InsideSources

A growing list of Washington players on the left and right want a government-regulated Facebook, including congressional Democrats, former White House adviser Steve Bannon, and now a well-known scholar from a prominent, Google-funded liberal think tank, recently ousted by the search giant for criticizing its monopoly practices.

Barry Lynn of the Open Markets Institute, a think tank with a reputation for scrutinizing political and economic monopolies, said Monday “Facebook’s pledge to ensure the transparency of political advertising must be codified by law and overseen by elected officials.”

The Open Markets Institute spun off from the Google-backed New America Foundation in August. The decision came after Lynn, the group’s executive director, praised the European Union’s decision to fine Google a record $2.7 billion for favoring its own services and products over rivals in search results, prompting the firing of the 10-member Open Markets team.

“The danger Facebook poses to democracy extends beyond foreign involvement in U.S. elections,” Lynn said in a statement. “Facebook exerts unprecedented, unaccountable control over America’s newspapers, news magazines, and other news media – influencing not only design but the business and editorial decisions that shape what reporters write and what Americans know.”

The director of the group — whose new website describes part of its mission as reclaiming Americans’ “freedom to talk freely and share trustworthy news with one another” — praised congressional Democrats for “forcing Facebook to share Russia-linked advertisements with Congress.”

Facebook agreed last week to turn over to congressional investigators some 3,000 2016 election ads purchased by Russian-connected groups for about $100,000. The announcement came after public pressure from Democratic Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Rep. Adam Schiff of California.

“Important & absolutely necessary first step,” Warner tweeted shortly after. “The American people deserve to know the truth about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.”

He and Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota are working on legislation that “would require digital platforms” like Facebook and Twitter “with 1,000,000 or more users to maintain a public file of all electioneering communications purchased by a person or group who spends more than $10,000 aggregate dollars for online political advertisements,” according to a letter they sent fellow lawmakers last week asking for cosponsors.

House and Senate Democrats including Reps. John Sarbanes and Elijah Cummings of Maryland, John Conyers of Michigan, and Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Al Franken of Minnesota, Kamala Harris of California, and others sent another letter to the Federal Election Commission last week asking the agency to consider making new rules barring such activity in the future.

“We encourage the Federal Election Commission to take immediate steps to understand the threats posed to our democratic process by foreign influenced internet and social media advertisement, and to promulgate new guidance on how advertisement platforms can better prevent foreign nationals from illicitly spending in future U.S. elections,” the letter reads.

Concerns over Facebook’s growing influence aren’t limited to voices on the left. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, largely seen as the voice of the extreme-right (especially now that he’s back at Breitbart News), believes digital platforms ingrained in American culture like Google and Facebook should be regulated along the same lines as public utilities, like telephone service or electricity.

“Bannon’s basic argument, as he has outlined it to people who’ve spoken with him, is that Facebook and Google have become effectively a necessity in contemporary life,” The Intercept reported in July. “Indeed, there may be something about an online social network or a search engine that lends itself to becoming a natural monopoly, much like a cable company, a water and sewer system, or a railroad.”

Even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg himself has suggested Facebook is a “utility.”

Buzzfeed reported Monday Bannon even “plotted to plant a mole inside Facebook, according to emails sent days before the Breitbart boss took over Donald Trump’s campaign.”

Last June, Black media outlets concerned about Facebook’s growing influence over online news — including the National Newspaper Publishers Association, the largest black-owned media resource in the U.S. —  called for regulation over Facebook, which has grown into a major driver of news consumption in recent years.

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A U.S. Senate bill designed to eliminate legal protections for websites knowingly hosting child sex-trafficking ads became the target of tech giants like Google in August, but it’s Silicon Valley-friendly media outlets that are doing the fighting for them.

Senators Rob Portman, a Republican from Ohio, and Claire McCaskill, the Democrat from Missouri, introduced the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) last month after the conclusion of an 18-month Senate investigation into Backpage.com, a website lawmakers found “actively and knowingly facilitated online sex trafficking.”

Backpage “coached its users on how to post ‘clean’ ads for illegal transactions, and knowingly edited ads to conceal evidence of crimes,” according to Portman. Its CEO, Carl Ferrer, became the first congressional witness to duck a Senate subpoena in 20 years during the investigation when he refused to show up for questioning. Ferrer and other Backpage executives were arrested last October on charges Backpage accepted money in the prostitution of minors.

