firehose

In the overwhelmingly male comic book industry, it has been a challenge for some editors and readers to see the ever growing number of talented women currently trying to make a name for themselves. With that in mind, ComicsAlliance offers Hire This Woman, a recurring feature designed for comics readers as well as editors and other professionals, where we shine the spotlight on a female comics pro on the ascendance. Some of these women will be at the very beginning of their careers, while others will be more experienced but not yet “household names.”

Cartoonist Sally Jane Thompson has created many comics on her own such as the webcomic From! and the graphic novel Atomic Sheep. She has also contributed art to projects like Womanthology: Space and Liberator Volume 1.

ComicsAlliance: What’s your preferred form of creative output?

Sally Jane Thompson: My own writer-artist projects are my favorite — unsurprisingly, since those are the most personal, the projects that have the most of me in them. But they’re complemented by the creative challenge of working on others’ stories, and for those I prefer doing either  full-service monochrome art, or pencils and inks if it’s a team and/or color book.

CA: Do you work on paper or digitally?  Why?

SJT: I do most of the work on paper, up to inks, and then clean up, color (if needed), and letter digitally. I’ve recently been experimenting with ink wash to move even more of the process to paper; I like the tactile feedback I get from a brush, and the way it forces me to accept and work with small quirks that add character.

CA: What’s your background/training? 

SJT: I did fine art in university and started doing comics in my free time during the degree. I think the first proper comic I did was in a lit class on Canadian long-form poetry, where my excellent prof let me do part of my final essay as a comic. Which is fitting, as for me comics have a strong relation to poetry, and I discovered while doing that essay how amazing a vehicle they are for communicating a sense of place and time. Following that, I did an MA in art and design and started freelancing and self-publishing while doing that.

CA: How would you describe your creative style?

SJT: Every story is different, so I try and adjust a bit stylistically for each one, but I think there’s a recognisable thread of me-ness running through all of it! Common elements are organic curves and expressive inking, and a focus on character and expressions, with manga-influenced layouts and sense of place. Writing-wise, I tend towards contemplative slice-of-life, often with a magic realist twist. A friend once described my style as “bold lines with an air of feminine certainty,” which I hope she won’t mind me quoting, as I loved that!

CA: What projects have you worked on in the past? What are you currently working on?

SJT: Recent projects include Atomic Sheep, a coming-of-age graphic novel released last year by AAM Markosia; a short comic called Now and Then; and artwork on stories for Womanthology: Space (IDW, with writer Jody Houser and colorist Katherine Layno) and Liberator Vol 1 (Black Mask Studios, with writer Alex de Campi and colorist Jenn Manley Lee). At the moment I’m working on a new graphic novel, and I’m collaborating with Jody Houser on a fairy-tale influenced one-shot. I’ve recently started an illustration side-project called Blood and Roses, and I’ll be doing art duties on a great children’s comic soon, which I’m incredibly excited about!

CA: Approximately how long does it take you to create a 20-page issue?

 SJT: It varies based on the style and what roles I’m filling. So I might write, pencil, ink and letter a 20-page short in a month because on my own work the style tends to be more pared down, thus quicker to create (at least, I might if I had a month where I could work on my own work full-time!). But pencils and inks on something more detailed and, for lack of a better term, more mainstream, would also take around a month (full time).

Of course, few projects are that linear (sit down and draw one thing for a month) in their production, feedback times, etc. — but it’s a useful starting point for working out a schedule that works for everyone!

CA: What is your dream project?

SJT: I’ve only got so long on this planet, and want to offer something that makes the world even a tiny little bit better for me being here, so a dream project would have some positive effect — whether being a help and encouragement to people, or even just increasing empathy, as good fiction so often does. Aside from that, a dream project (whether writing, drawing, or both!) would mix the fantastical and the mundane, be full of atmosphere and beautiful imagery, have wonderful female characters (and be focussed on their inner journies/development), and allow for spacious layouts and quiet moments. Possibly aimed at teens. Interesting, personal, and just plain good storytelling. And, since we’re dreaming, it would be read by tons of people, of course!

