment firm doing purchasing control of the whole of the .ORG registry? How does an African firm get into position to do this at all? And why are they doing it now?

To answer these question, we turn to The Register, a UK publication, which has looked into this story:

Who's behind Ethos?

Despite stating that Ethos Capital “understands the intricacies of the domain industry” its founder and CEO Erik Brooks has no experience within that industry. The firm’s website lists only Brooks and one Nora Abusitta-Ouri – who joined the outfit last month as its “chief purpose officer” – as employees.

But there is a common thread between those two and it is Fadi Chehade, a former CEO of ICANN, the organization that oversees the domain-name system and awards the contracts to run internet registries.

It was under Chehade that ICANN radically changed its approach to internet registries, including a massive expansion of the internet namespace and a move toward a free market approach to internet addresses. Chehade’s actions as CEO led directly to the Ethos Capital buyout of .org but he is not listed as a part of Ethos Capital and the company has so far failed to respond to our questions about his connection to the firm.

More recent decisions by ICANN also had a significant bearing on the decision to sell the .org registry. At the end of June this year, in a controversial decision made despite significant and vocal opposition, ICANN decided to lift price caps on .org domains for the next 10 years, paving the way for unlimited price increases on the 10 million .org domain names. That decision massively increased the value of the .org registry from millions to potentially billions of dollars.

At the time, ICANN justified the decision by saying it was bringing the contract in line with the many new extensions that have been added to the internet in recent years. And this week, ICANN’s chairman Maarten Botterman told The Register in a statement that:

“The renewal agreement for .org removed the price cap and includes pricing provisions that are consistent with the base form registry agreement that is published and has been in public view for some time, essentially removing the role of ICANN in pricing restraints, where possible.”

So the order of events is:

• ICANN, under Fadi Chehade, in a highly controversial move, massively expands top-level domain names, greatly multiplying profit opportunities for registrar and middlemen.

• PIR, a non-profit entity tasked with managing the .ORG top-level domain, removes the price cap on .ORG registrations, meaning any price can be charged by any registrar.

• A few months later, Ethos, an investment firm, buys the .ORG operation by purchasing PIR, the non-profit entity that controls it.

Sounds like a neoliberal wet dream come true to me.

The article emphasizes that so far no connection between Chehade and Ethos has been established or acknowledged, but note well that Ethos has not responded to requests for information on the connection — when a simple denial would have sufficed. I think The Register is right to smell a rat.

In the meantime, any poor, cash-strapped non-profit with a .ORG domain name — for example, sierraclub.org, to pick just one of literally millions — is best advised to renew its registration for the maximum time allowed, and do it now.

After all, there's no telling when our noble billionaire job-creators will seize this new opportunity to milk yet another cow completely and utterly dry.
  

The Rest Of America Needs To Be Connected To A Rapidly Changing Digital Universe That Is Revolutionizing Every Aspect Of American Life

On Sunday, the NY Times published an OpEd by Ro Khanna (D-CA), Spread the Digital Wealth. Ro's own district, CA-17, has lots of it to share. Although it starts up in Newark and Fremont in the East Bay, traditionally white collar towns, it meanders down into the Silicon Valley and bedroom communities like Milpitis, Sunnyvale, Cupertino and Santa Clara and right to the edge of San Jose. The district's residents are about 50% Asian-American now. Khanna was elected in 2016 after having served as an Assistant Secretary in Obama's Commerce Department. He has a law degree from Yale, where he specialized in intellectual property law, and before joining Congress wrote a book on competitiveness in business, Entrepreneurial Nation: Why Manufacturing is Still Key to America's Future.

He's widely considered one of the hardest working and effective members of Congress and he works on the cutting edge of policy, much of it informed by his studies and experience in the tech and business world. ProgressivePunch rates him the 5th most progressive member of the House (not counting the newly elected freshmen). He was the only member of the House to endorse Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's campaign against "future Speaker" Joe Crowley. In his Times OpEd Sunday he addressed a burning question in much of America-- when will "noncoastal towns and rural communities, including many communities of color be able to participate in the digital revolution. We know," he wrote, "that almost all Americans are avid consumers of technology, but many lack the opportunity to do the creative work that fuels our digital economy."