Backpage shuttered its adult ads section in January, the same day the Senate released its report finding the website hosted 80 percent of all online sex ads (the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) said in 2015 that 71 percent of all child sex trafficking reports submitted by the public were tied to Backpage). It further highlighted emails showing Backpage outsourced its ad screening to India between 2010 and 2012, where moderators removed words, phrases and images that would have flagged ads to authorities. Witnesses, including the parents of minors whose pictures appeared on Backpage, said the site refused to remove sex ads featuring identified underage children.

Despite the evidence, Backpage prevailed in court — twice. In 2016, the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Backpage’s favor because of immunity granted to the website under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA)–the statute, passed in 1996, that gives broad immunity to websites from being held liable for content generated or posted by users.

Backpage won again in a California court in August based on the same statute, with the court opining “until Congress sees fit to amend . . . section 230 . . . [it] even applies to those alleged to support the exploitation of others by human trafficking.”

That’s when Portman and McCaskill introduced SESTA, a bill aimed at amending section 230 to “eliminate federal liability protections for websites that assist, support, or facilitate a violation of federal sex trafficking laws.” It would also empower state law enforcement “to take action against individuals or businesses that violate federal sex trafficking laws” even without Justice Department participation.

The bill has the support of 26 senators including eight Democrats. Despite the rare showing of bipartisanship, it doesn’t have the backing of Silicon Valley itself, or prominent Valley-focused media outlets.

A New York Times op-ed published Thursday highlights Google’s efforts to fight the law, in part via a letter from Google lobbyist Stewart Jeffries asking lawmakers in the House of Representatives not to sponsor similar legislation from Missouri Republican Rep. Ann Wagner.

Wagner’s bill, the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017, would take away section 230 protection for online entities engaged in “knowing or reckless conduct . . . that furthers or in any way aids or abets” child sex trafficking. It also empowers states to enforce federal laws and lets victims sue violators for civil restitution.

“I wanted to bring to your attention an issue that is picking up steam in the Senate and the House that has the potential to seriously jeopardize the internet ecosystem,” Jeffries wrote.

Since his letter, Wagner’s bill has picked up another 50-plus co-sponsors for a total of 116, including 74 Republicans and 42 Democrats. But the strong agreement on Capitol Hill isn’t so uniform among media, where outlets like The Verge and Salon, often champions of Silicon Valley and left-leaning politics, criticized legislative efforts to curb online child sex-trafficking.

The Verge described the bills as efforts to “further eviscerate CDA 230” and said Backpage “allegedly hosted ads from sex traffickers,” declining to acknowledge the mountain range of evidence from the Senate Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations, the NCMEC, numerous state attorneys general, and a Washington Post investigation that found Backpage “uses a contractor in the Philippines to solicit sex ads from other websites and also posts sex ads on other sites to attract more customers.” Instead, the outlet criticizes a press release for the House bill for citing Backpage six times.

It goes on to warn “a state could piggyback off the legislation to create a new law that would impose liability for all posts promoting the sex trafficking of children unless a site prescreens content or user registrations. This could potentially empower any one state in the U.S. to create a new regulatory regime for the entire web.”

A Salon article agrees the legislation “could significantly curtail internet freedom,” the author going on to liken the bills’ aims to combat online child sex trafficking as a way to facilitate “every ambitious prosecutor who wants a headline.”

“Furthermore, SESTA’s language is so broad that it could lead to state lawsuits and prosecutions of sites that don’t carry any advertising at all,” the Salon article reads. “It could sweep in every online service that hosts user-generated content—perhaps even including email services and comments sections.”

The article, authored by the former general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, appeared in Salon’s “What Is Future Tense?” blog, a section on technology policy co-sponsored by New America Foundation. The prominent Google-funded, left-leaning lobbyist group came under fire in August for firing a well-known Google critic at the behest of the search giant.

Portman disagrees with those characterizations of the bill and others in more prominent outlets like Forbes. In a Thursday Fox News op-ed, Portman said the legislation “only removes protections for rogue online actors that knowingly facilitate and participate in sex trafficking.”

“This bill does not affect liability protections for websites that obey the law,” Portman wrote. “In fact, it preserves the Communications Decency Act’s ‘Good Samaritan’ provision, which protects good actors who pro-actively block and screen for offensive material.”

Another Silicon Valley giant — database, cloud and business software firm Oracle — agrees. The company broke ranks from Silicon Valley Tuesday and expressed support for the bill.

