If you’ve been around a while, you might remember that Verizon used to be completely obnoxious when it came to forcing you to use their phones and their shitty apps. At one point, Verizon wouldn’t even let you use a competing GPS mapping app, locking you to Verizon’s substandard VCAST apps. The company also adored locking you into long-term contracts and expensive phone payment plans, making it expensive, annoying, or impossible to switch carriers.
Two things changed all that. One, back in 2008 when the company acquired spectrum that came with requirements that users be allowed to use the devices of their choice. And two, as part of merger conditions affixed to its 2021 acquisition of Tracfone. Thanks to those two events Verizon was dragged, kicking and screaming, into a new era of openness that was of huge benefit to the public.
Under current rules, Verizon is supposed to unlock handsets 60 days after they are activated on its network. This includes both Verizon’s main brand, and its sub-brands like Straight Talk. But (correctly) confident the Trump administration won’t hold them accountable, Verizon has been refusing to unlock its phones, as Kansas resident Patrick Roach recently found out.
Roach bought a discounted iPhone 16e from Verizon’s Straight Talk earlier this year as a gift to his wife. He planned to pay a month of service, cancel, and then switch the phone to the US Mobile service they normally use. Under the rules, that was supposed to be possible. But Verizon blocked the attempt. So he sued them in small claims court, and won. From the October ruling:
“Under the KCPA [Kansas Consumer Protection Act], a consumer is not required to prove intent to defraud. The fact that after plaintiff purchased the phone, the defendant changed the requirements for unlocking it so that plaintiff could go to a different network essentially altered the nature of the device purchased.”
Before winning in court, Roach turned down a Verizon settlement offer for $600 because it would have restricted him from talking about his case openly:
“It’s just kind of slimy of them, so I feel like it deserves a spotlight,” he said. “I’m not sure with the current state of the FCC that anything would happen, but the rule of law should be respected.”
Not all heroes wear capes. Again, Verizon is currently lobbying the Trump FCC to eliminate these unlocking guidelines entirely; and, like everything else the telecom industry asks of Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr, they’re very likely to get it, shifting the wireless industry back to the shittier days of old where switching carriers was annoying and expensive. You know, to make America great again.
Hoping to repay corporate America’s feckless support of authoritarianism, the Trump administration is once again attempting to illegally ban all state and federal oversight of corporate power. Both via executive order, and by withholding already awarded grants from states that refuse to play along.
The Trump administration has tried several times this year to push an unsuccessful blanket ban on “regulating AI.” They like keeping the press attention on “regulating AI,” to push the narrative that they’re protecting American innovation from the mean old government. As opposed to trying to impose a corrupt, blanket ban on all state or federal oversight of unchecked corporate power.
Case in point: earlier this year, Senator Ted Cruz came up with the idea of withholding billions in already awarded infrastructure broadband grants from any state that “regulated AI.” But Cruz’s effort also attempted to punish any state that attempted to enforce their own net neutrality laws, or even make sure that taxpayer-subsidized broadband was affordable.
“Trump’s draft order apparently would apply to about half of the funding available from the $42 billion program, which was created to deploy broadband to homes and businesses without modern access.”
By “regulate AI” it’s again important to understand the Trump administration means “do absolutely anything that upsets corporate America.” While the Supreme Court and circuit courts have done an impressive job destroying federal oversight of corporate America, state autonomy still remains a bit of a wild card in the Project 2025 and corporate quest for total immunity from literally all public accountability.
This isn’t about “protecting innovation from burdensome regulation.” It’s about completely destroying the state and federal government’s ability to protect labor, consumers, markets, or the environment from unchecked corporate power. I feel compelled to annoyingly repeat myself on this point because it’s so often buried in press coverage that tries to normalize corrupt anti-democratic extremism.
The poster child for this effort has been the $42.5 billion BEAD (Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment) broadband grant program created by the 2021 infrastructure bill. Republicans repeatedly demonized and voted against this bill, but love taking credit for its improvements.
