So we've noted a few times how Trump FCC boss Ajit Pai enjoys wandering the country informing everyone he's a massive champion of closing the digital divide. But those claims have been repeatedly and consistently undermined by Pai's own actions, whether that involves rolling back net neutrality (a move that will make life harder and more expensive for countless consumers, non-profits, minority communities and startups alike), or his slow but steady dismantling of programs intended to make life a little bit easier for the poor.

One of Pai's biggest targets has been the FCC's Lifeline program. It's an arguably modest program that was started by Reagan and expanded by Bush, and it long enjoyed bipartisan support until the post-truth era rolled into town. Lifeline doles out a measly $9.25 per month subsidy that low-income homes can use to help pay a tiny fraction of their wireless, phone, or broadband bills (enrolled participants have to chose one). The FCC under former FCC boss Tom Wheeler had voted to expand the service to cover broadband connections, something Pai (ever a champion to the poor) voted down.

Now Pai is back with a new proposal that would prevent anybody but the nation's biggest carriers from helping provide service to the poor via the Lifeline program. According to Pai's new proposal, only "facilities-based broadband" providers (companies that own and operate their own networks) could participate in the program, forcing millions of the nations' poor off of existing MVNOs and other resellers, and forcing them onto the networks of incumbent wireless carriers.

If you've followed Pai's ideological rhetoric, it's pretty clear he sees government as a pesky impediment to the miracles of the broadband free market, which, in Pai's head, will always do the right thing if left in an accountability vacuum. But if you've also followed the broadband industry, you'll know it's not a free market. It's a mish-mash of regional monopolies that enjoy regulatory capture on the state and federal level, resulting in limited competition, high prices, and awful service. In telecom, history shows us that mindlessly gutting regulatory oversight instead of reforming it doesn't magically fix this problem, it makes it worse.

Still, it's clear that Pai believes that slowly dismantling the FCC as both an agent of altruism (empathy is painfully unfashionable) and oversight is the path to nirvana. And he's justifying his latest efforts to scale back Lifeline by insisting that booting resellers off the program somehow will magically boost broadband deployment:

"[W]e believe Lifeline support will best promote access to advanced communications services if it is focused to encourage investment in broadband-capable networks...We believe this proposal would do more than the current reimbursement structure to encourage access to quality, affordable broadband service for low-income Americans. In particular, Lifeline support can serve to increase the ability to pay for services of low-income households. Such an increase can thereby improve the business case for deploying facilities to serve low-income households."

Consumer advocates argue in their own filings with the FCC (pdf) that the effort is a pointless attempt to help drive additional revenue to incumbent carriers. And former FCC staffer Gigi Sohn recently noted in Wired how this is part of a broader effort that will make life more difficult for low-income Americans to actually get broadband:

"One of Pai’s first acts as chair was to chill competition and innovation in the Lifeline program. Pai reversed a decision made by former FCC chair Tom Wheeler that allowed nine new Lifeline providers into the program. In the process Pai got rid of new competitors who could drive down prices and improve services.

Now, Pai proposes to limit Lifeline even further. Eliminating a Wheeler-era designation that welcomed new broadband providers into the program, the FCC said in December, will “better reflect the structure, operation, and goals of the Lifeline program.” But if the goal of the program is to ensure that low-income Americans have affordable access to broadband, reducing competition in the program will do the exact opposite.

The problem is only compounded by Pai's failure to do anything about a lack of competition in general in the telecom market. And while incumbent ISPs (like Pai's former employer Verizon) routinely applaud Pai's efforts on these fronts, even they doubt the effectiveness of Pai's proposal. For example Verizon was quick to point out in its own filing (pdf) that Pai's plan wouldn't do what he claims and would actually be harmful:

"The proposed exclusion of resellers from the Lifeline program would be highly disruptive to existing Lifeline beneficiaries and is at odds with the Commission's goal of supporting affordable voice telephony and high-speed broadband for low-income households."

Even all of the dollar per hollar think tankers, academics, and others the industry uses to parrot anti-consumer policies aren't impressed by Pai's proposal. US Telecom, a lobbying group spearheaded by ATT, also panned Pai's plan for Lifeline, saying it wouldn't accomplish what Pai says it would (pdf):

"[T]he proposed elimination of resellers from the Lifeline program would not materially further the deployment of broadband infrastructure, because revenue from resellers already contributes to facilities-based carriers' deployment of broadband facilities."

Again, you've got industry and consumer advocates agreeing here that Pai is wrong and his plan will actually harm the poor.

But as his attack on net neutrality made pretty clear, Pai's blinded by an ideological vision of the telecom market that may or may not be supported by actual reality. And whereas a good leader would listen to opposition to his plans and reconsider positions that run in contrast to the will of the public, the insight of experts, and the facts -- Pai's default tendency is almost always to double down on bad ideas. And it this case Pai's bad idea is pretty clear: dismantling telecom programs that help the poor via death by a thousand cuts, no matter how counterproductive it is.

