Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 6th, ’24

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Whatever else Farley’s work is, it is not AI — even when it barely seems to be I." – Brett Martin


































Early Edition



April 6th, 2024













How Pirates and Factory Workers Changed Music Forever (and Made Eminem’s Life Miserable)

Filmmaker Alex Stapleton and writer Stephen Witt discuss their new documentary How Music Got Free about the file-sharing era
Jon Blistein

The story everyone knows about the rise of the Mp3 and the end of the CD gold rush is a good one. It’s got Metallica and Dr. Dre, Sean Parker and the RIAA, Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, and the record industry’s flabbergasting decision to sue its own fans. But the real story, or arguably the most nuanced and fascinating one, lies elsewhere with a bunch of young computer wizzes scattered across the country and a handful of crafty, underpaid factory workers in Shelby, North Carolina.

This story anchors the new MTV Entertainment Studios documentary, How Music Got Free, directed by Alex Stapleton and based on the 2015 book of the same name by Stephen Witt (also a producer and talking head in the film). It’s a remarkable turn-of-the-millennium caper centered around Dell Glover, a tech-savvy employee at Universal Music’s CD manufacturing plant in Shelby, who — with the help of some of his co-workers — smuggled out unreleased discs, ripped them to his computer, and shared the files with a mysterious figure known as Kali, leader of the most prolific digital piracy groups. (The film just premiered at South by Southwest and will get a wide release on Paramount+ in early summer.)

If you used Napster, Kazaa, or Limewire to download new music from the Universal catalog, odds are you were enjoying the fruits of Glover and Kali’s labor. Together, they leaked everything from Jay-Z’s The Blueprint and Eminem’s The Eminem Show to Blink-182’s Take Off Your Pants and Jacket and Queens of the Stone Age’s Rated R. Glover even put his finger on the scale of the great Kanye West/50 Cent showdown of 2007, leaking both Graduation and Curtis within a few days of each other.

How Music Got Free features extensive interviews with Glover, some of his plant co-workers, and other key pirates in the so-called “Warez scene” (though not Kali). But that’s just one side of the tale. Eminem and his manager, Paul Rosenberg, helped produce the film, and both sat for interviews; as did other artists and industry figures — 50 Cent, Timbaland, Jimmy Iovine, and Steve Stoute — who still harbor residual leak-induced trauma.

“Eminem was one of the most pirated artists during this time period,” Stapleton tells Rolling Stone. “He was so vocal about how much he hated these kids that were screwing up this album releases. But they just kept doing it. That kind of paradox is a filmmaker’s dream… [Eminem] trolled the music industry. He had a lot of fun, and that’s why we loved him. And then you have this whole other world that was getting his goat.”

How Music Got Free is filled with fascinating tensions: between artists, fans, and corporate interests; music and technology; those who put in the labor of all kinds to make music possible and those who see the largest profits. In the opening five minutes of the film, the rapper Rhymefest offers the perfect hypothetical for the file-sharing era: “We talk about what went wrong—what went wrong for who? The artists or the industry?”

As Stapleton notes, when “things were good” for the music industry in the CD days, “it was bad” for the workers at the plant making $8.50 an hour and consumers forking over $20 for a disc that cost a couple of bucks to make (to say nothing of the environmental toll from all that plastic). But when things got bad for the industry, those who bore the brunt were arguably those who weren’t doing much good anyway.

“The concentration of the means of production of the CD factory plants and the expense of distributing stuff in stores created a class of gatekeepers,” Witt says. “I don’t think, in aggregate, they were good for creative arts. It was bad, in aggregate for society, that in 2005 and 2006, the recording industry revenues collapsed by 50 or 60 percent — but it did kind of get rid of a lot of these gatekeeper types.”

Stapleton and Witt were both part of the file-sharing generation. Stapleton remembers using the high-powered internet connection at the production company where she interned to download stuff on Napster — everything from hip-hop and R&B hits to electronic artists like Moby and Daft Punk to weird covers of pop songs. Witt filled up multiple hard drives with pirated music — Radiohead, Nirvana, Jay-Z, N.W.A., Snoop Dogg, etc. — after arriving at college in 1997. This was the pre-Napster days when you still “had to go into a chat room and be like, ‘Hey, do you think anyone’s ripped this song? Where could I find it?’”

The eclectic nature of their collections speaks to the ultimate meaning of the title How Music Got Free: “I think the aggregate result of this era was to collapse many genre distinctions; force into the hands of consumers a much wider variety of music than they’d ever really expected before; and broaden people’s horizons and tastes to create the expectation that you should have access to basically the entire history of recorded music at the press of a button,” Witt says. “You don’t have that with television or movies. There’s not an omni channel, in the way there is for music.”

This, of course, has created a new set of problems for the streaming era. Music is technically no longer free — you’re either paying about $10.99 a month or listening to ads — but streaming royalties are doled out proportionally, funneling the most money to the biggest artists; the rest are left to split the remaining pennies, and frequently, advances and expenses must first be recouped before any profits can be made. Putting further pressure on all of this, as both Stapleton and Witt note, is the rise of artificial intelligence and large language models (allegedly) trained on copyrighted materially that potentially portends an even graver existential crisis for music (and other forms of entertainment) than Napster ever conjured.

In a wide-ranging interview with Rolling Stone, Stapleton and Witt discussed this brave new world and its resonances with the file-sharing era, as well as perennial questions about how to survive as an artist and what went into the making of How Music Got Free. (This conversation was edited and condensed for clarity.)

Were there any stories or angles that emerged while making of the movie that weren’t part of the book?
Alex Stapleton: Finding more factory workers was a big mission. Shelby’s a tiny town, so everyone worked at that plant. But getting people to go on camera and talk about copping CDs added another layer to it. But it became really important to give this context and backstory, showing that this is a place that didn’t have a lot of opportunity. These people were not being paid anything.

Stephen Witt: I went into this a little [in the book], but I think Alex really captured Shelby in a way that was difficult to do in print. What it looks like to be in an economically depressed, post-industrial town in the South. It’s not an accident that the manufacturers locate their sites in these economically depressed places. They don’t want to pay high wages. There’s not a lot of other opportunities, there’s no unions, so [manufacturers] have a lot of bargaining power.

How did you get people like Dell Glover, these factory workers, and the pirates to speak on the record about this stuff? Was it difficult, or were people willing to discuss it after all these years?
Alex: The roadmap was started by all the research and writing that Stephen did. Obviously, Dell was central to that. Tony Dockery is another big character in the book. But I could never get Tony to come to the table. I really wanted him to talk, but he’s moved on with his life and doesn’t want to revisit that chapter.