“[W]e are 100 percent confident that a Portman/Blumenthal amendment – identical to S. 1693 – offered to the Communications Decency Act in 1996 would have passed the Senate overwhelmingly and the internet would have enjoyed the same exponential growth and innovation over the past twenty one years,” Oracle CEO Kenneth Glueck wrote to Portman. “Frankly we are stunned you must even have this debate.”

The company, a frequent Google critic, took the opportunity to take a thinly veiled shot at the search giant.

“Your legislation does not, as suggested by the bill’s opponents, usher the end of the internet,” the letter reads. “If enacted, it will establish some measure of accountability for those that cynically sell advertising but are unprepared to help curtail sex trafficking.”

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Digital rights advocates asked the U.S. Supreme Court Thursday to review the case of an American convicted with evidence gathered under FISA Section 702 — warrantless National Security Agency surveillance authority meant to spy on foreign nationals.

Privacy and digital rights groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a petition Thursday with the nation’s highest court seeking review of the case of Mohammed Mohamud, an American citizen who was charged in 2012 with planning to car-bomb a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon. Information used to prosecute Mohamud was gathered using Section 702 of the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act.

Section 702 authorizes NSA to tap the physical infrastructure of internet service providers, like fiber connections, to intercept foreign emails, instant messages, and other communications belonging to foreign nationals as they exit and enter the U.S. But according to NSA, the program also “incidentally” sweeps up the communications of Americans corresponding with, and until recently, merely even mentioning foreign targets.

NSA is legally barred from searching through Americans’ communications without a warrant, but that wasn’t the case with Mohamud. His emails were intercepted specifically by a program dubbed PRISM, the existence of which was leaked to the press by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013. PRISM gives NSA access to communications transmitted over internet edge services like Google, Yahoo, or Facebook.

Mohamud learned after his conviction that his emails were gathered under Section 702 and sought to suppress the evidence, arguing its gathering violated his Fourth Amendment rights against search and seizure without a warrant. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit noted the government’s conduct was “quite aggressive at times” but upheld the search, a move EFF, the Center for Democracy and Technology and New America’s Open Technology Institute call “dangerous and unprecedented.”

“The ruling provides an end-run around the Fourth Amendment, converting sweeping warrantless surveillance directed at foreigners into a tool for spying on Americans,” Mark Rumold, a staff attorney for EFF, said Thursday. “Section 702 is unlike any surveillance law in our country’s history, it is unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court should take this case to put a stop to this surveillance.”

The groups add weight to a Supreme Court petition filed by Mohamud’s attorneys in July, and join a long list of battles from the courts to Congress over the legality of Section 702. Wikimedia and the ACLU are suing the government over the use of Section 702 in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Congress has held several hearings this year to debate the law’s renewal ahead of its expiration at the end of December.

Section 702 is at the heart of a dispute between Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, the nation’s top spy chief. Wyden has pressed Coats and his predecessor to provide an estimate of the number of Americans incidentally swept up in Section 702 that both claim is impossible to produce. The senator has further suggested the authority could be used to warrantlessly target Americans directly.

Congress’s concerns over Section 702 have become a point of rare bipartisanship for some. Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul has fought alongside Wyden to peel back the curtain on Section 702. South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham is grilling intelligence officials for information about what Section 702 gathers on lawmakers and other members of government, and if those intercepts can and are used to politically target government officials like former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

In testimony to Congress intelligence chiefs including NSA Director Mike Rogers have admitted Section 702 programs have a history of compliance issues, some highlighted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves more than 99 percent of the government’s secret surveillance requests.

The typically intel-friendly court chastised the government for an “institutional lack of candor” on a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue.” One such opinion said NSA has engaged in “significant overcollection . . . including the content of communications of non-target U.S. persons and persons in the U.S.”

As a result, NSA in April suspended a Section 702 practice known as “about” collection — when NSA sweeps up American emails and text messages exchanged with overseas users that simply mention search terms — like an email address belonging to a target — but isn’t to or from a target.

The agency recently told Congress it’s working on a technical solution to reengage about collection.

All of the pushback comes as intelligence leaders pressure Congress not just to renew Section 702 but implement it permanently. Top Republicans and Democrats have endorsed the idea, including Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas and Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein of California.

In a recent interview, Snowden said using Section 702 to surveil Americans requires the agency to engage in little more than “word games.” Privacy advocates suspect the loophole created by Section 702 likely amounts to millions or even hundreds of millions of warrantless interceptions belonging to Americans.