At stake is the dignity of millions of people. Within the next 10 years, nearly 60 percent of jobs could have a third of their tasks automated by artificial intelligence. Many traditional industries are becoming digital. Recently, a senior hotel executive described his business to me as essentially a digital one, explaining that his profit margins were contingent on the effectiveness of his software architects. Today’s hospitality vendors, precision farmers and electricians spend significant time on digital work.

Economists keep telling those left out of our digital future to move to the tech hubs. Sometimes I wonder if they have ever been to places like Jefferson, Iowa, or Beckley, West Virginia. If they visit, they will realize that many people there are not looking to move. They are proud of their small-town values and enjoy being close to family. They brag that their town doesn’t need many traffic lights. And they worry about a brain drain.

These places also are not looking to become the next Silicon Valley. They are self-aware enough to recognize that there are benefits for the world’s top engineers and computer scientists to flock to Palo Alto, California, or Austin, Tex. They understand why venture capitalists betting millions of dollars would want to be close to the start-ups they fund to have some control and accountability. But the choice facing small towns should not be binary-- it should not be “adopt the Silicon moniker or miss out on the tech future.”

Although the most advanced software innovation may take place in big cities with research universities, there is a lot of work concerning the application of software to business processes and the administration and maintenance of software systems that can be done remotely. Shame on us for shipping over 211,000 of these jobs offshore to countries like Malaysia and Brazil. Americans have an advantage in doing them because of a cultural understanding of what businesses need and a more convenient time zone.

Small towns can also sustain entrepreneurial activity that is tailored to their needs. Consider the fifth-generation internet service provider in Jefferson, Iowa, that was willing to make a bet on investing in fiber to serve a 4,200-person town. Jefferson is not chasing brand-name venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road but is seeking more modest investments in local businesses that will solve local problems.

So, what more can we do to make sure rural America has its share of middle-class jobs and businesses that will be the backbone of the digital economy? We need to provide additional funds to existing community colleges and land-grant universities to create tech institutes in places left behind. West Virginia University’s new tech institute in Beckley provides a model, equipping students with practical degrees or credentials that lead to jobs.

The federal government also should invest $80 billion to have affordable high-speed internet-- preferably fiber-- in every corner of this nation. We need to pay special attention to the racial gap in the affordability and adoption of broadband. Our infrastructure should not be a barrier to remote work.

Finally, the federal government can change incentives. When awarding federal software contracts, agencies should give favorable consideration if at least 10 percent of the work force is rural. We should, moreover, adopt stronger Equal Employment Opportunity reporting requirements for companies on the number of programmers they hire by country and location.

When I was in Beckley to visit the new tech campus, I was reminded of the story of John F. Kennedy’s visit to West Virginia during his 1960 campaign, when coal miners enthusiastically supported his vision for going to the moon. Our nation has always had a love affair with innovation. I saw that spark in the Beckley students, many from coal mining families, who were eager to show off their tech projects.

One of the most popular teachers was a Pakistani-American woman, with a thick accent, who was teaching software design. When some of the Beckley students asked me what more they should do to bring tech, I joked that they would be wise to open up a few more Pakistani or Indian restaurants. There was awkward silence and then laughter. If we can figure out how to give more Americans a shot in tech, a shot at the ordinary jobs that don’t necessarily afford rock star status or come with generous stock options but that can sustain middle-class life, then we might just take a step toward stitching our nation back together.

Two 2018 congressional candidates who live in largely rural districts-- and who will almost certainly be 2020 congressional candidates as well-- are Audrey Denney from the far northeast of California (about 42% rural) and Mike Siegel in an oddly-gerrymandered district stretching from northern Austin through suburbs, small towns and farmland into the exurbs of Houston (TX-10, about 20% rural). Both read Khanna's OpEd with their own districts in mind. Audrey told us that in her "vast remote, rural district our lack of broadband access exacerbates our inability to connect to new jobs in the digital age, but it also is a public safety issue and an educational issue. In one town in western Sierra county not only do they not have internet access or cell service-- but new landlines aren’t being installed. When an accident happens-- residents literally have to run down to the pizza parlor in town to use the landline. In CA-01, where major wildfires continue to ravage our communities, the lack of connectedness can be a matter of life and death. Additionally, equipping rural students for future-ready jobs requires being able to access the Internet, which many of our rural schools can’t.