With the pirates outside of Shelby, there were a lot of people that we really wanted to talk to. One would only let me use his voice. He was the pirate who compressed a Metallica song [into an Mp3] and put it on the Warez scene — he was the first guy to do it. He now works in IT for some big company and was like, ‘No, I can’t be a part of this.’

The pirates that did participate, it’s not that they’re proud of being criminals, but I think they’re proud of building a world and an ecosystem that we’re all part of today. And I also think they wanted their story to be told. It was really extreme, the sentences for what they did, because the problem was really the music industry not embracing technology. These kids were just doing the inevitable. Some of them, after a screening, came up to us and were like, “Thanks for doing this, because now I can show this to my kids to explain why I have a federal record.”

I thought the movie made an interesting distinction between the piracy itself and leaking albums early, which is what really seemed to rattle artists more than anything.
Alex: When you’re 19 years old, you don’t have any money, you’re a super fan, and you have this tool on your computer — what do you really expect people to do? Going back to the artists and their position, I think the connection that wasn’t being drawn from their perspective — and Eminem, this was something that was really important to him — is that the albums were part of the art. You had skits and all these interstitials — it was a movie. And I think [Eminem] was really traumatized when little pieces, little scenes, were being leaked because you weren’t getting to experience the album and the songs as he wanted you to.

Stephen: The pirates didn’t have any concept of how much damage they were causing. They thought it was funny; they were trolling. I don’t think they recognized that there were 50 to 100 people working on an album launch. It’s not just Eminem pressing a button. They were pretty economically divorced from what they were doing.

Alex: This is also an era of extreme gluttony in America. The 2000s were so live with money — popping champagne bottles and making it rain. And I think for all of these kids, how would they understand that those cars are rented and the money is fake? They’re taking it at face value when you’re saying you’re a millionaire and nothing can hurt you. They’re like, “Ok, well I’m gonna keep doing my thing over here.”

That dynamic is even more acute with Dell or the factory employees like Rodney and Kimberly, who were smuggling CDs and sometimes selling bootlegs to their friends in town. Rodney has this great quote, “If they wanted me to be good, they would have paid me more.”
Alex: Exactly. There are different degrees of this piracy. In Shelby, a lot of it was tangible. Rodney and Kim — they were not necessarily online during that time period, understanding the bigger picture. They’re like, “I’m one human giving out 10 CDs, and one goes to this guy, Dell.” But Rodney kept saying he had no idea!

Stephen: No one understood that Dell was a direct conduit to Limewire. They thought they were like selling these for $5.

I got the sense that no one in the industry really suspected the leaks were happening at the plant level. Like, everyone thought it was the engineers or something. Was it really not until the FBI got involved that they started tracing this back to the factory?
Stephen: They were so clueless, and you’d think they would know. I mean, I interviewed the plant security guard. He didn’t know! It was a Keystone Cops kind of thing, like how are you not finding this? [Laughs]

Another thing is, at a certain point, Universal sold the plant. So while they were telling artists, “We’re really locking down the plants,” in reality, they were just like, “This is a wasting asset, we’re not going to pump anymore money into this, including security.” They basically took this plant, shoved it into an open grave, and waited for it to die. Nobody at the plant, after a certain point, took anything seriously.

Speaking artists and people in the industry, what lessons do you think they took away from this era, besides that it’s probably not a good idea to sue or prosecute your own fans?
Alex: I think that for artists — maybe not necessarily all of the executives — they just want to put their art out, and most are very flexible about how that happens. But when you start messing up the process, so that they can’t afford to work on the art they want to make — I think artists are resentful at that. And I don’t think artists were part of the conversation during piracy. It was very much like, “Don’t worry your pretty little head about this, we’re gonna figure it.” And that added 10 years onto the pain of an industry falling.

Stephen: To quote Twin Peaks, “It is happening again.” The New York Times is suing OpenAI right now. The ongoing growth of large language models and music production models — think about where that comes from. They hoover up this raw content and repurpose it for profit. None of that flows back to the original creators, which they need to make that stuff work. Something like ChatGPT, in a certain sense, is like the new Napster. It’s a more sophisticated technology, but it essentially is an engine for copyright infringement for the profit of a narrowly defined company. The lesson for The Times and other content creators like us is that you can’t just fight it. You’re not going to successfully suppress this. And that’s what they tried to do with Napster. They did sue it out of existence, but ultimately, they were unsuccessful in their aims. The cat was out of the bag. It took way too long for the labels to accept that they weren’t going to sell CDs at the mall anymore.

Now, I’m on The Times’ side in the lawsuit. Clearly, OpenAI is committing copyright infringement and attempting to profit off of it. But they can’t just shut down OpenAI. They have to reach some kind of agreement where the content creators are paid back for the generation of the automated text of the AI.

Did you do any research into what the contemporary piracy scene looks like these days, like private torrent trackers? My assumption is it doesn’t carry much weight anymore, but I’m curious if you found anything to suggest otherwise.
Stephen: I think it has almost zero impact.

Alex: Yeah. But the pirated world for film, I think that’s becoming a bigger threat than for music in today’s world. I don’t think it’s taken off. It’s a little bit more complicated to understand how to get free movies.

Stephen: There’s nothing like Napster for TV. I mean, it’s out there. There’s top sites and private trackers that have all of Netflix, Hulu, and all of that stuff. And as the costs to stream multiple services go up, you might expect more people will gravitate back to piracy. But [this] generation didn’t come up with it in the same way that we did. So maybe they just don’t feel that sense of entitlement, frankly, that my generation felt — that all files should be free at the push of a button. I don’t think it’ll ever come back, or at least not soon, in the way that it once was. If I were a streaming executive, I’d be more concerned about the potential impact of artificial intelligence, and, frankly, YouTube, than piracy.

How so?
Stephen: It’s a tough moment for TV streaming, I don’t think that’s a secret. A lot of the stocks are down, and I think they have to figure out a business model that works. At the same time — this is looking into the future a little bit — but if you had something like Sora that could create entertainment on demand, that could create a big problem. If you’re watching that, then you’re not watching a scripted show. This hasn’t happened yet. The technology isn’t there, but it’s what they’re trying to do.

Alex: It’s very close. It’s scary, but also cool. You can take an iPhone 15 and go shoot anything that you want. The tech is moving so fast, and I think you’re gonna see a lot of amazing filmmakers on YouTube. There’s still going to have to be some kind of curation of the content, and that, to me, is what will be interesting. What will that look like, and how will the industry figure out how to monetize that?