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Facebook sought to allay fear and suspicions surrounding biases in its popular “Trending Topics” News Feed Wednesday by outlining a set of values the social network says it uses when curating news content.

“We don’t favor specific kinds of sources — or ideas,” Adam Mosseri, Facebook vice president of product management wrote in a blog post Wednesday. “Our aim is to deliver the types of stories we’ve gotten feedback that an individual person most wants to see. We do this not only because we believe it’s the right thing but also because it’s good for our business.”

The statement comes in response to a Gizmodo article last month in which former Facebook employees said they suppressed content from conservative news outlets in favor of liberal ones — an allegation the company has been working to dispel ever since.

“We are not in the business of picking which issues the world should read about,” the blog post reads. “Our integrity depends on being inclusive of all perspectives and view points, and using ranking to connect people with the stories and sources they find the most meaningful and engaging,”

Mosseri goes on to explain how the News Feed users see is curated based on their individual preferences, ranking from top to bottom content from friends and family (which will dominate user feeds starting Wednesday via forthcoming updates), informative posts and lastly, entertaining posts. The system is constantly adjusting based on users’ activity, and Facebook’s work on News Feed is only “1 percent finished,” according to the company.

The company pledged to “be as open as we can” with regard to sharing how News Feed works in the future.

Facebook’s campaign to convince conservatives otherwise with statements, briefings and face time with executives — including COO Sheryl Sandberg — appears to have had little impact on their concerns and those of others. The National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), which represents hundreds of black-owned media companies, expressed their own concerns Monday at the lack of knowledge surrounding how Facebook ranks content, and called on federal regulators “to bring some much needed transparency to the new media king.”

“The tech company isn’t transparent in its methods. So we don’t know whether the viewpoints of black publishers are heard or if there is a bias against our views,” NNPA representatives wrote. “Without knowing how Facebook’s ‘Trending Topics’ or other algorithms are used in promoting stories, the owners of black-owned newspapers, magazines and other media are left only to wonder why the stories our outlets produce are relegated to the margins – if they are acknowledged at all.”

Experts on a panel at New America, a Washington-based policy think tank, expressed similar concerns about Facebook and Google’s impact on journalism Wednesday.

Martin Moore, Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication, and Power at King’s College London said social media networks like Facebook don’t see themselves as publishers, despite the growing influence they hold over mainstream media, and as such, “don’t subscribe to the same practices and values as a news organization.”

“They don’t, for example, see it as their role to ensure a diversity of news — the way the algorithms are structured results in the opposite,” Moore said. “As the editor of Buzzfeed said last week, ‘the publishing rules of these social media platforms are rooted in no clear precedent, tradition or philosophy and seem to be improved in reaction to circumstance.'”

Moore said Silicon Valley’s views on freedom of speech and other key democratic values and journalism ethics raise questions about their viability in the news sphere.

“How would Facebook respond if a news organization sought to publish Snowden-like leaks via Facebook instant articles?” Moore asked. “Are we confident that Microsoft would not allow public authorities to listen to conversations between a journalist and a source on Skype?”

The web giants’ don’t define themselves by their independence from the state and don’t see it as their role to report on public affairs, making them unfit sources for news, according to Moore.

“For these reasons — though we’re coming to rely on them for our news — we can’t rely on them for our news,” he said.

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren joined the progressive call for an overhaul to workers’ rights in the sharing economy during a speech Thursday in Washington, where the Massachusetts Democrat named companies like Uber and Lyft as antagonists in the fight for employee welfare in the 21st century.

While the ridesharing services have fought hard for their chance to compete against decades-old taxi monopolies in major cities across the country, Warren said they’ve fought equally hard against regulations to level the playing field between the old and new, and resisted “rules to promote rider safety and driver accountability.”

“And while their businesses provide workers with greater flexibility, companies like Lyft and Uber have often resisted efforts of those very same workers to try to access a greater share of the wealth that is generated from the work that they do,” Warren told attendees of New America’s annual conference, titled “The Next Social Contract.”

The ridesharing companies have come to represent the forefront of the “gig economy,” as well as the public face of its growing pains in recent years. Both have engaged in numerous legal battles resisting the attempts of their workers — hired as independent contractors — to claim the same benefits as full-time employees, including paid leave, insurance, tax withholding, retirement income and the ability to form unions.