CA: Who are some comic creators that inspire you?

SJT: I hugely admire Hope Larson for her sensitive, gentle storytelling and organic inking; Becky Cloonan for her evocative lines; Jillian Tamaki for the atmosphere and inventiveness in her work; Kaoru Mori for the richness of her focus on small real-life details, Ashinano Hitoshi for the quiet expansiveness of his stories, and so so many others!

CA: What are some comics that have inspired you either growing up or as an adult?

 SJT: I grew up with Tintin,  Asterix and Archie comics. When I got truly sucked into comics it was via manga as a teen. Ai Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss, Ashinano Hitoshi’s Yokohama Shopping Trip, Iou Kuroda’s Sexy Voice and Robo and Kozue Amano’s Aria all had a big influence on me. I started reading more widely in university, the time when I started making comics as well, and comics like the Flight anthologies, Hope Larson’s Salamander Dream, and Craig Thompson’s Blankets were a huge influence. Of course, I continue to find comics that knock me for six and affect how I think about my work – most recently Fanny Britt and Isabelle Arsenault’s Jane, the Fox and Me.

CA: What’s your ideal professional environment?

SJT: I currently work at home, but I do get a bit cabin-fever-y and have to take my work to coffee shops sometimes. I very much hope at some point I’ll be able to work in a shared studio with a few other comickers and illustrators, where seeing eachother working everyday would give us a mutual boost. Ideally, it would have a messy space for painting, and a few spare work spots — couch, tables — as I find myself roaming over the course of a day!

CA: What do you most want our readers and industry professionals to know about your work?

SJT: The stories I want to work on stay with the reader, and have depth and character — but good stories come in all shapes and sizes and genres, and I’m always up for a challenge, even if it looks a little different than what I’ve done before!

Other than that, I place high importance on being professional and pleasant, and try to push myself on every new project. I’m a little biased, but I think I’m nice to work with!

CA: How can editors and readers keep up with your work and find your contact information?

 SJT: You can contact me via my site or at sally (at) sallyjanethompson.co.uk. You can keep up with my work on my blog, and I’m on twitter rather too much at @sallythompson.

If there is a woman you’d like to recommend or if you’d like to be included in a future installment of this feature, drop us a line at comicsalliance-at-gmail-dot-com with “Hire This Woman” in the subject line.

On Saturday night at a pink-lit bar in New York's Lower East Side, the musician Aaron David Ross took a moment away from DJing his own party to evangelize a bit.

"Look," he said between vaporous pulls of a dual-coil atomizer, "I'm like the vegetarian that won't leave you alone. Cigarettes are terrible for you."

---

Ross, who makes records under the name ADR and is one-half of the industrial duo Gatekeeper, held up his personal vaporizer. Cylindrical and silver, it looked much more like an expensive piece of jewelry than a replacement for "analog" cigarettes, a stark contrast to the tobacco-aping NJOYs whose recent advertising campaign has focused on their ability to "look, taste, and feel just like a real cigarette."

Ross and his friends, some wearing chains and black fitted caps, exhaled more odorless smoke than seemed reasonable for a human lung to hold. They looked pretty cool, which is a feat — a friend of Ross', Mat Dryhurst, had earlier relayed that when he started vaping, "My wife said she wouldn't have sex with me if I did this in public."

"Music for vapers, by vapers."

Ross turned back to his laptop, where he was playing an FKA Twigs track to celebrate his new mixtape, Cloud Chasing Vol. 1. It's ostensibly the "first collection of music for vapers, by vapers," and it was compiled by Ross and some of his e-cig enthusiast friends in honor of a symposium held at the art and technology center Rhizome this past weekend. By inviting a group of artists, academics, and enthusiasts to speak on the subject of the e-cigarette, Rhizome hoped to learn "what it means to ‘vape.'"