Stephen: I’m watching Shogun right now, and just the level of human artistry and craft that went into it is very high. It’s a great show. And I think we’re a fair distance away from a computer being able to make something like that.

Alex: We are. But the crazy part about Sora and the visual part of AI, the tech changes so fast. The distance between the innovation is a lot smaller than AI than anything we’ve ever seen in my lifetime.

What’s Shelby like now? Is the plant still open?
Alex: It’s not a CD plant. That shut down sometime in the 2010s. It is currently occupied by the Chinese government [laughs]. We got in trouble trying to get on their property a couple of times. Even flying a drone in that area. You can do that in most rural areas with no problem. But it was kind of creepy. I would ask the locals like, what is going on in that plant? And nobody knows.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/m...ai-1234998051/





Original Pirate Material

On 28 March 1964, Radio Caroline hit the waves. How did pirate radio discover its winning formula and what happened next?
Rob Chapman

Shortly before midday on Easter Saturday 28 March 1964, the first medium wave broadcasts were heard from the offshore pirate station Radio Caroline. Based on a converted ferry moored just outside UK territorial waters, Radio Caroline was the brainchild of Dublin-born Ronan O’Rahilly. His father Aodogán owned the port of Greenore in County Louth and it was there that Ronan was able to get his radio ship fitted out in relative secrecy.

Radio Caroline’s conception was predominantly a response to the BBC’s limited pop music output, in particular its restricted needle time – the amount of recorded music it could play in any one day. The broadcaster’s pop coverage was largely governed by its relationship with the Musicians’ Union and the various copyright and licensing revenue organisations, including the Performing Rights Society and the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society, all of which mitigated against any practical expansion in the Light Programme’s pop output, a national radio station launched in 1945 which was the forerunner to Radio Two. By the time O’Rahilly established his radio station Britain had a thriving beat music scene and the Merseybeat era, galvanised by the phenomenal success of the Beatles and other Liverpool-based groups, was arguably at its peak. With a plethora of other UK beat groups beginning to dominate the Top 30, British pop music was changing rapidly, a situation with which the Light Programme with its pop orchestras, often playing cover versions of the hits of the day, was ill-equipped to keep pace.

Radio Caroline was not the first European radio station to circumvent legislation by mooring a vessel in international waters. Radio Mercur (Denmark, 1958-62), Radio Nord (Sweden, 1960-62) and Radio Veronica (the Netherlands, 1960-74) were the earliest of seven continental pirates that preceded Caroline. O’Rahilly’s station was not even the first British-based offshore initiative. Allan Crawford’s Project Atlanta had been planned since 1960. The two briefly shared a mooring facility in Greenore harbour and Caroline narrowly beat Atlanta to the airwaves by a few weeks. The two stations merged into Radio Caroline North and South to ensure nationwide coverage. Although several other pirate stations launched over the next three years it is Radio Caroline, along with the equally successful Radio London, which began broadcasting in December 1964, that have become largely synonymous with the offshore radio era.

The received wisdom about pirate stations is that they played a non-stop selection of Top 40 records 24 hours a day from the start. Analysis of those earliest broadcasts from Radio Caroline in March and April 1964 shows that this was far from the truth. The station played the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other beat groups of the period, but it also featured artists as varied as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Connif, Mantovani and The Mike Sammes Singers, as well as showtunes from musicals by Judy Garland and Stanley Holloway. In its first few months, the output of Radio Caroline resembled a kind of hip easy listening version of the Light Programme.

This was due in no small part to the station’s cultural milieu, which closely reflected its ‘Kings Road Chelsea Set’ origins. One of Caroline’s chief backers was Jocelyn Stevens, at that time editor-in-chief of Queen magazine. By the early 1960s Stevens had transformed Queen from a poor imitation of Tatler into a stylish publication. From 1962 Queen carried the Top 10 playlist of the recently opened Annabel’s Nightclub in Berkeley Square. These lists, with their emphasis on jazz, bore a marked similarity to the records that were regularly aired on Caroline in those earliest broadcasts.

The most prominent of Radio Caroline’s original financial backers was the Eton- and Cambridge-educated entrepreneur John Sheffield, founder and chairman of the Norcros group of companies, but also among the initial list of signatories and small investors were a number of long-term Chelsea residents. As O’Rahilly put it in Channel 4’s The Black and White Pirate Show, aired on 13 July 1987: ‘Without the capitalist pigs of the City of London there would have been no Caroline.’ To this assertion he might have added Cadogan Square and Paulton Square dowagers, plus a discreet number of philanthropic heiresses, lords and earls. It is a distinctive aspect of the ‘long 1960s’ (which began with the formation of a new bohemian upper middle class of the 1920s) that so many Swinging London initiatives were launched on a mixture of old money, creative whims, trust fund wealth and the emerging micro-economies of the newly affluent young.

Chelsea’s unique social and cultural blend was one of the main influences in moulding Caroline’s distinctive rebellious image in the 1960s. It certainly offers a contrasting economic model to that of its main offshore rival Radio London, also known as ‘Big L’. Created by a Texan businessman and with a number of high-level investors, ‘Big L’ boasted a professional programming and sales team; it was to all intents and purposes a successful commercial radio station that just happened to be based on a ship. It even enjoyed a better broadcasting signal. Its streamlined UK version of American Top 40 radio was immediately a hit with listeners and it was chiefly in response to this success that Caroline finally dropped the more broad-based element of its music policy and moved over to a solid output of pop and rhythm and blues.

Radio London provided the majority of DJs when the BBC was recruiting for the launch of Radio One in September 1967. ‘Radio London had its act together and was much better organised, whereas Caroline kind of reflected O’Rahilly’s attitude to life’, record company promoter Tony Hall told me when I interviewed him in 1988. This much was confirmed when Radio Caroline, alone among the offshore stations, chose to continue broadcasting when the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act was brought in on 14 August 1967, a piece of legislation which outlawed the pirates. Legislation had been inevitable for some time. The draft Bill to outlaw the pirates proposed to make it illegal for any British citizen or company to work for, advertise on or otherwise supply, assist or fund an offshore station. It was published on 2 July 1966, over a year before it came into force, and received its first reading in the House of Commons on 27 July. On 20 December 1966 the government issued its White Paper on the future of broadcasting and recommended for the first time that the BBC set up a dedicated pop music service to replace the pirate stations.