Warren likened those fights to the battle for occupational safety standards and worker’s rights amid the Industrial Revolution.

“Workplaces were monstrously unsafe, wages were paltry, hours were grueling,” she said. “America’s response wasn’t to abandon technological innovations and improvements from the Industrial Revolution — we didn’t send everyone back to the farms.”

Warren said no one “entertains the idea of pulling the plug on the Internet,” but said history has proven “policy also matters” to bolstering a strong middle class.

“Instead, we came together, and through our government, we changed public policies to adapt to a changing economy to try to keep the good, and get rid of the bad,” the Massachusetts senator said.

She added the problems aren’t unique to the gig economy — it just represents the most recent “merciless attack” on workers over the last three decades.

“Long before anybody ever wrote an article about the gig economy, corporations had discovered the higher profits they could wring out of an on-demand workforce made up of independent contractors,” Warren said.

Dubbed 1099 workers after the IRS form for reporting miscellaneous income, independent contractors have little or no access to unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation and social security, which according to Warren, “means the workers who most need the safety net are the ones least likely to have it.”

She speculated the benefits of the gig economy — like working when convenient and making ends meet in a weak labor market — “might be true for some workers in some conditions,” but added “for many the gig economy is simply the next step in a losing effort to build some economic security in a world where all the benefits and wealth are floating to the top 10 percent.”

Warren’s list of fixes include universalizing workers’ comp and paid leave — including medical, family and personal — across the 1099 divide, requiring payroll deductions for disability, workers’ comp and Social Security (contractors pay in themselves, often at lower rates than their full-time counterparts, resulting in a smaller cushions), making benefits like health insurance portable from job-to-job, introducing worker-run pension plans similar to those managed by unions, giving contractors the right to organize like unions and creating narrowed definitions for worker classification.

“It’s time for all workers to have access to the same low-cost, well-protected retirement products that some employers and unions provide today,” the Massachusetts senator said.

Warren’s Republican colleagues in the upper chamber, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, have resisted calls for more regulation to what they paint as the frontier of the new American economy.

“The on-demand economy is a miracle that only American free enterprise could produce,” Rubio said in October. “That’s why it’s so shameful that the biggest obstacle to the growth of this platform is our very own government.”

The Florida senator said the gig economy gives workers the freedom to seek higher education and increases upward mobility by freeing disruptors like Uber from the obligation to provide costly benefits like health insurance.

He also pointed out 1099 requirements prevent companies from establishing minimum standards for service and appearance, or from providing “perks and benefits” to attract “high-quality professionals.”

“Our outdated politicians bash the on-demand economy for not taking better care of workers,” Rubio said, “Yet our outdated government is the exact force preventing it from doing so.”

Though the Federal Trade Commission has launched invenstigations into certain practices in the gig economy, FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen told companies during a workshop last year the agency has no “planned, big enforcement push” coming to the sharing space.

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Representatives from T-Mobile, Verizon, Facebook, a former Federal Communications Commission Chairman and others met in Washington Thursday to debate what could be the future of mobile Internet, or the next big fight in net neutrality: zero-rating.

The term has been steadily brewing into the next hotbed of debate over how Internet service providers (ISPs) send data downstream to customers since January, when T-Mobile CEO John Legere called critics of the “un”carrier’s new “Binge On” unlimited video streaming program “jerks” espousing “bullshit” over the possibility the program may violate the FCC’s new net neutrality rules.

That’s because Binge On, like other programs including Verizon’s FreeBee and Facebook’s Free Basics, allows for free unlimited data streaming of certain content providers choosing to partner with the company (in T-Mobile’s case, that includes heavyweights Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Showtime, Starz, ESPN and more), which doesn’t count against a customer’s monthly data cap — essentially “zero-rating” specific data.

T-Mobile began offering Binge On at no extra cost to customers in November, allowing customers “to watch unlimited HBO, Hulu, Netflix, Sling TV and more…without eating into their LTE data,” according to Legere. The catch? T-Mobile achieves this by “optimizing” (the uncarrier’s word) all video streamed on the company’s network, whether the edge provider partners with T-Mobile or not, by reducing video quality to 480p at 1.5 megabits-per-second (essentially DVD quality).

Critics including the pro-net neutrality digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation say T-Mobile’s optimizing is essentially throttling — one of the three bright line rules the FCC explicitly forbade in its net neutrality rules to prevent ISPs from favoring certain content over others.