Republicans also stripped away any and all language requiring that taxpayer-funded broadband is actually affordable to the public. And they redefined core definitions to make the program generally less useful. Hijacking already awarded funds doled out by Congress is not, you may be surprised to learn, legal. But that’s generally not reflected in press coverage of the program’s sabotage.
As Ars Technica notes, Trump’s latest Executive Order also tries to magically imbue FCC boss Brendan Carr with the regulatory authority to punish states that try and regulate AI:
“The draft order would also require the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission to take action against state AI laws. The FCC chairman would be directed to “initiate a proceeding to determine whether to adopt a Federal reporting and disclosure standard for AI models that preempts conflicting State laws.”
Again, that’s… not how any of this works.
With one hand, the Trump administration likes to insist that regulators have zero power to tell corporations what to do. They’ve made very clear progress in defanging all regulatory autonomy when it comes to protecting consumers, labor, or markets.
But with their other hand, the Trump administration likes to pretend they have all manner of vast regulatory authority to tell companies or states what they can or cannot do.
But U.S. courts (so far) have generally found that when the federal government abdicates its authority over federal consumer protection, it can’t then just turn around and tell states what they can or can’t do. This was most notable on the net neutrality front, when the FCC was repeatedly told by courts it couldn’t ignore consumer protection, then ban states from enforcing state net neutrality laws.
The corporate press buries the lede (because most affluent media owners really like this war on the regulatory state), but the goal here is a complete ban of government oversight of billionaires and corporate power.
The nation’s richest certainly don’t want states like Tennessee trying to prevent Elon Musk from engaging in rampant data center pollution of minority neighborhoods, they also don’t want states enforcing labor protections, policing consumer fraud, enforcing “right to repair” laws, punishing predatory telecom monopolies, or anything else.
The Trump election season lie that he’d be a Lina Khan populist antitrust enforcer was pushed by MAGA and assorted useful idiots. Instead we’ve seen a generational assault on state and federal corporate oversight. This has been broadly dressed up as sane policy by the corporate press, “free market” Libertarians and authoritarian zealots, but it’s really just anti-democratic corporatist extremism that’s going to leave a generation of suffering, chaos, and carnage in its wake.
Under Trump 2.0, the company has not only seen the complete lobotomizing of agencies like the FCC thanks to revolving door regulators like Brendan Carr, but a Trump-stocked court that makes it genuinely impossible to hold big companies like AT&T accountable for literally anything (see the 5th Circuit’s recent decision to nullify a fine against AT&T for spying on its customers and selling their location data).
With federal regulatory oversight dead and most states too overwhelmed or feckless to fill the void, AT&T’s now taking aim at the last vestiges of any sort of functional oversight: flimsy “self regulation” groups like the BBB National Programs’ National Advertising Review Board (NARB) and its BBB National Programs’ National Advertising Division (NAD) enforcement arm.
NARB and NAD are supposed to act as a way for companies to resolve disputes about misleading advertisements in house to forestall the complaints migrating over to the FTC and FCC (which again, no longer function under Trump). The organization will often give adorable wrist slaps to telecom companies that engage in things like lying about their competitors or advertising misleading promos.
Some times the actions will result in companies pulling misleading ads, but it’s usually long after the ads have been airing for a while and have had their intended impact.
For example, AT&T was recently criticized by NARB for airing ads that falsely promised everybody a new iPhone, when the actual promotion (more than a year old at this point) had all sorts of limits. You know, the sort of thing that’s super common in a country too corrupt to have functional regulators:
“In reality, the offer was only for AT&T customers on certain plans, excluding customers with low-cost plans. “The panel recommended AT&T modify its advertising to avoid conveying the message that everyone is eligible for AT&T’s free cell phone offer, or to clearly and conspicuously disclose that subscribers to value plans are not eligible or otherwise make clear the extent of plan eligibility,” the NARB announcement said.”