By this time Radio Caroline, the sole survivor of the offshore radio era, had moved its entire operation to Amsterdam. The Dutch did not at that point have equivalent anti-pirate legislation and the Netherlands’ own offshore pirate Radio Veronica was still broadcasting. ‘Listen, all the others are only in it for the money’, O’Rahilly told Caroline programme director Tom Lodge when that legislation was being drafted. ‘We are in it for a principle. We are in it for an ideal. We are in it for a philosophy.’

That philosophy, reflecting the spirit of the times but economically reckless, saw money squandered on a huge scale at the station. Even at its height Caroline could never compete with the advertising revenue grossed by Radio London. ‘Big L’ had a shrewd business plan and recruited accordingly, bringing in the corporate expertise of the J. Walter Thomson agency to oversee its sales team. Caroline was always more cavalier in the way it did business. A comparative fiscal model of flawed ‘hip capitalism’ in the second half of the 1960s was the Beatles’ Apple venture, a multimedia corporation conceived to enable members of the band to invest in business opportunities (and to find tax shelters for their capital), floated on similarly high ideals but which floundered and failed when faced with economic reality.

Everybody involved in the creation of Caroline admits that had a navy gun boat pulled up alongside their vessel in the first weeks of broadcasting the entire dream would have been scuppered. Instead, with radical objectives the pop pirates thrived for three and a half years, broadcasting 24 hours a day from the coastal waters of England. Sixty years later, Radio Caroline lives on as a licensed UK broadcaster.
https://www.historytoday.com/miscell...irate-material





Why Did This Guy Put a Song About Me on Spotify?

The answer involves a remarkable — and lucrative, and ridiculous — scheme to game the way we find music today.
Brett Martin

I don’t want to make this all about me, but have you heard the song “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes”?

I guess probably not. On Spotify, “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes” has not yet accumulated enough streams to even register a tally, despite an excessive number of plays in at least one household that I can personally confirm. Even I, the titular Nice Man, didn’t hear the 1 minute 14 second song until last summer, a full 11 years after it was uploaded by an artist credited as Papa Razzi and the Photogs. I like to think this is because of a heroic lack of vanity, though it may just be evidence of very poor search skills.

When I did stumble on “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes,” I naturally assumed it was about a different, more famous Brett Martin: perhaps Brett Martin, the left-handed reliever who until recently played for the Texas Rangers; or Brett Martin, the legendary Australian squash player; or even Clara Brett Martin, the Canadian who in 1897 became the British Empire’s first female lawyer. Only when the singer began referencing details of stories that I made for public radio’s “This American Life” almost 20 years ago did I realize it actually was about me. The song ended, “I really like you/Will you be my friend?/Will you call me on the phone?” Then it gave a phone number, with a New Hampshire area code.

So, I called.

It’s possible that I dialed with outsize expectations. The author of this song, whoever he was, had been waiting 11 long years as his message in a bottle bobbed on the digital seas. Now, at long last, here I was! I spent serious time thinking about how to open the conversation, settling on what I imagined was something simple but iconic, on the order of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” After one ring, a male voice answered.

I said: “This is Brett Martin. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to call.”

The man had no idea who I was.

“You have to understand,” he said, apologetically. “I’ve written over 24,000 songs. I wrote 50 songs yesterday.”

And thus was I ushered into the strange universe of Matt Farley.

Farley is 45 and lives with his wife, two sons and a cockapoo named Pippi in Danvers, Mass., on the North Shore. For the past 20 years, he has been releasing album after album of songs with the object of producing a result to match nearly anything anybody could think to search for. These include hundreds of songs name-checking celebrities from the very famous to the much less so. He doesn’t give out his phone number in all of them, but he does spread it around enough that he gets several calls or texts a week. Perhaps sensing my deflation, he assured me that very few came from the actual subject of a song. He told me the director Dennis Dugan (of “Dennis Dugan I Like Your Movies Very a Lot”) part of an 83-song album about movie directors) called once, but he didn’t realize who it was until too late, and the conversation was awkward.

Freed from the blinding incandescence of my own name, I could suddenly see the extent of what I had stumbled into. It was like the scene in a thriller when the detective first gazes on the wall of a serial killer’s lair. Papa Razzi and the Photogs is only one of about 80 pseudonyms Farley uses to release his music. As the Hungry Food Band, he sings songs about foods. As the Guy Who Sings Songs About Cities & Towns, he sings the atlas. He has 600 songs inviting different-named girls to the prom and 500 that are marriage proposals. He has an album of very specific apologies; albums devoted to sports teams in every city that has a sports team; hundreds of songs about animals, and jobs, and weather, and furniture, and one band that is simply called the Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over.

He also has many, many songs about going to the bathroom. If you have a child under 10 with access to the internet, it is very likely you know some part of this body of work. What he refers to collectively as his “poop songs” are mostly released under two names: the Toilet Bowl Cleaners and the Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke and Pee.

“The Odd Man is more shameless,” he explained. “The Toilet Bowl Cleaners are making statements with their albums,” though the distinction between the former’s and the latter’s may be subtler than he imagines.

Largely, though not entirely, on the strength of such songs, Farley has managed to achieve that most elusive of goals: a decent living creating music. In 2008, his search-engine optimization project took in $3,000; four years later, it had grown to $24,000. The introduction of Alexa and her voice-activated sistren opened up the theretofore underserved nontyping market, in particular the kind fond of shouting things like “Poop in my fingernails!” at the computer.

by the Toilet Bowl Cleaners, currently has over 4.4 million streams on Spotify alone. To date, that “band,” and the Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke and Pee, have collectively brought in approximately $469,000 from various platforms. They are by far Farley’s biggest earners, but not the only ones: Papa Razzi and the Photogs has earned $41,000; the Best Birthday Song Band Ever, $38,000; the Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over, $80,000. Dozens of others have taken in two, three or four digits: the New Orleans Sports Band, the Chicago Sports Band, the Singing Film Critic, the Great Weather Song Person, the Paranormal Song Warrior, the Motern Media Holiday Singers, who perform 70 versions of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” substituting contemporary foods for figgy pudding. It adds up. Farley quit his day job in 2017.

“People like to criticize the whole streaming thing, but there’s really a lot of pros to it,” he said. Indeed, in 2023, his music earned him just shy of $200,000, about one halfpenny at a time.

‘If you reject your own ideas, then the part of the brain that comes up with ideas is going to stop. You just do it and do it and do it, and you sort it out later.’