There's still time for Pai to back off his plan, given the FCC isn't expected to vote on the proposal until sometime after the public comment period ends on March 23. Still, when your definition of "helping the poor" includes ensuring cable boxes stay expensive and closed, allowing duopolies to abuse net neutrality and drive up service costs, protecting prison monopoly telcos that have price-gouged families for years, and preventing smaller ISPs from actually helping the poor you profess to love -- you have to wonder what it looks like when Pai actively wants to harm something.

Rhode Island lawmakers are proposing a new law (pdf) that would force ISPs to filter pornography and other "patently offensive material." It would then force state residents interested in viewing porn to pony up a one-time $20 "digital access fee" to whitelist the internet's naughty bits for each internet-connected device in the home, the money purportedly going toward helping combat human trafficking. ISPs would be required to build entire new support systems (on their dime) to help combat porn, and would face fines of $500 for each instance of offensive content that ISPs failed to censor.

The bill is worded vaguely enough to suggest that hardware vendors could also be held liable if they failed to help censor said "patently offensive" material:

"If a person who manufacturers, sells, offers for sale, leases, or distributes a product that makes content accessible on the Internet is unresponsive to a report of sexual content or patently offensive material that has breached the filter required by this section, the attorney general or a consumer may file a civil suit. The attorney general or a consumer may seek damages of up to five hundred dollars ($500) for each piece of content that was reported but not subsequently blocked. The prevailing party in the civil action may seek attorneys' fees."

Upon initial inspection, this awful proposal would just appear to be garden-variety vanilla stupid. It's technically impossible, annoyingly expensive, unlikely to ever pass, and (like most filter programs) would likely only cause collateral damage to the access of legitimate content. But the proposal is actually just one of more than a dozen similar proposals winding their way through numerous state legislatures. All of these bills follow the same, absurd playbook, and all falsely try to use child trafficking as a bogus straw man to justify censorship.

And they're all being spearheaded by a man named Chris Sevier, whose checkered history suggests he shouldn't be writing love notes on cocktail napkins, much less helping craft state-level legislation:

"Chris Sevier, 40, who sometimes goes by Mark Sevier in court and Chris Severe in communications with state legislators, has a contentious and often intentionally provocative relationship with the American court system that is news to at least some of the bill’s co-sponsors. He once famously tried to legally marry his computer to protest same-sex marriage, and was charged with stalking and harassing both country star John Rich and a 17-year-old girl."

Lovely. Sevier's war on porn, and his effort to obfuscate his real agenda by professing to be combating human trafficking, isn't new. Sevier has also filed suit against Apple in the past for the company's failure to implement more robust porn filters. Said lawsuit was jam-packed with spelling and other errors, and he claimed that Apple's failure to police porn resulted him in seeing "pornographic images that appealed to his biological sensibilities as a male and lead to an unwanted addiction with adverse consequences."

Somehow, Sevier has had some notable success convincing lawmakers to push their own versions of the same draft legislation. We've covered previous iterations of these efforts, which all use human trafficking as a bogeyman to justify ham-fisted and technologically unworkable censorship efforts. South Carolina Senator Bill Chumley pushed one-such incarnation of this effort in late 2016. We've also covered similar efforts in Virginia. Time and time again, the lawmakers backing these proposals fail utterly in explaining how their legislation actually harms human trafficking in any material way.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation last week did a good job highlighting the scope of this absurdity, noting that more than fifteen states are now pushing some flavor of the “Human Trafficking Prevention Act” (HTPA). Again, none of the bills actually do anything to stop human trafficking, but do appear to enjoy using the subject to obfuscate the problems inherent in hysterical puritanical hyperventilation and censorship. And as the EFF notes, the fact that these proposals are logistically unworkable doesn't appear to bother their backers in the slightest:

"The bill would force the companies we rely upon for open access to the Internet to create a massive, easily abused censorship apparatus. Tech companies would be required to operate call centers or online reporting centers to monitor complaints about which sites should or should not be filtered. The technical requirements for this kind of aggressive platform censorship at scale are simply unworkable. If the attempts of social media sites to censor pornographic images are any indication, we cannot count on algorithms to distinguish, for example, nude art from medical information from pornography. Facing risk of legal liability, companies would likely over-censor and sweep up legal content in their censorship net.

Numerous states (like New Mexico) have backed off their own proposals after the EFF raised the alarm, but it remains stunning just how much traction these efforts have seen despite being technologically impossible, hugely expensive, utterly disingenuous, and the intellectual and legislative equivalent of some random internet troll's epic brain fart.