Trump FCC Boss To Destroy Whatever’s Left Of U.S. Broadband Consumer Protection

Policy

from the not-with-a-bang,-but-with-a-whimper dept

Just so we’re very clear up front: despite a lot of bullshit to the contrary, the Trump administration is completely dismantling whatever’s left of U.S. consumer protection and corporate oversight. That’s not hyperbole; between recent Supreme Court rulings, Trump executive orders, and the actions of radical agency bosses like Brendan Carr, they’re not being at all subtle about the goal.

Over at the FCC they’ve already killed net neutrality. They’ve butchered the agency’s efforts to stop racial discrimination in fiber deployments. They’re already ending all the agency’s investigations into predatory telecom bullshit like usage caps or predatory fees. Trump-stacked courts are about to kill longstanding programs that helped poor rural Americans and school systems afford broadband access.

They’re utterly disinterested in protecting consumers or smaller competitors from the harms created by shitty giant telecom monopolies. Gone is even the pretense of concern about the impacts of unchecked corporate power. Gone is any effort to protect consumers and healthy markets.

In their place is a weird fusion of rank corruption and radical zealotry, with Carr spending most of his time abusing FCC authority to threaten companies and journalists that refuse to kiss Trump’s ass, or launching fake “investigations” into telecom companies for not being racist enough.

Now Carr is looking to apply the final, killing blow to the FCC’s role as any sort of consumer watchdog, something it already didn’t do all that consistently, or well. In a public notice issued last week, Carr proclaimed he’s taking public comment on his plan to follow through on Trump’s executive order and basically completely defang the agency.

The goal is to make the FCC largely decorative on consumer protection, much to the pleasure of shitty regional telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast. Of course, Carr and friends phrase it somewhat differently:

“Specifically, we are seeking public input on identifying FCC rules for the purpose of alleviating unnecessary regulatory burdens. We seek comment on deregulatory initiatives that would facilitate and encourage American firms’ investment in modernizing their networks, developing infrastructure, and offering innovative and advanced capabilities.”

This is all dressed up as very serious adult policy thinking in some policy circles and in our feckless media. But it’s just overly verbose corruption in a shitty hat.

For 50 years, an underlying right wing (and “free market libertarian”) lie has been that basically all oversight of shitty giant telecom monopolies constitutes an “unnecessary regulatory burden.” And if you just strip away oversight of a giant shitty company like Comcast, innovative magic happens.

That magic, of course, never materializes; monopolized broadband access continues to be spotty, expensive, and unreliable due to regulatory capture and limited competition. Travel to nearly every town or city in America and behold the pretty widespread broadband industry market failure that’s resulted from this sort of coddling of consolidated corporate power.

It’s because if you strip away regulatory oversight of consolidated regional monopolies, they just double down on the shitty behavior. With neither competition nor regulatory oversight in place to constrain their worse impulses, they just perpetually exploit captive customers in increasingly “creative” ways. It’s why U.S. broadband remains more expensive and shittier than a long list of developed nations.

Still, the lie that large telecom giants face uniquely terrible, burdensome oversight in the U.S. remains a useful fiction for captured lackeys like Carr. But this mindless deregulation and defanged oversight of corporate power has very real, very obvious harms that go beyond high prices and shitty broadband. As we saw recently with the biggest Chinese hack of U.S. telecom infrastructure in recorded history.

These “mindless deregulation” folks have dressed up greed as some elaborate ethos, and like to pretend that competent regulatory oversight is radical extremism. It’s all in service to the singular goal of improved quarterly returns at absolutely any cost. There is zero interest in the real world harm of such a narrow ideology. They simply ignore the harms when they arise.

Except in this instance U.S. companies like AT&T and Comcast have finally bitten off more than they can chew. They signed up for Trump 2.0 thinking they’d just get more of what was common during the first Trump turn: tax cuts, rubber stamped merger approvals, and mindless deregulation.

But with Trumpism unconstrained by the courts or needs of re-election, they’re instead getting a heaping dose of authoritarianism: weird radical zealots who can ruin your businesses on a whim if you’re not suitably deferent to the mad child king; massive societal destabilization and chaos; weird, pointless tariff wars; recessions that ensure the public can’t pay for your already-overpriced broadband access. Enjoy.

Filed Under: brendan carr, broadband, corruption, fcc, high speed internet, regulatory capture, telecom