“Even if the commission’s order is upheld in its entirety, the ability of mobile carriers to exclude certain content from data caps, or the buckets that determine what a user pays each month, remains undecided and increasingly controversial,” Michael Calabrese, director of Open Technology Institute’s Wireless Future Project said at an event hosted by OTI Thursday.

Though the rest of the rules face uncertainty until the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals’ likely mid-March ruling, the agency opted for a regulatory light-touch approach to zero-rating, which it will judge on a case-by-case basis, according to Chairman Tom Wheeler.

Kevin Martin, Facebook’s vice president for mobile and global access and a former FCC chair himself, said the agency took the right approach to zero-rating — a technique that in Facebook’s case, is aimed at getting the poorest regions in the world online by giving a free, albeit limited, option to users who would otherwise have no other access.

Of the roughly 4 billion unconnected people in the world, 2 billion of them live within an area covered by a mobile provider, and it’s those 2 billion Facebook is targeting with Free Basics. As the name implies, it gives users free, limited Internet access minus bandwidth-heavy services like high-resolution photos, music and video streaming. The social network giant partners with any providers who meet those standards and want to participate, and publishes all the program’s limitations in an effort to be “transparent,” according to Martin.

“It’s not exclusive, it’s non-discriminatory, and in this instance it’s really a non-commercial kind of program. Facebook doesn’t actually pay for any of the data utilized by those consumers,” Martin said, drawing a distinction between Free Basics, sponsored data programs like those offered by AT&T and Verizon — where edge providers pay the carriers to exempt their apps from data caps — and from T-Mobile, which eats the cost of customers’ unlimited data use.

In areas where local operators have deployed Free Basics, Martin said they saw a 50 percent increase in the number of users getting online. Fifty percent of those new users typically go on to purchase a data subscription of some type.

T-Mobile’s senior vice president of government affairs Kathleen Ham, another FCC veteran and former chief of the agency’s wireless bureau, said Binge On helps customers avoid hitting their data caps, and that some participating video providers have seen a 79 percent increase in viewership. She added the extra data has led to a 33 percent increase in the number of hours watched even among video services not participating in Binge On.

“Since we’ve launched the program … 34 petabytes of video traffic has crossed T-Mobile’s network,” Ham said. “That’s the equivalent of 109 million episodes of DVD-quality ‘Game of Thrones.'”

Ham said 93 percent of T-Mobile customers approve of the program, 92 percent say they are watching more video, and anyone at any time can opt out of Binge On, now the default option.

“We’re also confident it fits within the guardrails of the commission’s general conduct standard, which said the rules were flexible enough to accommodate innovation, investment, and we’re taking the FCC at its word on that,” Ham said, adding the program allows T-Mobile, which has about a 16 percent share of the wireless market, to compete with AT&T and Verizon, which sport double that.

Verizon’s vice president of public policy David Young compared the programs to toll-free numbers, and added zero-rating data is “just like free shipping — it’s not getting there faster, just someone else is paying for it.”

Senior counsel and director of open Internet policy at OTI Sarah Morris said zero-rating helps alleviate the artificial scarcity users frequently associate with data caps, which often inhibit them from using data on security updates to improve cybersecurity, and disproportionately affect poor and minority communities that often rely on mobile as their only source of connectivity.

Policy director for the pro-net neutrality group Free Press Matt Wood pointed out that if T-Mobile can zero-rate video under a certain bandwidth, why doesn’t the company zero-rate all data under the same parameters, and let the consumer decide how to use their data instead of T-Mobile.

“Should there be a relationship between my ISP and every website or app I might want to visit? No,” Wood said. “The problem with comparing sponsored data to the 800 numbers is that the Internet never had a toll to begin with.”

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Authors big and small, publishers, lawyers and regulators gathered in Washington Wednesday to discuss the growing influence and monopoly power in the book publishing and selling market wielded by Amazon, described by those in attendance as “the Darth Vader of the literary world,” that if left unchecked by antitrust regulators, will spark “a nuclear winter in book publishing.”

Amazon, by a wide margin the largest book retailer in the U.S., currently has as large a market share in the entire book business as John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil — the largest vertically integrated oil refiner of it’s time — had in 1911 before the Supreme Court ruled it an illegal monopoly, breaking it up into 34 companies, according to economist Paul Krugman.