Now to be clear, companies can basically ignore NARB and NAD without any real consequence. Because again, these organizations were was long-ago designed by companies for companies, to create the illusion that companies like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile are capable of regulating themselves without serious federal or state government oversight (spoiler: they can’t).
“AT&T also slammed the NAD for failing to rein in T-Mobile’s deceptive ads. The group’s slow process let T-Mobile air deceptive advertisements without meaningful consequences, and the “NAD has repeatedly failed to refer continued violations to the FTC,” AT&T said.”
Again that’s… ironic, given that companies like AT&T specifically built NAD and NARB to give the illusion that federal oversight isn’t necessary. It’s basically the flimsiest veneer of functional oversight specifically built to pre-empt real government oversight, and even that’s a bridge too far for the fine folks at AT&T.
Trump falsely claims to be funding the ballroom’s $300 million price tag himself with the help of “patriotic donors.” But like any good grift, the price is certain to skyrocket well beyond that by the time the ballroom is completed sometime in the next three years. And he’s certainly not paying for any of it himself, it’s mostly being funded by the feckless shitweasels at Meta, Amazon, HP, Micron, Apple, Comcast, and T-Mobile. As well as fascist ass kissers like the Winklevoss twins.
“The decision by Comcast and other deep-pocketed donors to finance the project underscores the grotesque dynamic between corporate America and the mercurial, transactional president: companies openly buying favor, or at least hoping to stay off Trump’s enemies list. And for Comcast, the decision is deeply personal. Trump has frequently attacked Roberts and his news outlets, publicly calling him a “lowlife” and mocking the corporation as “Concast.” The insults have continued even after the conglomerate spun off its cable networks, including the Trump-loathed MSNBC and business-focused CNBC.”
Comcast’s support for Trump’s ballroom has put the NBC family of journalists (or what is left of them after a recent spin off and mass layoffs) into a tricky predicament as they cover the mess on the air without getting too pointed about Comcast’s pathetic capitulation:
“On NBC News and MSNBC in recent days, anchors have taken pains to note—sometimes with audible discomfort—that their corporate parent, Comcast, is among the donors helping bankroll Trump’s ballroom. The move has left the network’s journalists in the awkward position of covering the story of their own company’s complicity. For Comcast and its chairman and chief executive, Brian Roberts, it marks a moment of corporate humiliation, being publicly shamed on his own air for deference to Trump, the same vengeful president who has repeatedly targeted Roberts by name.”
While Comcast may have suffered through a few barbs and fake FCC investigations, most of the news coverage oddly doesn’t mention the massive benefits from the second Trump administration.
In addition to a surge in taxpayer subsidies and tax breaks, the Trump administration has destroyed the what remained of functional U.S. federal corporate oversight. They’ve demolished not just net neutrality but the entirety of FCC and FTC autonomy. That means little to no competent regulatory oversight of a company with a multi-decade history of extremely dodgy, anti-competitive, anti-consumer behavior.
The Trump assault on the regulatory state and courts has made it effectively impossible to hold corporations like AT&T and Comcast accountable for literally anything (see: AT&T’s spying on wireless subscribers). How much is the complete destruction of the federal regulatory state worth over the next few decades? Probably significantly more than the millions Comcast is throwing at the ballroom.
The question for the pathetic simps at Comcast is: how high will the longer-term costs of capitulating with authoritarians be? These are bizarre, erratic zealots, whose often incoherent demands shift on a dime. And in countries like Russia, where this sort of oligarch autocratic fusion has been allowed to fester, it generally doesn’t end well for industry leaders who wander too close to windows.
We may not be quite there yet, but we’re on the path. The level of corruption and influence peddling we’re seeing now makes the last three decades of U.S. history look positively quaint by comparison. And the speed with which the abject cowards in the U.S. business community have fecklessly capitulated to the idiotic whims of mad tyrants isn’t something anybody’s likely to forget anytime soon.