They couldn't have scheduled the panels for a better time: as recently as a few years ago, e-cigarette smoking was a relatively obscure habit. But with the industry still largely unregulated and projected to rake in a reported $1.5 billion in sales this year, the e-cig market has grown into a multi-tentacled beast. Just as the largely forum-based DIY "modding" scene gains serious traction, legislation is on the horizon for 2014. Meanwhile Big Tobacco, thanks to new lines of electronic products, has the opportunity to hawk its wares on television for the first time in 40 years. This is the Wild West of the Electronic Nicotine Delivery Device (ENDD), and it may not last very much longer in its current form.

And so the panel, on which Ross and Dryhurst both spoke, was cheekily called "This is the ENDD." The event largely cast the e-cig debate's usual suspects — economic, health, and legislative issues — as the background to a number of cultural shifts. Which, because of the world we live in, largely came down to the way e-cigarettes have been marketed.

Vaping parties in glass jacuzzis and at the jane hotel

The e-cigarette industry has spent vast amounts of money and time making a once-dorky and counterintuitive idea — sucking on a metal device filled with nicotine juice and some of the same chemicals used in smoke machines — look desirable, fun, and edgy. This year at CES, Vapor Corp. hosted a party on the pool deck of the Marquee with plexiglass jacuzzis; as one of Rhizome's panelists pointed out, NJOY invited "influencers" to party with e-cigs in hand at the posh Jane Hotel last year, before New York City's former mayor, Michael Bloomberg, banned public indoor vaping.

Now, Courtney Love stars in an e-cig commercial ("It's a f**cking NJOY") and Stephen Dorff strikes rugged poses as a modern-day Marlboro Man for Blu, a brand that was acquired in 2012 for $135 million by Lorilard, one of the Big Three "analog" tobacco companies.

Stephen Dorff, a sensitive modern Malboro Man

Health researcher and panelist CAS Fredericks notes Blu has even taken the recent indoor e-cig bans in select states as ammunition for those marketing campaigns, encouraging Blu customers to "fight back" against the man.

If some large e-cig companies like NJOY and Blu have rested their cred largely on the dont-tread-on-me, rebel-without-the-consequences feeling of retro Marlboro and Lucky Strike ads, others like the Reynolds-owned Vuse have churned out marketing materials that make their e-cigs sound less like smokes and more like iPads, with TV spots obliquely announcing "dreams, opportunities, the promise of new things to come.

According to Orit Gat, an art critic and Rhizome contributor, the schism between e-cigs marketed like gadgets and those marketed like cigarettes may be because "we're in a particular moment" in the development of the e-cigarette; "We're still not sure what they are," she said during her presentation, "or what we're supposed to do with them."

Gat, having recently spent time in Provence, France, flipped through slides of two small e-clopinettes, small storefronts in which locals were encouraged to try the latest in e-cig technology. A sign above the display read, in French, "technology meets elegance." White-walled and minimalist, with battery packs and slim e-cigs displayed on a wall behind glass, the shops looked more like Apple Stores than smoke shops.

"Vaporists" in Nolita help you "hack" your ecigs

Her next set of slides, however, showed The Henley Vaporium in Nolita, where available e-cig flavors were written on a chalkboard pinned to an exposed brick wall. There, "vaporists" help you "hack" your e-cigs - "Whatever that means," Gat quipped - in a shop that shares more DNA with an artisinal coffee house than a hyper-clean technology store. "The closer we get to e-cigs," she said, "the closer it is to a Whole Foods than an Apple Store."

For Dryhurst, the idea of the e-cig as a lifestyle brand originates a bit closer to home. When he switched from regular cigarettes to e-cigs, he says he realized he'd have to go all the way to fully commit — he had to make his new device part of his "look." Dryhurst, a San Francisco-based artist, says something like the corporate Blu just wouldn't cut it — "Blu cigarettes are the Coca-Cola of this culture," he says. "They went out of fashion."