Mike Siegel's district is more of a mixed situation. In one area they have Austin, which it's high tech industries and in the middle of the district... they need some of that "sharing" Khanna is talking about. "As Democrats," he told me recently, "we must show up in our rural communities, express our willingness to fight against the rigged economy, and work to win concrete victories. Universal High Speed Internet is one project that is achievable and would make a tremendous impact on rural economies. And the proposed Green New Deal will bring countless quality jobs to build renewable energy infrastructure, support energy efficiency, and promote local agriculture. Here in Texas, we have a tradition of economic populism going back a hundred years, and we can tap into that with a program that seeks both short-term and long-term change."

How Much Of Your Life Is Lived Online?

This is real... ah, for the good old days

You may have noticed DWT doesn't accept advertising-- let alone chase it. The concept repulses me and I've always thought the ad world is a scam with everyone scamming everyone and that it's incompatible with any attempt I could make in searching for any semblance of Truth. Friday night, one article-- this one by Max Read for New York captured the zeitgeist. I heard about it first when Rewad was a guest on Chris Hays' MSNBC show. How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually doesn't come to many conclusions you probably didn't already know, or at least suspect. But now you have the benefit of some real reporting to back up your suspicions. Read wrote that "In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered. Digital advertisers tend to want two things: people to look at their ads and 'premium' websites-- i.e., established and legitimate publications-- on which to host them." Show does this relate to Russia handing Trump the white House in 2016 or China's plans to manipulate U.S. elections goings forward? Keep reading.

The two schemes at issue in the case, dubbed Methbot and 3ve by the security researchers who found them, faked both. Hucksters infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to “spoofed” websites-- “empty websites designed for bot traffic” that served up a video ad purchased from one of the internet’s vast programmatic ad-exchanges, but that were designed, according to the indictments, “to fool advertisers into thinking that an impression of their ad was served on a premium publisher site,” like that of Vogue or The Economist. Views, meanwhile, were faked by malware-infected computers with marvelously sophisticated techniques to imitate humans: bots “faked clicks, mouse movements, and social network login information to masquerade as engaged human consumers.” Some were sent to browse the internet to gather tracking cookies from other websites, just as a human visitor would have done through regular behavior. Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites-- the fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet, where the only real things were the ads.

How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”

In the future, when I look back from the high-tech gamer jail in which President PewDiePie will have imprisoned me, I will remember 2018 as the year the internet passed the Inversion, not in some strict numerical sense, since bots already outnumber humans online more years than not, but in the perceptual sense. The internet has always played host in its dark corners to schools of catfish and embassies of Nigerian princes, but that darkness now pervades its every aspect: Everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake; everything that once seemed slightly fake now has the power and presence of the real. The “fakeness” of the post-Inversion internet is less a calculable falsehood and more a particular quality of experience-- the uncanny sense that what you encounter online is not “real” but is also undeniably not “fake,” and indeed may be both at once, or in succession, as you turn it over in your head.

The metrics are fake.

Take something as seemingly simple as how we measure web traffic. Metrics should be the most real thing on the internet: They are countable, trackable, and verifiable, and their existence undergirds the advertising business that drives our biggest social and search platforms. Yet not even Facebook, the world’s greatest data–gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. In October, small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80 percent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say). According to an exhaustive list at MarketingLand, over the past two years Facebook has admitted to misreporting the reach of posts on Facebook Pages (in two different ways), the rate at which viewers complete ad videos, the average time spent reading its “Instant Articles,” the amount of referral traffic from Facebook to external websites, the number of views that videos received via Facebook’s mobile site, and the number of video views in Instant Articles.

Can we still trust the metrics? After the Inversion, what’s the point? Even when we put our faith in their accuracy, there’s something not quite real about them: My favorite statistic this year was Facebook’s claim that 75 million people watched at least a minute of Facebook Watch videos every day-- though, as Facebook admitted, the 60 seconds in that one minute didn’t need to be watched consecutively. Real videos, real people, fake minutes.

The people are fake.