That said, it’s not exactly a surprise for me (somebody who has covered Comcast professionally for two decades) that when push came to shove, Comcast corporation wound up being a soulless ass kisser.
Just so you know: it’s not normal for your country’s voice communications networks to be completely hijacked by scammers and marketers, rendering it almost unusable. That’s literally not something people in most serious countries have to deal with. Yet we’ve largely normalized the fact that Americans are so inundated with unwanted scams and bullshit that they don’t answer the phone.
Americans have received 4.1 billion robocalls so far this year, or around 135 million each day. A recent survey by Talker Research of 10,500 general population adults indicates that Americans get twice as many scam calls and texts as any other country (and even more than countries that have passed useful consumer protection laws and have functional regulators).
“Cyberattacks and digital scams continue to cause serious harm to American consumers, often with devastating consequences,” says Yael Grauer, program manager at Consumer Reports. “Government and industry must do more to protect consumer privacy and security, but with federal consumer protection agencies facing reduced resources, it is even more critical to empower consumers to adopt strong cybersecurity practices against increasingly sophisticated scams and attacks.”
So however bad you think scam and marketing texts and calls are now, they’re extremely likely to get significantly worse. This is the end result of an unholy alliance of authoritarianism and corporate power. A fake populist movement stocked with corrupt zealots, dead set on dismantling the country’s last vestiges of consumer protection.
Like so many systemic U.S. problems, the robocall and phone scam problem simply isn’t something that gets fixed without first embracing much broader corruption, campaign finance, lobbying, and legal reforms. That is, obviously and indisputably, not something that’s happening under Trump and his sycophantic regulators and telecom industry-coddling courts.
A New York business frozen out of its checking account. A Georgia chemotherapy patient denied a credit card refund after a product dispute. A New Jersey service member defrauded out of their savings.
These consumers — along with hundreds of others — reached out to their congressional representatives for help in the past 12 months.
“I have been unable to pay my rent, utilities, personal bills, student loans, or my credit card. I have been unable to buy groceries or put gas in my car,” wrote the New Yorker, who contacted Rep. Nicole Malliotakis’ office.
Records show their representatives — all Republicans — referred them to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the watchdog agency formed in the wake of the Great Recession to shield Americans from unfair or abusive business practices. All three consumers got relief, according to agency data.
Then the lawmakers — along with nearly every other Republican in Congress — voted to slash the agency’s funding by nearly half as part of President Donald Trump’s signature legislative package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a step toward the administration’s goal of gutting the agency.
Republicans have long been critical of the CFPB, accusing it of imposing unreasonable burdens on businesses. Already, the CFPB under Trump has dropped a number of cases and frozen investigations into dozens of companies.
Yet the agency has historically benefited consumers across the political spectrum, securing around $20 billion in relief through its enforcement actions.
Data obtained by ProPublica through a public records request shows that many of the same Republican members of Congress who have targeted the CFPB for cuts have collectively routed thousands of constituent complaints to the agency.
Rep. Darrell Issa of California and Rep. Rob Wittman of Virginia, for example, voted to reduce the CFPB’s budget. Yet each of their offices has referred more than 100 constituents to the CFPB for help, among the most of any House members. The office of Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who also voted for the CFPB cuts, has routed more than 800 constituent complaints to the agency, the most of any current lawmaker from either party, ProPublica found.
A spokesperson for Issa said in an email that most of his office’s referrals to the agency “occurred several years ago” and reflected “a conventional way” to handle constituents’ consumer issues.
Wittman and Cornyn didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about the disconnect between their offices’ use of the CFPB’s services and their votes to cut it. Neither did New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith, whose office fielded the defrauded service member’s complaint, or Malliotakis, who was approached by the New York business owner, or Rep. Rick Allen, whose office directed the Georgia chemotherapy patient to the agency.