Farley’s earnings help fund his multiple other creative endeavors. He records what he calls his “no jokes” music. This includes a two-man band he’s been in since college called Moes Haven, which once recorded an album a day for a year. He hosts two podcasts, one about his work and the other recapping Celtics games. And he makes movies: microbudgeted, determinedly amateur but nevertheless recognizably cinematic features starring himself and his family and friends. (They feature a spectacular array of New England accents.) In most, Farley plays some version of himself, a mild-mannered, eccentric hero projecting varying degrees of menace. Farley and his college friend Charlie Roxburgh are in the midst of a project in which they have resolved to release two full movies per year. The model, Farley said, was inspired by Hallmark Movies: “If this movie stinks, good news, we’re making another in six months!” Their most popular work remains “Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You!” (2012), a charmingly shaggy tale of a cryptid threatening a small New England town. It features Farley’s father as a big-game hunter named Ito Hootkins.

Like many of Farley’s endeavors, his films have attracted a small but intense following. “I could fill a 5,000-seat arena, if I could only get everybody in one place,” he says. His is the kind of obsessive project that seems to inspire the same from others. A few years ago, Leor Galil, a Chicago music writer, set out to listen to Farley’s entire corpus, from start to finish, chronicling the journey in a zine titled Freaky 4 Farley. Four pages into Issue 1, he had already taken on the grim tone of an Arctic explorer. “I’ve become a little tired of the album 25 songs in,” he wrote, “which makes me concerned about my ability to get through the rest of this listening quest.” Issue 2 begins, “I failed.”

The umbrella name that Farley uses for all his outputs is Motern. He made the word up; or rather, he seized on what he felt was its strange power after misspelling the word “intern” in what he had planned to be a 10,000-page novel. To Farley, creativity has always been a volume business. That, in fact, is the gist of “The Motern Method,” a 136-page manifesto on creativity that he self-published in 2021. His theory is that every idea, no matter its apparent value, must be honored and completed. An idea thwarted is an insult to the muse and is punished accordingly.

“If you reject your own ideas, then the part of the brain that comes up with ideas is going to stop,” he said. “You just do it and do it and do it, and you sort it out later.” Or, as the case may be, you don’t, but rather send it all out into the abyss, hoping that someday, somebody, somewhere will hear it.

I was aware, of course, that on some level I’d been had, the one tiny fish vain enough to be snared in Farley’s trawl. It left me a bit paranoid. “Charlie Roxburgh” suddenly seemed like such a perfect Boston pseudonym that I spent a day investigating whether he was a real person. (He’s real, lives in Connecticut and makes corporate videos for his day job.) I lost another day chasing after a Letterboxd commenter who goes by the handle dcs577 and was so baffled by the popularity of Farley’s movies that he published his own short e-book, “The Not Motern Method.” It urges readers to give up on their artistic dreams, and even mimics Farley’s buckshot S.E.O., by appearing in multiple, slightly different versions. Surely he had to be a Farley alter ego. (Nope: a 36-year-old movie buff in Missouri.)

Mostly I was trying to figure out whether I thought Farley was a bad guy. Did his scheme represent the inevitable cynical end product of a culture in the grips of algorithmic platforms? Or might it be a delightful side effect? Was his work spam or a kind of outsider art? Was he just the Poop Song Guy, or was he closer to Steve Keene, the Brooklyn-based, Gen-X-hipster-approved painter of over 300,000 works who has been the subject of books and museum retrospectives? As it happens, Farley has

It’s on a Papa Razzi album titled “I Am Not Wasting My Life,” which suggested he was asking some of the same questions.

When I went to Danvers to meet Farley in December, it became quickly apparent that he is the most transparent person in the world. He’s got a thick head of hair, high cheekbones and a friendly, Kyle Chandler-like face that another Letterboxd reviewer correctly identified as “youth-pastory.” When he picked me up at my hotel, he was wearing a fleece-lined brown hoodie that, judging by social media, is the only outer layer he wears throughout the New England winter — including on the 15-to-20 mile walks he takes twice a week. He struck me as the kind of guy who wears shorts the moment it gets above 48 degrees. Compulsively early, he confessed that he arrived at the lobby an hour before we were scheduled to meet.

You might mistake Motern’s aesthetic for stoner humor, but Farley says he has never had a sip of alcohol, much less done drugs. By his own description, he eats like a picky 12-year-old. When I made him take me to a restaurant in Salem called Dube’s Seafood, famed for its belly clams, he ordered chicken nuggets and buried them beneath a blizzard of salt and ground pepper, removing the top of the pepper shaker to pour it on more directly. In the car we listened to the Rolling Stones, the Replacements, Tom Waits. “It’s a mammoth accomplishment of self-control for me not to be playing my own music right now,” he said, though his efforts at restraint were puzzling, given that I was in all likelihood the one person on Earth at that moment whose job was to listen to it.

All of Farley’s life he has wanted to make things and have people see and hear them. After going to school at Providence College, he moved to Manchester, N.H., specifically because he knew nobody there who might distract him. “If you know people, they want you to go to cookouts,” he says. “I designed my entire life to not have to go to cookouts.” Even now, he cannot abide downtime; to him, the wasted time of a party or watching a football game is measured in songs or scripts he could have written. At no point did Farley consider a more conventional route such as film school or a low-level job in the entertainment industry. Instead, he took a job at a group home for teenagers, knocking out a 40-hour week in three days so that he could work on music and movies the other four. He would leave Moes Haven CDs in public places across Manchester, hoping somebody would pick them up; he slipped them into the stacks at local record stores, like a reverse shoplifter. He would drive people to the airport just so he could force his music on them on the way.

Farley’s persona is simultaneously grandiose — “I really do think I’m the greatest songwriter of the 21st Century,” he told me — and knowingly self-effacing. One night, I went with him to a tiny independent theater in Lexington for a screening of the Motern film “Magic Spot,” a time-travel comedy. On the drive down, I asked what the endgame for the movies was. Obviously, they have a very different business model from his music. What if somebody gave him, say, a million dollars to make his next movie? He thought for a second.

“Three-hundred-thousand for me and Charlie, spread the rest around to the people who have helped us all these years, make a $10,000 movie and get sued,” he said. (That would be about twice the budget of a typical Motern joint.)

“Magic Spot” wasn’t on the marquee when we pulled up, but there was a flier taped to the door. “We couldn’t afford color copies, but we did our best,” the theater owner said as he let us in. There were 11 people in the audience, including Farley’s father and brother-in-law, both of whom were in the movie. There was also a film student named Taylor, who had driven up from the Cape for the second of three Motern screenings he’d see within a month, and two guys down from Manchester, one of whom was turning the other on to the Farley canon. A few minutes into the movie, the sound went out, and we sat for about 10 minutes while Farley frantically tried to fix it. He was on the verge of jury-rigging a solution involving holding a microphone to his laptop when the sound system miraculously healed itself.