And maybe we shouldn’t even assume that the people are real. Over at YouTube, the business of buying and selling video views is “flourishing,” as The Times reminded readers with a lengthy investigation in August. The company says only “a tiny fraction” of its traffic is fake, but fake subscribers are enough of a problem that the site undertook a purge of “spam accounts” in mid-December. These days, the Times found, you can buy 5,000 YouTube views-- 30 seconds of a video counts as a view-- for as low as $15; oftentimes, customers are led to believe that the views they purchase come from real people. More likely, they come from bots. On some platforms, video views and app downloads can be forged in lucrative industrial counterfeiting operations. If you want a picture of what the Inversion looks like, find a video of a “click farm”: hundreds of individual smartphones, arranged in rows on shelves or racks in professional-looking offices, each watching the same video or downloading the same app.

This is obviously not real human traffic. But what would real human traffic look like? The Inversion gives rise to some odd philosophical quandaries: If a Russian troll using a Brazilian man’s photograph to masquerade as an American Trump supporter watches a video on Facebook, is that view “real”? Not only do we have bots masquerading as humans and humans masquerading as other humans, but also sometimes humans masquerading as bots, pretending to be “artificial-intelligence personal assistants,” like Facebook’s “M,” in order to help tech companies appear to possess cutting-edge AI. We even have whatever CGI Instagram influencer Lil Miquela is: a fake human with a real body, a fake face, and real influence. Even humans who aren’t masquerading can contort themselves through layers of diminishing reality: The Atlantic reports that non-CGI human influencers are posting fake sponsored content-- that is, content meant to look like content that is meant to look authentic, for free-- to attract attention from brand reps, who, they hope, will pay them real money.

The businesses are fake.

The money is usually real. Not always-- ask someone who enthusiastically got into cryptocurrency this time last year-- but often enough to be an engine of the Inversion. If the money is real, why does anything else need to be? Earlier this year, the writer and artist Jenny Odell began to look into an Amazon reseller that had bought goods from other Amazon resellers and resold them, again on Amazon, at higher prices. Odell discovered an elaborate network of fake price-gouging and copyright-stealing businesses connected to the cultlike Evangelical church whose followers resurrected Newsweek in 2013 as a zombie search-engine-optimized spam farm. She visited a strange bookstore operated by the resellers in San Francisco and found a stunted concrete reproduction of the dazzlingly phony storefronts she’d encountered on Amazon, arranged haphazardly with best-selling books, plastic tchotchkes, and beauty products apparently bought from wholesalers. “At some point I began to feel like I was in a dream,” she wrote. “Or that I was half-awake, unable to distinguish the virtual from the real, the local from the global, a product from a Photoshop image, the sincere from the insincere.”

The content is fake.

The only site that gives me that dizzying sensation of unreality as often as Amazon does is YouTube, which plays host to weeks’ worth of inverted, inhuman content. TV episodes that have been mirror-flipped to avoid copyright takedowns air next to huckster vloggers flogging merch who air next to anonymously produced videos that are ostensibly for children. An animated video of Spider-Man and Elsa from Frozen riding tractors is not, you know, not real: Some poor soul animated it and gave voice to its actors, and I have no doubt that some number (dozens? Hundreds? Millions? Sure, why not?) of kids have sat and watched it and found some mystifying, occult enjoyment in it. But it’s certainly not “official,” and it’s hard, watching it onscreen as an adult, to understand where it came from and what it means that the view count beneath it is continually ticking up.

These, at least, are mostly bootleg videos of popular fictional characters, i.e., counterfeit unreality. Counterfeit reality is still more difficult to find-- for now. In January 2018, an anonymous Redditor created a relatively easy-to-use desktop-app implementation of “deepfakes,” the now-infamous technology that uses artificial-intelligence image processing to replace one face in a video with another-- putting, say, a politician’s over a porn star’s. A recent academic paper from researchers at the graphics-card company Nvidia demonstrates a similar technique used to create images of computer-generated “human” faces that look shockingly like photographs of real people. (Next time Russians want to puppeteer a group of invented Americans on Facebook, they won’t even need to steal photos of real people.) Contrary to what you might expect, a world suffused with deepfakes and other artificially generated photographic images won’t be one in which “fake” images are routinely believed to be real, but one in which “real” images are routinely believed to be fake-- simply because, in the wake of the Inversion, who’ll be able to tell the difference?

Our politics are fake.