Overall, members of Congress have steered nearly 24,000 complaints to the CFPB since it opened its doors in 2011. Roughly 10,000 of those were referred by the offices of current and former Republican lawmakers, ProPublica found.
“This is how members of Congress from both parties get help for the people who live in their districts,” said Erie Meyer, the CFPB’s former chief technologist, who left the agency in February. The agency has a particular mandate to help service members and seniors, she noted. “This is how, if a service member is getting screwed on an auto loan, this is the only place they can go.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., has referred more than 200 constituents to CFPB since its creation. In a statement to ProPublica, he accused Republicans in Congress of “pursuing senseless cuts that will undermine their own ability to protect their constituents, who will be left in the lurch when they fall victim to scams or deceptive and unfair business practices.”
“Republicans have made clear that they stand on the side of big businesses — not consumers,” he added. “Their irresponsible pursuit of dismantling the CFPB will have far-reaching and long-lasting consequences.”
An Irreplaceable System
In recent years, the CFPB’s public database shows the number of complaints has exploded, from around 280,000 in 2019 to more than 2.7 million last year.
Complaints have grown across many categories, including credit cards and debt collection. Last year, most of the complaints filed, over 2.3 million, were about mistakes or other problems involving credit reporting agencies, and more than half of them resulted in relief, CFPB data shows.
“These credit score formulas govern so many factors of your life. It’s not just your ability to get a loan, it’s your ability to secure housing or qualify for a job,” said Adam Rust, director of financial services at the Consumer Federation of America. “It’s important that you can resolve something, but it’s difficult to do it on your own.”
Once a complaint is submitted, it is routed to the company, which has 15 days to respond. Companies can request an additional 45 days to reach a final resolution.
Many consumers end up getting nonmonetary relief, such as fixes to erroneous credit reports or an end to harassment by debt collectors, but some get financial help as well. More than $300 million has been returned to Americans through the complaint system, including $90 million just last year.
Normally, staff at the CFPB monitor the complaints to identify systemic issues and escalate complaints involving consumers who are at immediate risk of foreclosure, although that didn’t happen for a few weeks this year when the agency’s acting director halted its work.
The CFPB also shares complaint information with other federal agencies, states and localities to help them protect consumers. No other government or private entity has the capacity to effectively handle the volume of complaints that the CFPB does, experts and current and former employees say.
In legal filings opposing the Trump administration’s steps to effectively shut down the CFPB, 23 Democratic attorneys general noted that their states collectively have referred thousands of complaints to the agency and that its services can’t be replaced by state-level operations.
“In the CFPB’s absence, consumers will be left without critical resources,” they wrote.
The complaint system has also lessened the burden on congressional offices, which can route constituent problems to an agency dedicated to, and expert in, addressing consumer issues. Yet that hasn’t stopped Republicans from pursuing dramatic cuts to the agency.
The CFPB receives its funding from the Federal Reserve instead of annual appropriations bills. The structure is meant to safeguard the agency’s independence, though critics say this makes the agency less accountable, giving elected officials less power over its operations.
Initially, Republicans pressed for extreme cuts to the CFPB as part of Trump’s legislative package. House members approved a 70% cut. The Senate Banking Committee attempted to go even further, zeroing out the agency’s funding entirely.
Ultimately, the final version of the bill signed into law by Trump on July 4 cut the CFPB’s budget by around 46%, reducing the agency’s funding cap — the maximum amount it can request from the Federal Reserve — from $823 million to $446 million for this fiscal year. The agency requested $729 million last fiscal year.
The offices of lawmakers who voted for the bill have referred about 3,400 complaints to the agency, running the gamut of consumer problems — from crushing debt to mortgage issues to financial scams, ProPublica’s data analysis shows. (In some of these cases, consumers also took complaints to the CFPB themselves in addition to reaching out to their representatives. Consumers’ names aren’t disclosed in the data.)
Their constituents are sometimes desperate: “I’m about to be homeless because of this,” wrote a Florida resident whose bank account was frozen.
