#USA #BigTelcos #PublicHealth: "At a gathering of telecom officials more than a decade ago, John Malone, a senior AT&T manager, cautioned the group about a little-known danger crisscrossing the nation.

His topic was lead-covered cables, which once carried phone service and had long been obsolete. Weren’t these ancient cables gone?

“NO,” his slide presentation said. “Some older metropolitan areas may still have over 50% lead cable,” the slide said. In some places, they posed risks for phone-company workers and the surrounding environment, Malone concluded.

For decades, AT&T, Verizon and other firms dating back to the old Bell System have known that the lead in their networks was a possible health risk to their workers and had the potential to leach into the nearby environment, according to documents and interviews with former employees.

They knew their employees working with lead regularly had high amounts of the metal in their blood, studies from the 1970s and ’80s show. Environmental records from an AT&T smelting unit in the 1980s show contamination in the soil. Government agencies have conducted inspections, prompted by worker complaints, that led to citations for violations involving lead exposure and other hazardous materials more than a dozen times over four decades, records show."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/att-verizon-lead-cables-telecom-5e329f9

#EU #NetNeutrality #BigTelcos #BigTech: "In plain language, this proposal requires certain online services to negotiate with ISPs over the size of the fee, not whether there is a fee.

And if an online service disagrees with the requested fee or an ISP thinks an online service isn’t offering enough money, some arbitrator will decide how big that fee is.

This “obligation to negotiate network fees” is being shopped in the EU as a compromise alternative to mandated network fees, but it’s anything but.

In fact, it’s exactly the same.

While the telcos market the obligation to negotiate network fees as light-touch, less intrusive, and less regulatory than mandated network fees, an obligation to pay network fees is baked into the proposal: the negotiation determines how much the specific content provider has to pay the specific ISP, not if it should pay at all.

That’s a mandated fee.

A pig with a wig is still a pig."

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2023/07/eu-telecoms-newest-proposal-force-websites-pay-them-just-terrible-their-previous-one

#USA #BigTelcos #Health: "The U.S. has spent decades eradicating lead from well-known sources such as paint, gasoline and pipes. The Journal’s investigation reveals a hidden source of contamination—more than 2,000 lead-covered cables—that hasn’t been addressed by the companies or environmental regulators. These relics of the old Bell System’s regional telephone network, and their impact on the environment, haven’t been previously reported.

Lead levels in sediment and soil at more than four dozen locations tested by the Journal exceeded safety recommendations set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. At the New Iberia fishing spot, lead leaching into the sediment near a cable in June 2022 measured 14.5 times the EPA threshold for areas where children play. “We’ve been fishing here since we were kids,” said Tyrin Jones, 27 years old, who grew up a few blocks away.

For many years, telecom companies have known about the lead-covered cables and the potential risks of exposure to their workers, according to documents and interviews with former employees. They were also aware that lead was potentially leaching into the environment, but haven’t meaningfully acted on potential health risks to the surrounding communities or made efforts to monitor the cables."

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/lead-cables-telecoms-att-toxic-5b34408b

#USA #Broadband #Lobbying #BigTelcos #MunicipalBroadband: "That means providers have to compete, unlike many parts of the US where people are lucky to have even two real choices of ISP and subsequently pay some of the highest rates in the world.

I tell Austin that he’s just described the waking nightmare of AT&T, Comcast, Charter, Cox, Lumen (CenturyLink), and Frontier. We both laugh. But it’s not really a joke – not when tens of billions of dollars in federal funding are at stake.

The United States is about to deploy $41.6 billion to expand high-speed internet access across all 50 states and every major US territory through a program called Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD). It’s the largest public investment in US broadband ever, and the Comcasts of the country will try their damndest to make sure that public money winds up in private hands.

But in many states, the fight will be over before it even begins — because of lobbyists."

https://www.theverge.com/23763482/municipal-broadband-biden-internet-funds-telecom-lobbying?mc_cid=61f92ea1f5&mc_eid=eb527a594e

#EU #BigTelcos #FairShare #NetNeutrality #EC: "In a fight between the big tech companies and the internet provider giants, it can be very tempting to not care who wins and loses. However, in the case of the ISPs' "fair share" proposals, ISP victory would mean undermining one of the very foundations of the internet—net neutrality.