He, like Ross, is embedded in a rapidly expanding community of "modders"; e-cigarette users who buy parts online and assemble their own vaping devices, spending hours on forums, endlessly tweaking their constructions to get the perfect vapor density or amount of nicotine per hit. In this corner of the e-cigarette market, makers craft hours of YouTube reviews detailing the technical specs of their devices, which tend to be seen as tinkerers' toys: "It speaks to the same compulsion as synthsizer builders," Dryhurst said.

"Blu e-cigarettes are the coca-cola of this culture. They went out of fashion."

In the final section of the panel, during a question-and-answer period, Ross and Alex Gvojict,
the artist responsible for Cloud Chasing Vol. 1's cover art joined a handful of the other speakers onstage. In order to make the cover, Gvojict photoshopped a stock photo image of young professionals out at a purple club, vaping happily away over neon-colored drinks.

Gvojict expressed to the audience a desire to remove what e-cigarette stigma remained: "It's just about normalization," he said. Ross vaped enthusiastically alongside him at the presentation table, only to be chided softly by the event's organizers — even at an e-cig conference you can't vape indoors in New York.

Even the most theoretical of conversations about vaping culture eventually come back down to the ground — as was reported widely just days before This is the ENDD, lobbyists are storming Washington as the Office of Management and Budget reviews a proposal to bring e-cigarette rule-making under the wing of the FDA, which would likely regulate ENDDs much the way they do analog tobacco products.

"It's an extension of who you are."

In the final question-and-answer period of Rhizome's talk, an attorney and lobbyist named Philip Daman raised his hand and unceremoniously addressed both the panelists and the crowd.

"Vaping culture is absolutely fascinating," said Damon, who is the president of the Smoke Free Alternatives Trade Association. "And the script is very much unwritten .. So i'm here to ask you: Do you know how much influence you have?"

"I personally do think I have a lot of influence," answered Gvojict, "being someone who is about this culture .. and the actual building and customizing, bringing it to this avatar level. It's an extension of who you are."

A SERIOUSLY ill man died hours after he was hauled into an Atos fit-for-work assessment.

Terry McGarvey knew he wasn’t well enough to attend the hearing. But he was terrified his benefits would be stopped if he didn’t turn up.

He dragged himself to the assessment but had to be taken to hospital in an ambulance. Terry, 48, died the next day.

His brother Charlie, 50, said: “He said he felt terrible and didn’t think he could leave the house.

“But he was worried they’d take his benefits away if he didn’t go.

“When he went in, he sat down with a young woman who started asking him questions.

“I pointed out that he needed an ambulance, not a medical.

“They put us into a room next door and lay him on a bed. We waited more than an hour for the ambulance without anyone coming in to even ask how he was.”

Terry, who had blood disorder polycytheamia, died in Glasgow’s Victoria Infirmary from pneumonia last month. His death certificate also lists liver disease.

Charlie, from Glasgow, said Atos’s trained medical assessors should have realised his brother, a former lorry driver, was dangerously ill.

He added: “I think that if they had a doctor in there, they would have got an ambulance immediately.

“The girl who was supposed to be doing the examination never brought out a stethoscope or anything. They just put him in the room next door and that was the last we saw of her.”

An Atos spokesman said: “We would like to express our condolences to Mr McGarvey and
his family.

As soon as we were made aware that Mr McGarvey had taken ill, we offered our assistance and called for an ambulance.”

A spokesman for the Scottish Ambulance Service said: “The call was clinically triaged as a non-emergency based on detailed information provided by the caller.

“The caller was advised that the response to a non-emergency call at that time could take up to an hour but to call 999 again if the patient’scondition deteriorated.”