Others have expressed frustration at getting the runaround from a company. “I’ve spent countless hours on hold trying to speak with a representative, only to be met with silence or outdated instructions to send letters,” wrote one Virginian in a complaint about their bank.
In a statement after the CFPB funding cut passed, the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Tim Scott, R-S.C., applauded the measure for saving taxpayer money but insisted it would not affect the agency’s mandatory functions, which include handling complaints.
Consumer experts as well as current and former CFPB employees, however, said the cuts will likely hinder the agency’s effectiveness.
“I think the whole process is at risk,” said Ruth Susswein, director of consumer protection at the nonprofit advocacy group Consumer Action. “If you starve the system, it cannot provide the benefits that it now offers.”
Signs of Strain
The Trump administration’s initial efforts to unilaterally hobble the CFPB give a hint of what may lie ahead for the complaint system.
In February, acting Director Russell Vought issued a stop-work order to all CFPB employees and canceled a slew of contracts, including for antivirus software that scanned files attached to consumer complaints.
The actions largely froze the complaint system for about a week. More than 70,000 complaints were submitted, but most were not sent to companies for their response during that period, data shows.
Although some issues were later fixed, the work stoppage spawned a backlog of more than 16,000 complaints that required manual review, according to court records from a lawsuit filed by the union that represents CFPB employees. About 75 complaints from consumers at risk of imminent foreclosure, which would normally be escalated to CFPB staff, weren’t acted upon.
In late March, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ordered the CFPB to end the work stoppage, reverse contract terminations and reinstate probationary employees who were fired. However, an appeals court allowed layoffs to proceed, triggering a frenzied effort by the administration to cut about 90% of the CFPB’s staff.
The layoffs included the vast majority of the roughly 130-member team that manages the complaint system as well as nearly every staffer in legally mandated offices focused on service members and seniors.
The CFPB has fielded over 440,000 complaints from current and former service members and their families since 2011, according to CFPB data, more than 100,000 of which have resulted in relief.
The CFPB did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In a court declaration, Mark Paoletta, the CFPB’s chief legal officer, said that the agency’s leadership had “been assessing how the agency can fulfill its statutory duties as a smaller, more efficient operation. In making this assessment, leadership discovered vast waste in the agency’s size.”
Paoletta also said the agency would have a “much more limited vision for enforcement and supervision activities, focused on protecting service members and veterans, and addressing actual tangible consumer harm and intentional discrimination.”
In April, Jackson issued an order blocking the firings made at the CFPB after the appeals court decision. The administration has appealed Jackson’s ruling.
Lawsuits won’t protect the CFPB or its complaint apparatus from the cuts included in the recently passed spending bill, current and former agency employees pointed out.
These changes are likely to hit home with consumers no matter which party they favor, said Lauren Saunders, associate director of the National Consumer Law Center, which is a plaintiff in the union’s lawsuit.
“Republicans don’t want to be abused by big corporations that ignore them any more than Democrats do,” she said.
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.
“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.
So you may have seen that Elon Musk’s long-hyped Robotaxis have finally “launched” in Austin. And it’s going just about how you’d expect if you’re familiar with the fit and finish of Elon Musk promises.
There are about a dozen Robotaxis now operating; Model Ys with a human observer in the front seat to try and avoid calamity. And despite years of hype about this product, social media is filled with videos of Robotaxis engaging in all sorts of problematic and dangerous behavior, including routinely veering into the wrong lane, failing to accomplish basic turns, or responding poorly to unique situations.