After the European Commission held a public consultation on whether they should adopt what they call a “fair share” proposal, they unfortunately voted to move forward with this dangerous plan. This proposal is nothing but a network usage fees regime, which would force certain companies to pay internet service providers (ISPs) for their ability to deliver content to consumers. This idea not only hurts consumers, but also breaks a status quo that facilitated and continues to facilitate the rapid spread of the global internet. Accordingly, we filed comments that called for the European Commission to abandon this completely unfair idea altogether."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/there-nothing-fair-about-european-commissions-fair-share-proposal

#EU #BigTelcos #NetNeutrality: "In other words, Europe’s largest telecoms want the Commission to help them get paid twice for some services – once by everyday Europeans watching a YouTube video and second by YouTube itself.

But that violates net neutrality, and the European Parliament just voted to tell the Commission not to violate net neutrality in this matter.

So when the European Commission publishes the submissions to the consultation and issues its report (reportedly by the end of June), it cannot use the Parliament’s vote as cover to call for mandatory network fees over the objections of BEREC and the member states.

Perhaps that’s why the ISPs were fairly muted on social media after the vote, with the exception of a Telefonica lobbyist’s post on LinkedIn claiming a “mandate.”"
https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2023/06/when-media-gets-it-wrong-eu-parliament-actually-said-no-forcing-websites-pay-isps

#EU #BigTelcos #Broadband #NetworkFees #NetNeutrality: "In a frontal assault on net neutrality, the European Commission wants to force websites and apps to pay fees to broadband companies like Telefonica, Orange and Deutsche Telekom, and it just closed its call for comments on the proposal.

Network fees like this have never existed in the EU. They violate the EU's net neutrality law, and, if put in place, would be a radical departure from how the internet has operated and flourished over the last 30 years.

While reporting solid profits and telling their investors everything is going great, European internet service providers (ISPs) have seemingly convinced the European Commission that the normal rise in online traffic is overwhelming and that, without the government requiring online companies to pay them, they’ll be unable to roll out 5G and fiber fast enough to meet EU goals.

In fact, the largest ISPs appear to want to have websites and apps collectively pay them €36-40 bln a year, according to a 2022 study funded by their lobbying group, ETNO.

There’s a ton of reasons why this would be terrible public policy (see my explainer here for a comprehensive rundown), but I want to focus in this post on exactly how it violates net neutrality.

Both the ISPs and the Commission have repeatedly said that such fees wouldn’t violate the principles of net neutrality or the EU’s Open Internet Regulation, but repetition does not create truth.

Network fees violate net neutrality and would severely distort online competition and user choice."

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2023/05/heres-how-european-commission-proposal-force-websites-pay-isps-violates-net-neutrality

#USA #Broadband #BigTelcos #Telecommunications: "How are telecommunications network development priorities shaped? Recent news stories shed some light. A profit motive is overwhelming other social objectives in network infrastructure projects, from utility poles throughout rural areas to Arctic Ocean fiber-optic cables.

In the US, it is a given that broadband infrastructure will not be built out unless there is money to be made – because business interests have been permitted to provide internet access across the country. The COVID pandemic made the results clear, as people in poor and rural areas struggled to access the internet – which is no longer a luxury but a necessity for work, school, and life in general."

https://informationobservatory.info/2023/03/31/greed-fear-and-public-need-in-todays-telecommunications/

#USA #FCC #EFF #BigTelcos: "The core of this loathsome assault is that Sohn serves on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF is a prominent nonprofit devoted to protecting user privacy and freedom of expression online.

Sohn joined the EFF board, which includes leading academics from UC Berkeley and Harvard, digital entrepreneurs such as Brewster Kahle, and experts in digital security and telecommunications law, in 2018.

Sohn’s association with EFF is what has put her in the crosshairs of the far right. Among the EFF’s targets, you see, is a pair of laws known as FOSTA/SESTA, which were enacted in 2018 during a Congressional panic over online child sex trafficking."

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-02-03/opponents-unveil-a-grossly-homophobic-attack-on-a-superbly-qualified-fcc-nominee