Net Neutrality Advocates Won’t Appeal Trump Destruction, Say U.S. Courts Are Broken

Broadband

from the nothing-functions dept

A fusion of authoritarianism and corporatism is destroying what’s left of already soggy U.S. federal consumer protection and corporate oversight. You might not know this because the U.S. press and many policymakers genuinely don’t appear to care, but it’s happening all the same.

Whether by dodgy Supreme Court ruling, executive order, or captured regulators, the U.S. authoritarians, often in lockstep with consolidated corporate power, are making massive, historic, and likely irreversible inroads in destroying federal corporate oversight, labor protections, public safety provisions, environmental standards, and regulatory autonomy.

And generally the corporate press doesn’t seem to care because most corporate media ownership likes the tax cuts, mindless deregulation, and rubber stamped mergers and consolidation.

While dismissed as a niche issue, the right wing’s decade-long attack on net neutrality rules clearly predicted this was all coming. This extremely popular effort by our communications regulators to hold shitty regional telecom monopolies accountable was summarily executed: first by a Trump-loaded 6th Circuit, then inevitably by Trump’s hand-picked earlobe nibbler at the FCC, Brendan Carr.

Recently, consumer groups announced they weren’t going to appeal the 6th Circuit’s ruling because they know the Supreme Court will never let the rules live. And even if by some chance they did, the broken, captured Trump FCC would simply disintegrate the rules again:

“Federal rules safeguarding internet openness, reliability and affordability are just as vital today as always, despite what cable lobbyists and their paid pundits claim. Yet Trump’s election flipped the FCC majority back to ideologues who’ve always taken the broadband industry’s side on this crucial issue. And the justices making up the current Supreme Court majority have shown hostility toward sound legal reasoning on this precise question and a host of other topics too.”

This is, in case you’re new to this sort of thing, the opposite of democracy and a functional court system. Corporate power and authoritarians have taken control of the courts and ensured that it’s technically impossible to protect U.S. consumers. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about net neutrality, environmental protections, consumer privacy, or public safety rules.

Legal precedent means nothing. Authoritarian and corporate power desires now predict most legal outcomes. It’s still dressed up as competent law in polite conversation, but it’s the legal policy equivalent of a dilapidated Hollywood wild west set lousy with termites.

After the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright ruling, it’s effectively impossible to get any reforms — no matter how democratically supported — past our corrupt court system. Regulators are now effectively forbidden from crafting new rules or enforcing most existing ones. Case after case, you’re going to see the Trump courts cripple regulatory autonomy on every issue that impacts your family’s lives, declaring, over and over again, that regulators have “exceeded their regulatory authority,” no matter how modest — or popular — or essential — the effort.

This is going to cause mass death and disability at scale, but, again, the press (and even a lot of policy people) don’t appear to have figured this out yet, or don’t care because they like tax cuts and “deregulation.” For some, normalization bias has blinded them to what’s coming.

The attack on net neutrality didn’t just kill “net neutrality.” It eviscerated the FCC’s authority to protect broadband consumers from giant, shitty telecom monopolies. A smattering of states tried to fill the void with their own state net neutrality laws, but generally haven’t bothered to enforce them. Terrible, shitty corporate giants like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon increasingly see zero accountability… for anything.

This is the future of consumer protection across industries. Feds abdicate their responsibility to protect workers and consumers, regulatory agencies are steadily hollowed out like pumpkins, and a rotating suite of states (with varying degrees of competence) try to fill the void. The companies that lobbied to dismantle stable federal oversight then complain about the “discordant nature of fractured state law.”

With authoritarians taking the dismantling of federal consumer protection to an entirely new level, you’re going to see more and more states trying to fill the void with their own consumer protection laws. But as the fusion of corporatism and authoritarianism finishes irreversibly defanging federal governance, it’s going to increasingly set its sights on state autotomy.

States, facing unprecedented legal assault on everything from immigration law to healthcare, aren’t going to have the time, resources, or staff to meaningfully pick up the feds’ dropped ball on consumer protection and corporate accountability (see: popular right to repair reforms). That’s going to result in untold millions of Americans getting ripped off, neglected, or, in many instances, killed.

When these deadly real world impacts come, the right wingers, “free market Libertarians,” and corporate lobbyists who spent decades paving this path will either mysteriously be silent or busy pointing the finger elsewhere. And our consolidated corporate press will, as has been tradition, have its head so squarely lodged up its own ass they’ll never connect the dots for a befuddled, brutalized, and broadly propagandized electorate.

Filed Under: appeals courts, broadband, consumer protection, corruption, net neutrality, regulators, supreme court, telecom