good morning, here's a gnarly mistake from yesterday's Tesla "robotaxi" launch day: the vehicle is in a turn lane, signaling for the left, and about halfway through it bails out and decides to drive directly into an oncoming laneseems extremely chill!youtu.be/_s-h0YXtF0c?…
Elon thinks you're a crash test dummy. Watch this "robotaxi" make an absolutely bonkers mistake (and a second smaller one) as a Tesla super fan gets his first ride. Crazy. #teslatakedown #MuskMustFall
The videos have apparently gotten the attention of U.S. auto safety regulators (or what’s left of them after Trump and his courts basically lobotomized all regulatory independence). In a statement to the press, the NHTSA said they’re monitoring the situation and have asked Tesla for more information:
“NHTSA is aware of the referenced incidents and is in contact with the manufacturer to gather additional information. NHTSA will continue to enforce the law on all manufacturers of motor vehicles and equipment, in accordance with the Vehicle Safety Act and our data-driven, risk-based investigative process. Under U.S. law, NHTSA does not pre-approve new technologies or vehicle systems — rather, manufacturers certify that each vehicle meets NHTSA’s rigorous safety standards, and the agency investigates incidents involving potential safety defects. Following an assessment of those reports and other relevant information, NHTSA will take any necessary actions to protect road safety.”
But under the Trump administration, it’s all so much worse. Federal corporate oversight genuinely no longer exists. Several Supreme Court rulings have declared that U.S. regulators can no longer do basic tasks without the explicit direction of a Congress that corporations know is too corrupt to function. The rulings were the culmination of a multi-generational quest by corporate power to lobotomize corporate oversight (under the pretense they were “reining in regulators run amok” for the greater good).
Now, even if U.S. regulators do try to do their jobs, they have a very good chance of having enforcement efforts crushed by the Trump-heavy 5th or 6th circuits (see the 6th Circuit’s recent decision to vacate a long-percolating FCC effort to fine AT&T for spying on customer location data without consent). Any attempt to do anything to protect consumers, markets, or public safety will be bogged down in legal fighting for years, quite by design.
Cumulatively, it’s not hyperbole to state that federal consumer, labor, environment, and public safety protection no longer functions in this new golden age of corruption. That’s fucking dire and deadly. You simply won’t see this reality made apparent by most U.S. journalists.
If you read press coverage of the Tesla Robotaxi problems (TechCrunch, CNBC, Reuters) — or any story where regulators are involved — they all kind of act as if it’s business as usual. A reader walks away from all of those stories believing the NHTSA is truly “investigating” things, might do something about it, and there’s somebody competent managing the store. That there’s really nothing new under the sun.
Corporate media is conditioned to downplay the way that corruption has hollowed out our federal regulators because it’s a policy affluent media ownership supports. But it also feels like a lot of consumer and business journalism suffers from a sort of normalization bias. This all results in long stories about business and consumer policy that don’t mention the train has gone completely off the rails.
The Robotaxi stuff aside, that’s resulted in a lot of oblivious Americans who have no real understanding that we’re going to see widespread concussive failure of a lot of stuff they take for granted. Much of it fatal.
In Austin that means little real oversight while Tesla conducts a dangerous public beta (without Austin public input or approval) using obviously half-cooked automation. We’ll be lucky if this doesn’t ultimately end in fatalities, which, if history is any indication, once again won’t result in anything even vaguely resembling accountability for the executives or companies involved.
Tesla memestock was up ten percent the day reports emerged that the Robotaxis are dangerously undercooked. As per tradition.
We’ve noted how Republicans are busy screwing up the infrastructure bill’s $42.5 billion BEAD broadband grant program. After performatively whining that the program wasn’t moving quickly enough for their liking during the election season, the GOP announced it would be significantly slowing fund dispersal just to make life harder on poor people and to throw billions in new subsidies at Elon Musk.
To be very clear: this taxpayer funding had already been awarded to states years ago. Several states were just on the cusp of deploying next-generation, affordable fiber when Republicans decided to “fix” the program to the benefit of their billionaire benefactor.
Now Republicans are looking to cause even greater delays and legal battles by threatening to withhold billions in broadband grants from any states that try to engage in oversight of the “AI” industry.