This is real-- and now Gillibrand wants to run for presidente

Such a loss of any anchoring “reality” only makes us pine for it more. Our politics have been inverted along with everything else, suffused with a Gnostic sense that we’re being scammed and defrauded and lied to but that a “real truth” still lurks somewhere. Adolescents are deeply engaged by YouTube videos that promise to show the hard reality beneath the “scams” of feminism and diversity-- a process they call “red-pilling” after the scene in The Matrix when the computer simulation falls away and reality appears. Political arguments now involve trading accusations of “virtue signaling”-- the idea that liberals are faking their politics for social reward-- against charges of being Russian bots. The only thing anyone can agree on is that everyone online is lying and fake.

We ourselves are fake.

Which, well. Everywhere I went online this year, I was asked to prove I’m a human. Can you retype this distorted word? Can you transcribe this house number? Can you select the images that contain a motorcycle? I found myself prostrate daily at the feet of robot bouncers, frantically showing off my highly developed pattern-matching skills-- does a Vespa count as a motorcycle, even?-- so I could get into nightclubs I’m not even sure I want to enter. Once inside, I was directed by dopamine-feedback loops to scroll well past any healthy point, manipulated by emotionally charged headlines and posts to click on things I didn’t care about, and harried and hectored and sweet-talked into arguments and purchases and relationships so algorithmically determined it was hard to describe them as real.

Where does that leave us? I’m not sure the solution is to seek out some pre-Inversion authenticity-- to red-pill ourselves back to “reality.” What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t “truth,” but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be. Years of metrics-driven growth, lucrative manipulative systems, and unregulated platform marketplaces, have created an environment where it makes more sense to be fake online-- to be disingenuous and cynical, to lie and cheat, to misrepresent and distort-- than it does to be real. Fixing that would require cultural and political reform in Silicon Valley and around the world, but it’s our only choice. Otherwise we’ll all end up on the bot internet of fake people, fake clicks, fake sites, and fake computers, where the only real thing is the ads.

Verizon and the Death of the Internet

In Portugal, with no net neutrality, internet providers are starting to split the Internet into "packages" — so much for email service, so much for social media, and so on. You don't buy the service, you don't get access (source; click to enlarge)

by Gaius Publius

There are two stories here, one about net neutrality — which Trump's FCC is about to terminate — and one about a corruption of the process by which the FCC arrives that decision.

About net neutrality itself, consider an analogy. Should companies that control the telephone wires control (a) who gets to use them, and (b) what is allowed to be talked about? In the U.S. a long time ago, the answer was no. Telephone wires were declared "common carriers" in the same way that roads are common carriers — a resource that should be open and available to all.

The same with the transmission lines and pathways that carry the Internet, or so the thinking goes. For most of its life, the Internet was treated like a utility, and Internet "wiring" was treated like a common carrier. That made sense and happened almost automatically, since early Internet traffic was carried by phone wires (via modems and DSL), to which established common carrier rules already applied.

In short, in the early days, the Internet was treated the same way the phone system was treated — like a public utility whose transmission lines were mandated to remain open to anyone who wants to use them.

The Internet, Big Money and Political Speech

Then three things happened. First, "ecommerce" grew, becoming a sizeable percentage of both Internet traffic and company profit. The Internet wasn't just about communication, it was about Money, not just for large existing companies. Dedicated ecommerce giants were created — Amazon, for example, and Netflix. The people who love money more than anything now had a stake in how the Internet was treated under the law. Meaning, they had a stake in making sure their Internet traffic was special, privileged.

Second, Internet traffic spread from phone lines to wired coax and fiber optic cable networks (Comcast, Time Warner) and wireless channels like satellite transmission (DirecTV). Were cable and satellite systems considered "common carriers" under the law? No, and it made no original sense to consider them so, since traffic on those channels was typically one-way, from the company to the customer, and never in the other direction. Internet traffic, of course, changed all that, turning cable lines and satellite transmissions into virtual common carriers, even though they weren't considered as such under FCC regulations.

Finally, the Internet became an organizing tool for opponents, not just of Big Money, but of what I would broadly call "rule by the rich" — which includes, among other things, the establishments of both political parties. It's the Internet that allows dissidents all around the world to organize resistance to powerful elites, from Cairo to Beijing to Washington D.C. The world of power hates the Internet, and works in every way it can to subvert it.

All three of these changes made the Internet vulnerable to perversion no matter which party was in power, and open Internet, or net neutrality, advocates have been fighting ever since to keep the Internet as we now understand it open and free, which was always its developers' original intention.