“A huge success! I’m on cloud nine,” he said, as we headed back toward Danvers. After the show, he refused to accept his share of the ticket sales, instead pressing extra money into the owner’s hands as thanks.

For somebody so driven to find an audience and so immune to embarrassment, the advent of the digital age was a miracle. Farley began uploading the Moes Haven catalog to iTunes when it came out, and then to Spotify. As described in the closely autobiographical Motern film “Local Legends,” Moes Haven was intended to “meld the sounds of Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and Pink Floyd, into a musical concoction that was going to blow the minds of millions of fans all the way around the world.” As it turned out, Farley noticed that the only song that seemed to blow minds, or at least get downloaded, was a comic throwaway called

(“Get down/Get funky/Shut up/Your monkey.”)

“Some people would have quit right there,” he says. “I saw an opportunity.”

Whatever the dubious value of any individual song in the Farley universe, it’s as part of the enormous body of the whole, the magnum opus, that it gains power.

A lot of energy has been spent trying to pick the lock of the recommendation algorithms that can make or break a song on Spotify and other streaming services. Any number of online courses, distributors and publishing companies promise to navigate the labyrinth of inputs — playlist inclusion, natural language processing, average length of listens, influencer attention, metrics like “acousticness,” “speechiness” and “danceability” — that will push a song onto millions of users’ recommended playlists. Critics, meanwhile, bemoan the rise of bands like Greta Van Fleet, an “algorithmic fever dream” according to Pitchfork, who seem to be engineered to be the Next Song after whatever it was you actually chose to listen to.

When I asked Farley how much of this he factors into his work, the answer was “almost zero.” He gets the sense that longer titles seem to work better than short ones and that around a minute and a half is a good minimum length. But for the most part, his is a blunt-force attack on the softer target of search results. At its most intentionally parasitic, this includes such tracks as designed to be discovered by the Rolling Stones-curious. A 2013 album credited to the Passionate & Objective Jokerfan takes advantage of the fact that song titles cannot be copyrighted. Thus, and which, unlike the more famous “Sugar Man,” by Rodriguez, is about a baker whose sugar delivery is running late. Farley says he has since sworn off these kinds of tricks.

These days, he sets himself a relatively light goal of one 50-song album a month, recorded in a spare bedroom in his house. (Fifty tracks is the limit that CD Baby, which Farley uses to distribute and manage his music, allows, a regulation that may or may not have something to do with Farley, who used to put as many as 100 on an album.) Once he reaches his quota, he begins the tedious work of checking the levels of each song, entering titles and metadata (genre, writer, length, etc.), creating an album title and cover art (nearly always a selfie) and uploading the package one song at a time.

Farley showed me a worn, green spiral notebook in which he meticulously tracks his output and earnings. From Spotify, he earns roughly a third of a cent per stream; Amazon and Apple pay slightly more on average: between a third and three-quarters of a cent. TikTok, on the other hand, pays musicians by the number of videos featuring their songs and is thus immune to Farley’s strategy; when Kris and Kylie Jenner recorded a video of themselves dancing to Farley’s song about Kris, millions of people saw it, but Farley earned less than 1 cent.

Among other topics Farley told me he planned to tackle in future albums were: colleges, household items, tools, musical instruments. I had planned to ask what categories haven’t worked, but what had become clear by then is that the idea of any one song, or even album, hitting the jackpot isn’t the point. Even after Spotify’s recent announcement that it would no longer pay royalties on songs receiving fewer than a thousand streams, Farley’s business model rests on the sheer bulk of his output. And so does his artistic model. Whatever the dubious value of any individual song in the Farley universe, it’s as part of the enormous body of the whole, the magnum opus, that it gains power. This is especially true when you consider that an artificial intelligence could conceivably produce 24,000 songs, Farley’s entire oeuvre, in about a day, a fact that gives his defiantly human, even artisanal, labor a kind of lonely Sisyphean dignity. Whatever else Farley’s work is, it is not AI — even when it barely seems to be I.

A year or two ago, Farley discovered with some chagrin that he was no longer the No. 1 result for the search “poop song.” There was another Poop Song Guy.

His name is Teddy Casey, and amazingly, he is also from a Boston suburb, Newton. That’s where the similarities with Farley stop. Casey has precisely two songs available for streaming: a sweet kids’ song about animals called “Monkey,” and “The Poop Song,” which has over four million streams across various platforms.

Casey is 55; until recently he was working as a bartender and hosting open-mic nights near where he lives in midcoast Maine. When I reached him, he was back home after a week in New Hampshire, training to become a U.S. Postal Service letter carrier. He wrote his poop song around 2009, but he didn’t get around to posting it until 2020. “It didn’t do anything for months,” he said. “And then all of a sudden, one month it made $20. I was like, Wow, cool. Buy a case of beer.”

These days, the song brings in about $1,200 per month, enough to pay his rent, Casey told me, with what sounded like a Lebowskian shrug. “I have other songs that I want to put up,” he said. “But I kind of don’t want to sell out.”

I asked if he knew about the Toilet Bowl Cleaners, and he said he’d heard a few of their songs. “I’m not making this up,” he said. “There’s this other guy, I don’t know if you’ve heard of him, the Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke and Pee. His idea was to customize every poop song. So there’s a Steven Poop song, a Bob Poop song, a Mary Poop song. He’s got hundreds!”

I told him that both bands were in fact the same person.

“Well, OK,” he said, as if realizing the full extent of what he was up against. “I like mine better, but I’m biased,” he said, finally. “You can tell he knows how to write songs, but I think he’s just been going for volume.”

In fact, I knew about the suite of songs that combine Farley’s two most successful genres — names and poop — because he was working on a new set of them when I visited him. He estimated that he had already completed about 3,000, but there were always new names.

“This can be kind of painful,” he warned, switching on his keyboard and firing up his laptop. He donned headphones, consulted a list of names and got to work. In the silence of the room, I could just hear the soft click of the keyboard and his vocals:

Jamilah, p-p-p-poop/Jamilah poop poop poop.