(Note: No, this idea is not intended to be accurate to real-world Buddhist practice)

Like the DC Comics team of ex-supervillains being sent on high risk covert operations (and maybe a touch of Creature Commandos and so on), except with beings who are trying to wipe their negative karma off their souls. I'm thinking about setting it in fantasy China, but I can see it working in a modern superhero setting too.

There would be literal monsters on the team - beings from the lower orders of Buddhist cosmology, looking for a shortcut to jump up the wheel. Some team members may have more Chinese-y origins: tortured spirits and demoted deities who have been condemned for specific offences against Heaven. Some of them might just be really horrible people, but with talents too unique and valuable to waste. Just like the comics Suicide Squad, not all of them would be willing recruits, in which case Journey of the West-style control devices come in handy. I'd probably allow drawing from all of East Asian religion and mythology in general for a wide field of character concepts whether or not the game is set in fantasy times or a more modern milieu.

But with the framework of karma and reincarnation in the background, a team member's death isn't the end of their story. It might take multiple lives and deaths' worth of service for a monster to secure release from the Squad, their karmic slates a bit less grubby at the end of it all and maybe even with a nice retirement package tossed in in the form of a pleasant next life. On the other hand, if a Squad member doesn't die in the line of duty, then they stay monsters and likely for a lot longer too because going off the mission is probably extra negative karma. Only in death can they collect on their service, and death becomes something they'll have to look forward to. And according to my reaaaally folk understanding of Buddhism, dying in particularly horrible ways does help you work off your karma more effectively...

The team's handler is, of course, a chain-smoking avatar of Avalokitêśvara.

But there are lots of remaining questions over the mission structure and raison d'etre of the Buddhist Monster Suicide Squad that I haven't worked out yet, and I call upon Tabletop Roleplaying Open for aid. What kind of nasty business do they do? Why does the Buddha need a black ops service? What system can I run this in?

Update: Shortly after this brief went live, Apple released OS X version 10.9.2, which finally patches the critical "goto fail" bug.

It has been four days since Mac users began learning of a critical vulnerability in the latest version of OS X that gives attackers an easy way to surreptitiously circumvent the most widely used technology for preventing Internet eavesdropping. Three days ago, Apple told Reuters that it plans to release a patch "very soon," but it didn't elaborate on the details.

If it wasn't clear before, it should be painfully obvious now. The security and privacy of millions of Mavericks users depend on a patch becoming available soon. The vulnerability is taking on renewed urgency given the increasing availability of proof-of-concept code that exploits it. On Tuesday, security consultant Aldo Cortesi was the latest to create working attack code that targets the bug. Other public sites that do much the same thing include gotofail.com and this test page, which is signed with a key that doesn't match the underlying transport layer security certificate. The proliferation of code makes life easier for less-skilled hackers who may want to exploit the vulnerability maliciously.

Yummy Garden is one of those super crappy americanized Chinese places that you have to sorta be crazy to like, but I did like it. I last ate there about a month ago with a friend. Today I drove past and it was all closed up.. a quick Google search provided this http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-21961-the_secret_of_yummy_garden.html

"Chan (Yummy Garden owner who fled to China recently) is the alleged leader of a Chinese drug gang. Last week, Chan’s top lieutenant, Shu Guang “Big Rock” Wu, was in federal court and is expected to plead guilty Feb. 20 to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana. He faces 26 years in prison."

This explains how Yummy Garden, for the better part of my 15 years here, seemed to be consistently empty of customers no matter the time of day yet always remained in business. And it's weird seeing my favorite server in a mug shot, nicknamed "Fat Boy".

RIP Yummy Garden.. your legend will never die!

In a perfect storm of corporate greed and broken government, the internet has gone from vibrant center of the new economy to burgeoning tool of economic control. Where America once had Rockefeller and Carnegie, it now has Comcast’s Brian Roberts, AT&T’s Randall Stephenson, and Verizon’s Lowell McAdam, robber barons for a new age of infrastructure monopoly built on fiber optics and kitty gifs.