The FCC and the Open Internet

President Obama's FCC looked for a while like it would write rules that benefited the wealthy, since his choice for FCC chair, Tom Wheeler, had ties strong to the industry. Surprisingly, though, the Wheeler-led FCC preserved net neutrality — the open Internet as we know it today.

Trump's FCC chair is also an industry insider, Ajit Pai, and this time the threat to net neutrality is almost certain to be realized.

The Federal Communications Commission took aim at a signature Obama-era regulation Tuesday, unveiling a plan that would give Internet providers broad powers to determine what websites and online services their customers see and use.

Under the agency’s proposal, providers of high-speed Internet services, such as Comcast, Verizon and AT&T, would be able to block websites they do not like and charge Web companies for speedier delivery of their content.

The FCC’s effort would roll back its net neutrality regulation which was passed by the agency’s Democrats in 2015 and attempted to make sure all Web content, whether from big or small companies, would be treated equally by Internet providers.

According to Free Press, the new FCC order would:

• End Title II protections and erase the three Net Neutrality rules passed at the FCC in 2015 and upheld in court last year.
• Legalize internet blocking and discrimination by Comcast, AT&T and Verizon, no questions asked.
• Permit throttling back the speeds of different kinds of websites and apps.
• Encourage paid prioritization — sticking most sites and apps in the slow lane and reserving the fast lane for the few wealthy companies that can afford special treatment.

Ajit Pai is a former general council at Verizon, and most recently a partner in a lobbying firm specializing in "communications practice." He also has strong anti-government views. If you consider him an industry advocate (or shill), you wouldn't be wrong.

From a Trump administration perspective, Ajit Pai is to the FCC what Scott Pruitt is to the EPA — a destroyer. His "new rules" are set to be decided in December.

Ajit Pai's FCC Is Stone-Walling NY AG Schneiderman

The second story here involves the corruption of the process by which the FCC will make its decision — in particular, the "public comment" process.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, in an open letter to Pai posted at Medium, writes (my emphasis):

In April 2017, the FCC announced that it would issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking concerning repeal of its existing net neutrality rules. Federal law requires the FCC and all federal agencies to take public comments on proposed rules into account — so it is important that the public comment process actually enable the voices of the millions of individuals and businesses who will be affected to be heard. That’s important no matter one’s position on net neutrality, environmental rules, and so many other areas in which federal agencies regulate.

In May 2017, researchers and reporters discovered that the FCC’s public comment process was being corrupted by the submission of enormous numbers of fake comments concerning the possible repeal of net neutrality rules. In doing so, the perpetrator or perpetrators attacked what is supposed to be an open public process by attempting to drown out and negate the views of the real people, businesses, and others who honestly commented on this important issue. Worse, while some of these fake comments used made up names and addresses, many misused the real names and addresses of actual people as part of the effort to undermine the integrity of the comment process. That’s akin to identity theft, and it happened on a massive scale.

My office analyzed the fake comments and found that tens of thousands of New Yorkers may have had their identities misused in this way. (Indeed, analysis showed that, in all, hundreds of thousands of Americans likely were victimized in the same way, including tens of thousands per state in California, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and possibly others.) Impersonation and other misuse of a person’s identity violates New York law, so my office launched an investigation.

Successfully investigating this sort of illegal conduct requires the participation of the agency whose system was attacked. So in June 2017, we contacted the FCC to request certain records related to its public comment system that were necessary to investigate which bad actor or actors were behind the misconduct. We made our request for logs and other records at least 9 times over 5 months: in June, July, August, September, October (three times), and November.

We reached out for assistance to multiple top FCC officials, including you, three successive acting FCC General Counsels, and the FCC’s Inspector General. We offered to keep the requested records confidential, as we had done when my office and the FCC shared information and documents as part of past investigative work.

Yet we have received no substantive response to our investigative requests. None.

Ajit Pai and Trump's FCC are stone-walling the New York Attorney General, who is investigating an apparent scheme to grossly pervert the FCC public comment process so that it produces a result Agit Pai strongly favors. Whoever is behind the scheme, Ajit Pai is protecting them.

Are big-money "friends of Ajit Pai," or big-money "friends of Verizon," engaged in such a scheme? Agit Pai is acting like they are.