The U.S.’s biggest online retailer controls 75 percent of online sales of physical books, 65 percent of e-book sales, more than 40 percent of new book sales and 85 percent of e-book sales by self-published authors, founder of Authors United, author and journalist Doug Preston said at New America’s “Amazon’s Book Monopoly: A Threat to Freedom of Expression?” event Wednesday.

“This would be concerning even if the company in question were benign, but we all know that Amazon is not a benign company,” Preston said. “Amazon is a monopoly in absolutely every sense of the word.”

The next-largest publisher, Penguin/Random House, sells 15,000 titles every year, while Amazon uploads 500,000 new titles annually — as many titles as there are in Harvard’s Widener Library.

According to unpublished statistics by the Codex Group first revealed during Wednesday’s event, the retail share of books sold in book stores has gone from 72 percent in 2010 to 33 percent today — a market shift Codex described as “total domination.” The model has allowed Amazon to make more than $5 billion in book sales and avoid paying more than $600 million in state sales taxes in roughly half the states where it lacks a physical presence.

Amazon’s aggressive vertical expansion in the book market, where it dominates the independent publishing and e-book sectors, is not news. Preston was one of 3,000 authors who saw their books suffer delivery delays for weeks, cancelled pre-sales and ads suggesting other books on Amazon during the website’s near year-long dispute with publisher Hachette in 2014.

Amazon refused to restock or promote Hachette titles, and even threatened not to renew its license with the publisher, over its policy of drastically discounting e-books, which Amazon sells at a loss — a long-term tactic aimed at shutting down competitors. The two concluded the eleven-month dispute in November 2014, with Amazon permitting Hachette to set the prices for its e-books.

“These are an example of Amazon’s dirty tactics,” Preston said.

Publishers aren’t the only ones feeling the squeeze. Authors’ bottom lines have taken hard hits since Amazon’s takeover, with the Author’s Guild reporting the mean annual income of an author dropping 24 percent since 2009 from $10,500 annually to $8,000 in 2015 — below the federal poverty line. Authors writing full-time for more than 15 years fell 38 percent from $25,000 to $17,500, and while advances for the top 10 percent of writers have gone up, they’ve gone down dramatically for the remaining 90 percent.

By compelling self-published authors to agree to non-compete contracts for better placement and promotion on Amazon and selling their titles at massively discounted rates on Kindle Direct Publishing, the retail giant is effectively whittling away budding authors’ ability to publish and market their content across multiple venues, self-published author and Smashwords CEO Mark Coker explained.

“Unless there’s some form of government intervention, we face a nuclear winter in book publishing,” Coker said.

Even authors in the top percent such as New York Times bestselling-author Scott Turow, who said Amazon has helped him sell hundreds of thousands of books, said the online retailer’s power threatens authors’ free speech and expression by favoring certain books over others based on factors from pacing to page-count.

“They are, as I have called them, the Darth Vader of the literary world,” Turow said.

Turow, a former federal prosecutor and president of the Author’s Guild, pointed out Amazon has been able to distort and corner the e-book market by selling e-books at a loss partly due to Wall Street’s willingness to prop up the online retailer, despite it barely earning a profit, in anticipation of Amazon setting higher prices in a future where it dominates the market entirely.

“In my view — I don’t claim to be an antitrust expert — but that’s where the Justice Department should have stepped in,” Turow said.

Preston’s group wrote a letter to the Justice Department during the Hachette dispute in 2014 asking the government to investigate Amazon’s monopoly practices, and met with Justice Department antitrust officials late last year to present their case for an investigation, which officials said they would consider.

That may be hard going according to Jonathan Kanter, an antitrust partner with the Cadwalader law firm, who, along with others at Wednesday’s event, alleged the current administration is unwilling to prosecute Amazon because it views the market’s current low prices as a win for consumers, and doesn’t want to upset the financial arm behind the Washington Post in fear of bad press.

While federal regulators have been willing to block mergers between Comcast and Time Warner Cable, Staples and Office Depot and AT&T and T-Mobile, they’ve been less-willing to take action on antitrust.

“Merger enforcement is alive and well, antitrust enforcement is barely on life support,” said Kanter, who worked at the FTC’s Bureau of Competition during the Microsoft antitrust case in the ’90s.

Kanter added it’s not a question of whether there’s a federal case to be made against Amazon, but whether there’s a political will to do so.

“When was the last time you can remember a major antitrust agency bringing a monopolization case? The reason you can’t remember is because they haven’t done it,” Kanter said. “We haven’t seen one since the administration came in with a promise of more enforcement.”

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