And the power of the new network-industrial complex is immense and unchecked, even by other giants: AT&T blocked Apple’s FaceTime and Google’s Hangouts video chat services for the preposterously silly reason that the apps were "preloaded" on each company’s phones instead of downloaded from an app store. Verizon and AT&T have each blocked the Google Wallet mobile payment system because they’re partners in the competing (and not very good) ISIS service. Comcast customers who stream video on their Xboxes using Microsoft’s services get charged against their data caps, but the Comcast service is tax-free.

We’re really, really fucking this up.

But we can fix it, I swear. We just have to start telling each other the truth. Not the doublespeak bullshit of regulators and lobbyists, but the actual truth. Once we have the truth, we have the power — the power to demand better not only from our government, but from the companies that serve us as well. "This is a political fight," says Craig Aaron, president of the advocacy group Free Press. "When the internet speaks with a unified voice politicians rip their hair out."

We can do it. Let’s start.

THE INTERNET IS A UTILITY, JUST LIKE WATER AND ELECTRICITY

Go ahead, say it out loud. The internet is a utility.

There, you’ve just skipped past a quarter century of regulatory corruption and lawsuits that still rage to this day and arrived directly at the obvious conclusion. Internet access isn’t a luxury or a choice if you live and participate in the modern economy, it’s a requirement. Have you ever been in an office when the internet goes down? It’s like recess. My friend Paul Miller lived without the internet for a year and I’m still not entirely sure he’s recovered from the experience. The internet isn’t an adjunct to real life; it’s not another place. You don’t do things "on the internet," you just do things. The network is interwoven into every moment of our lives, and we should treat it that way.

"Common carrier rules are basically free speech."

Yet the corporations that control internet access insist that they’re providing specialized services that are somehow different than water, power, and telephones. They point to crazy bullshit you don’t want or need like free email addresses and web hosting solutions and goofy personalized search screens as evidence that they’re actually providing "information" services instead of the more highly-regulated "telecommunications" services. "Common carrier rules are basically free speech," says the Free Press’ Aaron. "We have all these protections for what happens over landline phones that we’re not extending to data, even though all these people under 25 mostly communicate in data."

It’s time to just end these stupid legal word games and say what we all already know: internet access is a utility. A commodity that should get better and faster and cheaper over time. Anyone who says otherwise is lying for money.

THERE IS ZERO COMPETITION FOR INTERNET ACCESS

None. Zero. Nothing. It is a wasteland. You are standing in the desert and the only thing that grows is higher prices.

70 percent of American households have but one or two choices for high-speed internet access: cable broadband from a cable provider or DSL from a telephone provider. And since DSL isn’t nearly as fast as cable, and the cable companies are aggressive in bundling TV and internet packages together, it’s really only one choice. And that means the level of innovation from these providers has almost completely stagnated, even as prices have gone up.

Why are cellphones so much cooler now than they were in 2000? Because Apple and Google and Samsung all had to fight it out and make better products in order to survive. They’re competing. Comcast hasn’t had to fight anything, at any time. It is fat and lazy and wants nothing more than to get fatter and lazier. That’s why Comcast is spending $45 billion on Time Warner Cable instead of integrating Netflix into its cable boxes and working with Apple and Google and Microsoft on the real next generation of TV: when you’re the only real choice in 19 of America’s 20 biggest markets, you get to move real slow and still make a lot of money. It's not clear Comcast even knows what real competition looks like.

"Unless the FCC thinks that there is a realistic chance that the deal will reverse two decades of rising prices, it should stop the merger," writes Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu. "Passing on savings has never been part of Comcast’s business model." Monopolies are nice like that.