For all we know, he or a subordinate could be behind the scheme, or the author of it. 

The Death of the Internet — Mourned or Avenged?

I'll make one tenuous prediction. If Pai and Verizon's plan goes through, it's possible the tired and harried masses will accommodate themselves to it. After all, betting on the willingness of most Americans to surrender their liberties was an easy call, ever since 9/11 "changed everything."

But look at the graphic at the top. Note that social media content is blocked in Portugal unless you pay extra. Same with video, music, messaging and email. Will people really stand for that?

In addition, without net neutrality, some content — for example, political discussion groups and websites — may never be accessible, no matter what you may want to pay, turning the U.S. into China in that regard. Will people really stand for that?

So this prediction: I could be wrong, but it may just be that this shocks Americans so much that they won't stand for it. And in this case, "won't stand for it" happens to have a convenient and effective target for expression — and punishment.

Verizon.

Ajit Pai's former employer, and one of the key companies pushing for this change.

Are you a Verizon customer? A paying customer? Time to change that perhaps.

Is there a Verizon office near you? Care to make a little visit? I hear they welcome the public with open arms.

Maybe you could bring your friends, or organize a group excursion via social media ... while you still can.

GP
 

15 House Republicans Join The Democrats To Stand Up Against Encroachments By Big Brother

Do you remember what these 15 congresscritters have in common?

• Justin Amash (MI)
• Mo Brooks (AL)
• Mike Coffman (CO)
• Warren Davidson (OH)
• Jimmy Duncan (TN)
• John Faso (NY)
• Garret Graves (LA)
• Jaime Herrera Beutler (WA)
• Walter Jones (NC)
• Tom McClintock (CA)
• Dave Reichert (WA)
• Mark Sanford (SC)
• Elise Stefanik (NY)
• Kevin Yoder (KS)
• Lee Zeldin (NY)

Yes, they are all Republicans. Some are crazy right-wing lunatics from the Freedom Caucus like Mo Brooks and Warren Davidson; some are libertarians like Walter Jones, Jimmy Duncan and Justin Amash; some are relatively mainstream conservatives like John Faso snd Jaime Herrera Beutler. Because of the nature of their districts, some are in precariously vulnerable positions for reelection, like Mike Coffman, and some are set-for-life, like Garret Graves. But all 15 crossed the aisle on March 28 of thise year to vote with every single Democrat against Jeff Flake's Joint Resolution-- which has since been signed into law by Trump-- to allow Internet providers to sell our personal online data to the highest bidders without our permission and, in fact, without even informing us.

That was insane for the Republicans-- regardless of how many of them took massive bribes from the internet providers-- to do. The bill passed narrowly, 215-205 and it makes every Republican, other than those 15, vulnerable on an issue millions American voters care very much about regardless of partisan politics.

Matt Coffay is a leader of Our Revolution in western North Carolina. He's running for Congress, taking on Freedom Caucus chieftain Mark Meadows, one of the Republicans who voted to allow Internet providers to sell our personal information to whoever wants to buy it. Matt disagrees with that vote. This morning he told us, "My position on internet privacy is much like that of Senator Bernie Sanders: your internet history belongs to you, and not to corporations. This isn't complicated, or radical. How can Republicans in Congress claim that they want government to stay out of people's lives, and then vote for a bill that allows people's private browsing data to be sold to the highest corporate bidder? This bill is a violation of our right to privacy, plain and simple."

David Gill is the progressive candidate for the IL-13 seat currently held by knee-jerk Republican Rodney Davis, who, of course, backed giving the Internet providers the green light to sell our personal information. David wasn't amused by his decision. "This vote represents yet another betrayal of his constituents by Rodney Davis: he took $49,000 from the telecom industry, and then he voted to allow those companies to sell your web browsing history to marketers and other third parties-- so much for privacy! I support undoing Citizens United & reforming campaign finance laws. When we take those steps, we'll have representatives who stand up for their constituents, rather than reps who sell out their constituents."

Three years before Flake wrote his Joint Resolution, Michael Gurnow wrote The Ed Snowden Affair, a book that tackles many of the issues the GOP legislation starkly brings up for Americans. Even back then, he wrote that "data brokers take their information, organize it into precise little profiles, and offer it to anyone with an open checkbook."

