The FCC runs an $8 billion federal subsidy program to help bring phone and broadband services to lower income homes and schools called the Universal Service Fund. The program was historically …
I’d bet a year’s salary that somewhere along the line, eel-on-musk made some promises to a bunch of politicians in 15 states, contingent on making Starlink the only way for poor people to access the internet. He’s literally building his monopoly in the open, as we speak.
I’ll additionally bet that it will be a blatantly non-net-neutral service, with certain ideological sectors/services paywalled or simply excluded altogether - e.g. Truth, Newsmax, OANN, and Facebook included in the base package, Fox for a very small premium, anything to the left of that is a meaningfully pricey “add-on”, and fledgling/competitor/open/ FOSS services and protocols like Bluesky and the fediverse fully blocked.
This is the beginning of a play to fully control the domestic information diet, particularly for less wealthy people.
I’m sure this won’t have implications that are even worse than when he took over Twitter and used it to help the fascists win.
Edit: yes, I’m aware I’m blurring the definition between ideological filtering and “actual” net neutrality, but honestly, this is roughly how I believe it’ll play out, because if you control the uplink, you can show or block the user from whatever the fuck you want, using whatever basis you want. It doesn’t necessarily have to just be a paywall. It’s just that I haven’t seen any non-net-neutral ISPs actually try to do something that blatantly censorious and biased in concert with a government before (the CCP’s GFW doesn’t really apply here). Remember: this is Musk and Trump we’re talking about. They want money and control. That’s their goal. If they can get both at once, they’ll sure as shit go for it.
Like other crimes, with cyber attacks it is important to identify a motive to understand your attacker better and anticipate their next move. In this attack I believe the motive is a forced cutover of critical infrastructure systems in banking, telecommunications and travel to a centralized model. In plain terms what I’m saying is that DOGE wants to migrate American federal systems to X using the WeChat model where all network and transactional systems are centrally routed and processed.
I’d bet a year’s salary that somewhere along the line, eel-on-musk made some promises to a bunch of politicians in 15 states, contingent on making Starlink the only way for poor people to access the internet. He’s literally building his monopoly in the open, as we speak.
I’ll additionally bet that it will be a blatantly non-net-neutral service, with certain ideological sectors/services paywalled or simply excluded altogether - e.g. Truth, Newsmax, OANN, and Facebook included in the base package, Fox for a very small premium, anything to the left of that is a meaningfully pricey “add-on”, and fledgling/competitor/open/ FOSS services and protocols like Bluesky and the fediverse fully blocked.
This is the beginning of a play to fully control the domestic information diet, particularly for less wealthy people.
I’m sure this won’t have implications that are even worse than when he took over Twitter and used it to help the fascists win.
Edit: yes, I’m aware I’m blurring the definition between ideological filtering and “actual” net neutrality, but honestly, this is roughly how I believe it’ll play out, because if you control the uplink, you can show or block the user from whatever the fuck you want, using whatever basis you want. It doesn’t necessarily have to just be a paywall. It’s just that I haven’t seen any non-net-neutral ISPs actually try to do something that blatantly censorious and biased in concert with a government before (the CCP’s GFW doesn’t really apply here). Remember: this is Musk and Trump we’re talking about. They want money and control. That’s their goal. If they can get both at once, they’ll sure as shit go for it.
https://landfamilyhome.substack.com/p/a-household-guide-for-cyber-defense
https://landfamilyhome.substack.com/p/presidents-day-update-a-household