Despite the innovation in phones, the same is true for mobile internet. There are only four major national carriers, most of whom run incompatible networks and all of which are stronger in various regions. If you hate your Sprint or Verizon service, switching to AT&T or T-Mobile is anything but simple and probably requires paying off a two-year contact of some kind. (Even T-Mobile, which is aggressively eliminating contracts for service, maintains a number of device payment plans that require a contract.) Chances are once you’ve chosen a wired broadband carrier and a wireless carrier that works well in your area, you’re stuck: there are few other places to go, and even if you have choices the high costs of switching mean you’re not very likely to leave at all.

(And if anyone tries to tell you that ultra-expensive mobile broadband is somehow competitive with wired service, ask that person to buy you a nice dinner and tell you the story of when they realized dignity had a price. You’re talking to a cable industry lobbyist; they can afford it.)

What happens in countries where there’s real competition? In the UK, where incumbent provider BT is required to allow competitors to use its wired broadband network, home internet service prices are as low as £2.50 a month, or just over $4. In South Korea, where wireless giants SK Telecom and LG Uplus are locked in a fierce technology battle, customers have access to the fastest mobile networks in the world — up to 300Mbps, compared to a theoretical max of 80Mbps on Verizon that’s actually more like 15 or 20mbps in the real world.

Americans pay more for slower speeds than anyone else in the world

And Americans pay more for these slower wireless speeds than anyone else in the world: in Germany, where customers can freely switch between carriers by swapping SIM cards, T-Mobile customers pay just $1.18 per Mbps of speed. In the US, our mostly incompatible wireless networks lock customers in with expensive handsets they can’t take elsewhere, allowing AT&T and Verizon to charge around $4 per Mbps each and Sprint to clock in at an insane $7.50.

American politicians love to stand on the edges of important problems by insisting that the market will find a solution. And that’s mostly right; we don’t need the government meddling in places where smart companies can create their own answers. But you can’t depend on the market to do anything when the market doesn’t exist. "We can either have competition, which would solve a lot of these problems, or we can have regulation," says Aaron. ‘What Comcast is trying is to have neither." It’s insanity, and we keep lying to ourselves about it. It’s time to start thinking about ways to actually do something.

NO INTERNET PROVIDER DESERVES SPECIAL TREATMENT

Mobile carriers like AT&T and Verizon love to pretend they are special flowers, the magicians who managed to fill our thin, empty air with the magic of wireless broadband. Mobile is so difficult, they argue, and spectrum so scarce, that any sort of check or oversight on their behavior would crater their delicate business and derail the entire industry.

This is nonsense, of course. If anything, we need to keep a sharper eye on the endless shenanigans of mobile carriers, because they pose a constant and growing threat to the overall health and innovative potential of the internet. The bad behavior is real, and it’s been happening for years: AT&T blocking FaceTime and Hangouts and Verizon knifing Google Wallet is just the tip of the iceberg. These industry behemoths also wield the wireless spectrum they lease from the public like a weapon, denying both competitors and potential competitors the most fundamental tool they need to get into the game.

The shenanigans of mobile carriers pose a Constant threat to the internet

Wireless executives will tell you they need to own as much wireless airspace as they possibly can, going on about a so-called "spectrum crunch" that has never really materialized: networks haven’t been brought to their knees by an apocalyptic wave of iPads with a voracious appetite for streaming video. In fact, cable companies bought a wide swath of prime spectrum in 2006, only to let it sit unused for years before flipping it to Verizon years later. Even the inventor of the cellphone denies that the crunch is a real phenomenon.

This shit is insane. It is unacceptable. The smartphone revolution was about putting a powerful computer and an internet connection in everyone’s pocket; it was not about creating a new class of economic gatekeepers with the unchecked power to control and destroy markets with zero oversight and little true competition. Famed venture capitalist Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures has called the net neutrality situation a "nightmare" for startups trying to get funded, saying that he expects telecom companies to "pick their preferred partners, subsidize the data costs for those apps, and make it much harder for new entrants to compete with the incumbents."