In “Local Legends,” which is something like Farley’s “All That Jazz,” there is a fantasy sequence in which Farley imagines the two sides of his personality arguing: one, the serious, heartfelt artist, the other a greasy record executive demanding ever more poop songs. Of course, the scene can only be a fantasy, and can only have Farley playing both characters, because the greasy record executive belongs to a lost world — one in which drastically fewer people had a chance to produce art and the work was often corrupted by corporate gatekeepers, but in which there was also a clearly marked road to an audience and a living. Farley represents both the best and worst of the incentives and opportunities that have taken this world’s place. Certainly, there are few creators working today in any medium who would not recognize the anxiety he embodies: that their work now lives or dies by the vagaries of opaque algorithms serving a bottomless menu of options to an increasingly distracted public. And that if they don’t bow to the demands of these new realities, their work — and by extension they — will simply disappear. Which is to say that while the experience of watching Farley work was not unpainful, as promised, neither was it totally unfamiliar.

After a minute and a half of “The Jamilah Poop Song,” Farley paused. He adjusted a few dials, consulted his notebook, thought for a few seconds and plowed on to the next song. Different tempo, different vocals, similar theme.

Tunka, Tunka, he sang. Poop, poop poop poop poop.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/m...tt-farley.html





The AI Industry Is Steaming Toward A Legal Iceberg

Legal scholars, lawmakers and at least one Supreme Court justice agree that companies will be liable for the things their AIs say and do—and that the lawsuits are just beginning.
Christopher Mims

If your company uses AI to produce content, make decisions, or influence the lives of others, it’s likely you will be liable for whatever it does—especially when it makes a mistake.

This also applies to big tech companies rolling out chat-based AIs to the public, including Google and Microsoft, as well as well-funded startups like Anthropic and OpenAI.

“If in the coming years we wind up using AI the way most commentators expect, by leaning on it to outsource a lot of our content and judgment calls, I don’t think companies will be able to escape some form of liability,” says Jane Bambauer, a law professor at the University of Florida who has written about these issues.

The implications of this are momentous. Every company that uses generative AI could be responsible under laws that govern liability for harmful speech, and laws governing liability for defective products—since today’s AIs are both creators of speech and products. Some legal experts say this may create a flood of lawsuits for companies of all sizes.

It is already clear that the consequences of artificial intelligence output may go well beyond a threat to companies’ reputations. Concerns about future liability also help explain why companies are manipulating their systems behind the scenes to avoid problematic outputs—for example, when Google’s Gemini came across as too “woke.” It also may be a driver of the industry’s efforts to reduce “hallucinations,” the term for when generative AIs make stuff up.

The legal logic is straightforward. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 has long protected internet platforms from being held liable for the things we say on them. (In short, if you say something defamatory about your neighbor on Facebook, they can sue you, but not Meta.) This law was foundational to the development of the early internet and is, arguably, one reason that many of today’s biggest tech companies grew in the U.S., and not elsewhere.

But Section 230 doesn’t cover speech that a company’s AI generates, says Graham Ryan, a litigator at Jones Walker who will soon be publishing a paper in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology on the topic. “Generative AI is the wild west when it comes to legal risk for internet technology companies, unlike any other time in the history of the internet since its inception,” he adds.

I spoke with several legal experts across the ideological spectrum, and none expect that Section 230 will protect companies from lawsuits over the outputs of generative AI, which now include not just text but also images, music and video.

And the list of potential defendants is far broader than a handful of big tech companies. Companies that simply use generative AI—say, by using OpenAI’s tech as part of a service delivered to a customer—are likely to be responsible for the outputs of such systems. This is a potentially vast universe of services, ranging from evaluating investments to providing customer support.

Among the most compelling indications that companies won’t be protected by current law is Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s early 2023 statement on the subject.

In discussing a Section 230 case before the court, he said: “Artificial intelligence generates poetry. It generates polemics today that would be content that goes beyond picking, choosing, analyzing or digesting content. And that is not protected.”

And as companies like OpenAI argue in legal briefs over whether scraping copyrighted content from the internet counts as theft of intellectual property, they may actually be hurting their case that they aren’t responsible for the content their systems produce.

Some AI companies have argued that their AIs “substantially transform” all the content they are trained on. That means, they argue, that they don’t violate copyright protections, under the doctrine of fair use. If that is true, it would seem to indicate they are “substantial co-creators” of the content they are displaying. That is the point at which a company is no longer merely hosting content, and loses the protection of Section 230, says Ryan.

Courts vs. Congress

Normally, when companies perceive a gap in existing laws, they lobby Congress for a fix. But lately, Congress has been keen to strip away some of the protections Section 230 already offers, by specifying that companies can only have Section 230 protection if they play by certain rules. Congress’s current mood is the opposite of what companies that make and use AI want.

“In the discussion about, ‘What do you want to do about Section 230’—the answer that many lawmakers will give you is ‘We should gut it,’ ” says Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, a conservative think tank. As a result, companies are eager to simply hold on to the existing law and not agitate for any changes, he adds.

The complicated work of figuring out how to apply old laws to AI might be best accomplished case-by-case in courthouses, says Bambauer of the University of Florida. “I’m even going to go out on a limb and say maybe it should,” she adds.

Her argument is, essentially, that by letting cases play out as new information about the harms and benefits of AI is revealed, companies might have the freedom to innovate—but could be reined in when they go too far.

Who’s to blame when AI causes harm?

OpenAI is being sued for defamation in at least two cases, including one in which a Georgia radio host alleges that the company’s chatbot wrote an answer that falsely accused him of embezzlement. The company has argued that it isn’t responsible for what its chatbot creates, because its product is more like a word processor, in that it is a tool people use to create content.

In a filing, OpenAI responded to the suit. “By its very nature, AI-generated content is probabilistic and not always factual, and there is near universal consensus that responsible use of AI includes fact-checking prompted outputs before using or sharing them,” its lawyers wrote.

The argument that ChatGPT is more like a word processor than an actual creator of content is likely to fail, says Jason Schultz, director of New York University’s Technology Law & Policy Clinic. “Microsoft Word gives you a blank document, it doesn’t give you a pre-scripted essay,” he adds.

Speech is one kind of liability for companies using generative AI. The design of these systems can create other kinds of harms—by, say, introducing bias in hiring, giving bad advice, or simply making up information that might lead to financial damages for a person who trusts these systems.

Because AIs can be used in so many ways, in so many industries, it may take time to understand what their harms are in a variety of contexts, and how best to regulate them, says Schultz.

Meanwhile, the legal uncertainty for companies that use generative AI, and resulting compliance issues and litigation, may create an unsustainable legal risk for many, says Ryan of Jones Walker. Some, like Therier of R Street Institute, believe this is a threat to the development of the entire field of AI.

