Brendan Carr’s FCC Abuses Run Face First Into Trump Court Efforts To Destroy Regulatory Power

Legal Issues

from the when-the-dog-catches-the-car dept

So we’ve established by now that the second Trump administration is attempting to completely destroy regulatory authority, consumer protection, labor rights, and corporate oversight. Whether by precedent-ignoring court ruling, executive order, illegally firing commissioners, cronyism, or regulatory capture, the effort isn’t subtle, and is poised to usher forth a new golden age of corruption.

That’s a problem for Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr, who has been trying to abuse now-nonexistent FCC authority to bully companies he thinks aren’t being sexist or racist enough. Or to launch fake investigations into media companies if they dare engage in journalism critical of the Trump administration. Or to harass companies he thinks don’t carry a suitable amount of right wing, religious programming.

As I wrote in a recent Verge profile of Carr’s first 100 days, Carr will routinely proclaim that his agency has no power at all when it comes to protecting consumers or standing up to giants like AT&T, but all the power in the world when it comes time for petty authoritarian bullshit.

Recently, the Fifth Circuit declared the FCC no longer has the authority to leverage fines against companies for wrongdoing. Their ruling let AT&T off the hook for decades of major abuse of sensitive consumer location data, which repeatedly put the public at risk.

The ruling is the latest in a series by Trumplican-stocked courts basically stating that U.S. regulators no longer have the authority to do… anything corporate power doesn’t like. Like the 6th Circuit ruling that the FCC can’t protect broadband consumers. Or the 5th Circuit ruling that federal efforts to help poor people afford broadband are now illegal. Like I said: not subtle.

After the AT&T privacy ruling, both Verizon and T-Mobile unsurprisingly sued the FCC (Verizon in the 2nd Circuit and T-Mobile in the DC Circuit) to have their own privacy fines overturned.  Trump FCC pick Nathan Simington has vowed to vote against any fine imposed by the FCC “until its legal powers are clear” (spoiler: Trumplings don’t want regulatory authority to ever be clear, ever again).

But it’s curious: in some of these latest cases Carr is having his FCC lawyers argue that the 5th Circuit’s ruling should be ignored:

“Carr repeatedly opposed Biden-era efforts to regulate telecom providers and is aiming to eliminate many of the FCC’s rules now that he is in charge. But Carr has also been aggressive in regulation of media, and he doesn’t want the FCC’s ability to issue penalties completely wiped out.”

Carr wants his cake and to eat it too. He’s the dog that caught the car. As his “delete, delete, delete” deregulatory bonanza shows, Carr wants to be a loyal footsoldier in the Trump agenda of destroying all federal oversight of corporate power. But he also wants to be able to, you know, harass Comcast for not being racist enough. Or bully CBS for making King Donald sad with facts.

The FCC already has no remaining authority to hold your shitty broadband provider to account. And if this trajectory holds, they’ll no longer have the ability to police things like scams and robocalls, or to protect public cybersecurity safety, throwing our telecom networks into (further) disarray.

Some of these folks are stripping away regulatory authority simply because, like Musk, they don’t want oversight of their often dubious — if not outright illegal — behaviors. Others have drunk decades of right wing and “free market” Libertarian Kool-Aid about how if you dismantle corporate oversight and regulatory autonomy, magic and innovation spills forth from the sidewalk.

Of course here in reality, when you strip away oversight of large, politically-powerful corporations (like say, AT&T or Comcast), most objective folks know those companies just double down on all their worst, anti-competitive, anti-consumer impulses. It’s been a generational effort by companies like AT&T to turn the FCC into a pile of pudding, and it’s not, I regret to inform you, in service of the public interest.

So on one hand, you have corporate power achieving its generational goal of destroying labor rights, consumer protection, and adult oversight. On the other hand, you have Brendan Carr and his legally-dubious efforts to behave like a full-diapered bully in pursuit of bigotry and religious extremism. If I had to bet between the two, I certainly know who I’d pick as the most likely winner (spoiler: it’s the one with more money).

Either way this country loses. I don’t think the fact we’ve lobotomized all our federal regulators has received anywhere close to enough attention from our feckless, corporate press for what should be obvious reasons. We’re ushering in the golden age of corruption, and I’m not sure the impact of what’s coming is truly fathomable to your average American.

Even in a best case scenario where Trump authoritarianism is destroyed, I’m highly doubtful that, in a country this corrupt, the incentive will ever exist to fully restore regulatory autonomy. This die is cast, the deadly impact is going to reverberate for generations, and I hope all the folks responsible — from Trumplings to “free market” think tankers — fully enjoy the brave new world they helped create.

Filed Under: 5th circuit, 6th circuit, brendan carr, consumers, corruption, deregulation, fcc, fines, free market innovation, privacy