And allowing these companies to get away with these antics has repercussions we’ve barely even begun talking about: a recent Pew survey found that 45 percent of the poorest Americans use a mobile phone as their primary internet device. Same with nearly half of all Americans aged 18-29, and particularly among minorities and the less-educated. Young, poor, not white: let’s definitely make sure we put them in the ghetto internet of corporate control.

THE FCC IS WEAK AND INEFFECTIVE

The Federal Communications Commission is ostensibly in charge of managing broadband deployment and regulating companies like AT&T and Comcast, but it’s shown no actual ability to do so in a focused and effective way — and when it tries, it does so in such a half-assed way that it gets smacked around in court and loses.

Part of the problem is historical: before former chairman Julius Genachowski released the first National Broadband Plan after taking office in 2009, the FCC wasn’t even completely focused on the internet, and was mostly known for enforcing indecency rules on radio and TV stations, a role that reached the pinnacle of absurdity in 2004 when Janet Jackson’s nipple was exposed for just over half a second during the Super Bowl halftime show. The agency under then-chairman Powell responded by wildly issuing indecency fines, ultimately resulting in ABC stations across the country declining to air Saving Private Ryan on Veteran’s Day for fear of government reprisal and yet another major loss in court when its indecency rules were found unconstitutionally vague in 2012.

"Comcast and Verizon have taken all the reasonable options off the table."

Genachowski succeeded in shifting the agency’s entire focus to the internet, but he instantly crumpled in the face of high-powered telecom lobbying. Genachowski’s first attempt at net neutrality rules were framed the right way and classified internet service providers as common carriers, but the industry succeeded in utterly killing that plan by stoking political outrage at the idea of "regulating the internet" — resulting in the half-baked rules that just got thrown out because the FCC didn’t call broadband providers common carriers. "Comcast and Verizon have so much clout in Washington that they’ve taken all the reasonable options off the table," says the Free Press’ Aaron. "Regulators come at things sideways." Genachowski had the right ideas, but his soft-pedal tactics led to inherently weakened regulations — Cardozo Law School’s Susan Crawford called his approach a "house of cards."

The FCC also sat in the back seat when AT&T tried to buy T-Mobile, has remained virtually silent about the rumored linkup between Sprint and T-Mobile, and has offered little public comment about the Comcast / Time Warner deal — instead letting the Department of Justice take the lead in opposing these obviously anticompetitive mergers. The FCC’s stunning lack of presence and leadership during these watershed moments in communications history is an extraordinary failure for an agency that is officially tasked with protecting the consumer interest.

The FCC "doesn’t seem to have the confidence to stop a merger," says Columbia’s Wu. New FCC chairman Tom Wheeler has "to be willing to take the heat," if he’s going to get involved, says Aaron. "If you’re going to take this job, you have to lead," he says. "The whole reason we have an independent agency is to shield it from Congress."

But there are no rules shielding the FCC from the companies it’s supposed to regulate, leading to an uncomfortable pattern: FCC commissioners are drawn from the ranks of industry lobbyists, while industry lobbyists are drawn from the ranks of FCC commissioners. Current chairman Wheeler has served as president and CEO of both the NCTA cable lobby and the CTIA wireless lobby; former chairman Powell is now the current president and CEO of the NCTA; former commissioner Meredith Baker, who voted in favor of the Comcast / NBCUniversal merger, is now the head of Comcast’s DC lobbying office. "I think for the top jobs the industry can veto people who they might think would be too hard on them," says Wu. "After all, it’s their agency."

"The FCC is scared of one thing: actual people."

This cozy relationship leads to the repeated insistence that consumer protections are too difficult to implement, even when they’re not complicated. "Somehow when they’re pushing through unpopular things that a few big companies want, the FCC can do it," says Aaron. "But when it’s things the people want that the corporations don’t, it’s suddenly impossible."

But not all hope is lost. "The FCC is scared of one thing: actual people," says Wu. "When they sense that something is a popular issue suddenly the FCC is terrified."