Others think that making the legal threat manageable may be as simple as limiting how today’s generative AI tools are used. If making AI chatbots and things that resemble them leads to too many lawsuits, the companies developing the underlying AI technology may simply cut off access to it, says Michael Karanicolas, executive director of the Institute for Technology, Law & Policy at UCLA.

“If we have these tools, and large volumes of people are doing dangerous things as a result of receiving garbage information from them, I’d argue it isn’t necessarily a bad thing to assign cost or liability as a result of these harms, or to make it unprofitable to offer these technologies,” he adds.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-ai-i...re_permalin k





Shrinking Arctic Ice Redraws the Map for Internet Cable Connections

A new 14,500-km subsea cable in the Arctic could reroute data traffic away from vulnerable choke points.
Mathieu Pollet and Giovanna Coi

Thawing ice in the Arctic may open up new routes for internet cables that lie at the bottom of the ocean and carry most international data traffic. And more routes matter when underwater infrastructure is at risk of attack.

Baltic Sea gas and telecoms cables were damaged last year, with a Chinese vessel a potential suspect.

Red Sea data cables were cut last month after a Yemeni government warning of attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Over 90 percent of all Europe-Asia traffic flows through the Red Sea route.

The problem of critical data relying on only one path is clear.

"It's clearly a kind of concentration of several cables, which means that there is a risk that areas will bottleneck," Taneli Vuorinen, the executive vice president at Cinia, a Finland-based company working on an innovative pan-Arctic cable, said.

"In order to meet the increasing demand, there's an increasing pressure to find diversity" of routes, he said.

The Far North Fiber project is seeking to offer just that. The 14,500 kilometer long cable will directly link Europe to Japan, via the Northwest Passage in the Arctic, with landing sites in Japan, the United States (Alaska), Canada, Norway, Finland and Ireland.

It would have been unthinkable until just a few years ago, when a thick, multiyear layer of ice made navigation impossible.

But the Arctic is warming up at a worrying pace with climate change, nearly four times faster than the rest of the world. Sea ice is shrinking by almost 13 percent every decade.

Ik Icard, the chief strategy officer for Far North Digital, another company working on the project said the summer thaws now allow ships to install the cable while the winter freeze limits disruptions.

"We are at this sweet spot where it's now accessible and allows us a time window when we can get the cable safely installed" while enjoying "the protection of that ice cover for a significant part of the year" against human threats, from anchor drops to sabotage attempts.

After the marine survey is completed, Nokia's subsidiary Alcatel Submarine Networks will start manufacturing the parts and roll them out by 2027, when it is set to go live.

The European Union is a fan, pouring about €23 million into the project under CEF Digital, the main financial tool supporting connectivity across the bloc. The European Commission recently called on EU governments to better secure their underwater networks and it wants new cable projects to fill strategic gaps.

Far North Digital co-founder Ethan Berkowitz wants to get more governments on board.

"We look for more vocal support from the United States and Canada," he said, citing the world geopolitical situation as a compelling reason for them to act.

"Nobody wants to cut a cable under the ice, it's really hard to do," he said.

A blessing and a curse

Although the shorter itinerary followed by the cable will allow lower latency — meaning a quicker transfer of data — operating in the Arctic can prove more challenging, and costly.

"The very ice that helps to protect the cable, in the unlikely event of damage, makes it more difficult to fix it," Icard explained, meaning it could take weeks or even months to repair, depending on the time of the year.

Ice scouring — when floating ice drifts into shallower areas and grinds the seabed —can also pose a threat. A broadband outage occurred in Alaska last summer after an undersea fiber optic line was severed by chunks of Arctic ice.

"The design of our system is that if there is a fault, we can reroute traffic," Berkowitz said.

The €1 billion cost of completing the project far outweighs other routes.

A cable across the Atlantic would cost around €250 million, said Alan Mauldin, the research director at TeleGeography, a Washington-based consulting firm. Laying a a cable in the Pacific could be around €320 million.

"Technically, it is feasible to do it but the question is commercial. Just because the cable has a unique route compared to other systems, you can't charge more for that," Mauldin said.

Cinia's Vuorinen said there is "a lot of interest" already from potential customers, such as Big Tech looking to diversify intercontinental connections to the defense and security community who could use a safer route. "The objective is to have a commercially viable project," he said.

If the project sets sail smoothly, it might just blaze a trail for others to dive into the opportunities of the Arctic's increasingly open waters. Scientists recently warned that the Arctic Ocean could even soon have its first "ice-free" days.
https://www.politico.eu/article/shri...limate-change/





FCC to Vote to Restore Net Neutrality Rules, Reversing Trump
David Shepardson

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will vote to reinstate landmark net neutrality rules and assume new regulatory oversight of broadband internet that was rescinded under former President Donald Trump, the agency's chair said.

The FCC told advocates on Tuesday of the plan to vote on the final rule at its April 25 meeting.

The commission voted 3-2 in October on the proposal to reinstate open internet rules adopted in 2015 and re-establish the commission's authority over broadband internet.

Net neutrality refers to the principle that internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites.

FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel confirmed the planned commission vote in an interview with Reuters.

"The pandemic made clear that broadband is an essential service, that every one of us - no matter who we are or where we live - needs it to have a fair shot at success in the digital age," she said.

An essential service requires oversight and in this case we are just putting back in place the rules that have already been court-approved that ensures that broadband access is fast, open and fair."

Reinstating the rules has been a priority for President Joe Biden, who signed a July 2021 executive order encouraging the FCC to reinstate net neutrality rules adopted under Democratic President Barack Obama.

Democrats were stymied for nearly three years because they did not take majority control of the five-member FCC until October.

Under Trump, the FCC had argued the net neutrality rules were unnecessary, blocked innovation and resulted in a decline in network investment by internet service providers, a contention disputed by Democrats.

Rosenworcel has said the reclassification would give the FCC important new national security tools. The agency said in its initial proposal that rules could give it "more robust authority to require more entities to remove and replace" equipment and services from Chinese companies like Huawei (HWT.UL) and ZTE (000063.SZ).

Republican FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr opposed the move, saying that since 2017 "broadband speeds in the U.S. have increased, prices are down (and) competition has intensified." He argued the plan would result in "government control of the internet."

Despite the 2017 repeal, a dozen states now have net neutrality laws or regulations in place. Industry groups abandoned legal challenges to those state requirements in May 2022.

Reporting by David Shepardson in Washington Editing by Chris Reese and Matthew Lewis
https://www.reuters.com/technology/f...mp-2024-04-02/
















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