This includes the obvious customers, U.S. government and corporations, but they have other steadfast clients. Many “people locator” websites purchase data mining profiles and resell them to the general public. For a nominal fee, anyone can access a person’s birthday, place of birth, current and past residences, family relations, social security and phone number, educational background, email address, place of current and former employment, and medical, property and court records. Medical insurance firms are curious whether a potential client prints Internet coupons for over the counter headache medicine and pays in cash to avoid a rate-hiking paper trail. Employment agencies want to know an applicant’s hobbies and proclivities without having to ask. Loan companies are interested in a candidate’s choice of recreational locales, be it a casino, truck rally or library. Once this data is combined with receipts from many of the major corporations, buying habits are then merged with wants and desires. The result is a very concise, detailed picture of an individual’s pos- sessions, activities and goals. This is then compared to established buying patterns. The end result is daunting. The owner of an analyzed profile knows who a person was, is, and is going to be. Corporations refer to this as market research. Privacy advocates consider the process an infringement upon the Fourth Amendment and argue third-party cookie usage violates the last sanctuary of privacy, one’s thoughts. Orwell’s prophecy is modestly conservative by 21st-century standards. The main character in Nineteen Eighty-Four believes, “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.”

The surveillance debate has intensified since June 5 and lent new perspectives upon the concept of the safety technol- ogy can provide. The underlying political issue is who has the right to particular varieties of information.

The public believes there are two types of conversations, public and private. The intelligence community doesn’t agree. In the Internet Age, a person can “Like” the activity of fishing enough to let the world know by making it public knowledge on one’s Facebook profile. The individual can also choose to obtain a vanity Facebook URL by confidentially submitting one’s telephone number to the social networking site. The phone number is used for authorization purposes to verify the request is coming from the Facebook account holder. Though it is not placed online, the number is nonetheless (questionably) stored on the company’s servers. David Omand, former head of GCHQ, has no problem with collecting the publicly-known fact Bob likes fishing along with his cell number via Facebook’s FISC order permitting the U.S. government access to the information. For the watchers, there is no line dividing what an individual puts on the Internet and what people have privately entrusted to another party, be it a website, bank, doctor or telephone company.


Government spies also scoff at the notion of intellectual property rights. Bought-and-sold politicians agree. If something is publicly or privately posted online, it automatically becomes the property of the website’s owner. (This is also why most businesses permit and encourage employees to use their company-issued phones and email accounts for personal communications-- the firms have legal license to review an employee’s private network and communications, because they own the devices and programs and therefore the data on them.) It is an absurd proposition analogous to stating an individual surrenders rightful ownership of a vehicle to a bank when it is parked on property whose tenant has yet to pay the mortgage in full. This policy refuses to acknowledge the resources and labor provided by the Facebook account holder, i.e., the computer used to access the social networking site, time it took to create a profile and mental ingenuity in deciding how and what to say about oneself. It is understood that the website has issued the venue which, in turn, makes the information available worldwide but the skewed exchange undermines the statement that profiles are “free.” No profit sharing is offered the user. Without account holders, social networking sites would be empty voids on lonely servers and not multinational corporate affairs.

In the surveillance communities’ opinion, everything is public domain and no one has the right to ask “Do you mind?” to someone eavesdropping on a conversation. Their argument is that if a person doesn’t want what is being said to be known (by whomever), the individual best not speak at all. In the cloak-and-dagger world of data mining, the person having a discussion cannot reasonably expect privacy, because the individual is voicing one’s thoughts, period. It does not matter whether they are spoken in confidence and directed to a particular person, much like an email is addressed “To: Bob” and not “To: Bob; Bcc: The NSA.” If the speaker is naïve enough to say something at a volume where a microphone can detect it, it is de facto public knowledge. Whereas government surveillance only exchanges the recorded conversation with its own kind, corporate surveillance broadcasts the discussion to anyone who is willing to pay to hear it. In the surveillance world, the only guarantee of privacy is dead silence.


The U.S. government knows the difference but deliberately ignores it. It does not want a distinction to be made, because it would restrict its power and the power of those who fund political campaigns: defense contractors, telecoms, Internet companies, corporate retailers, fast food enterprises and mul- timillion-dollar data mining firms. The last thing the U.S. government or private business wants is account holders to have control over their own information.