The House had already approved a budget bill that attempted to ban state AI regulation for 10 years. Now Texas Senator Ted Cruz has introduced budget reconciliation text in the Senate that would prevent states from getting their already-allotted broadband grant funds if they attempt to impose any oversight or regulation of automation.
Despite a lot of whining, the federal U.S. approach to “regulating AI” so far has effectively consisted of zero oversight whatsoever. You’ll notice this still somehow isn’t enough for many tech giants or Marc Andreessen types; they want a blanket ban that effectively pre-empts the possibility of any sort of oversight, privacy, or consumer safety provisions that might protect the public from the whims of gentlemen like himself who have proven to have abysmal judgement and little to no functional ethics.
Between awful Supreme Court rulings, problematic executive orders, and regulatory capture, the Trump administration has effectively destroyed federal corporate oversight and consumer protection (something that still oddly isn’t getting enough attention in press or policy circles). That leaves states as the last refuge of any sort of compensatory oversight, which is why corporations — via the GOP — are now taking aim at state power.
Meanwhile this BEAD program was already facing up to two years of additional, unnecessary delays due to the GOP’s Elon Musk cronyism. Trying to bully and extort states into going easy on tech companies by stealing already allotted BEAD funding is inevitably going to cause endless new legal fights and even greater delay. It’s ignorant corruption dressed up as adult policy making.
The choice also exposes the ideological hollowness of a party that claimed to be looking to “rein in big tech” (read: bully them away from content moderating racist, right wing propaganda on the internet), and is now handing them a gift ensuring these companies are more unaccountable than ever.
Last week, Republican FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington abruptly announced that he would be stepping down from the FCC. Simington gave all of two-days notice of his departure, which was odd not only because of the short notice, but because it delays Trump Republicans from getting a voting majority allowing them to actually do anything real.
In his wake, right wing media outlets like Fox News are suggesting that Simington may be replaced by Gavin Wax, a far right wing MAGA cheerleader. Wax has absolutely no serious qualifications for the role, but right wing outlets like Fox News are already busy pretending otherwise:
“Gavin Wax is being seriously considered by the White House to fill the vacancy that will be left by Commissioner Simington’s departure,” a source close to the FCC told Fox News Digital. “He’s seen as a strong conservative voice on tech and media policy, with close ties to key figures in both the policy and political arenas.”
“Once President Trump is back in office,” Wax said at the 2023 NYYRC annual dinner, according to Politico, “we won’t be playing nice anymore. It will be a time for retribution. All those responsible for destroying our once-great country will be held to account after baseless years of investigations and government lies and media lies against this man.”
Wax has been criticized by the Southern Poverty Law Center for, among other things, overseeing a private right wing Facebook chat from 2014-2017 where members “frequently used racial slurs, made jokes about the Holocaust and discussed topics like ‘race realism.'”
Wax is clearly being considered to help FCC boss Brendan Carr’s campaign to launch bogus investigations into media and telecom companies the administration either deems not suitably racist enough, or for the cardinal sin of occasionally doing journalism loosely critical of Trump.
We’ve noted how the Trump administration’s effort to lobotomize regulatory independence will ultimately leave the FCC without any authority to do much of anything real, outside of grievance-fueled tirades and fake investigations by the kind of people who get angry that Star Wars now has more black people.
Simington himself was never qualified for his role. Wax is somehow worse; a radical MAGA zealot with a long history of dodgy bedfellows (including white supremacists), who has less-than-zero qualifications to be making important choices about absolutely any of this. In other words: perfect for the Trump administration and it’s bizarre (and often illegal) war on equity and corporate oversight.
That attack, if you recall, was aided by key Democrats like Joe Manchin and Mark Kelly, and successfully left the Biden FCC without a voting majority for the better part of two years. It’s worth highlighting the speed at which unqualified zealots and rank corporatists get confirmed to the agency, compared to the blockades and slowdowns seen for those, like Sohn, who actually represent the public interest.
Whether Wax can survive the Senate nomination process and get the needed 51 one vote majority remains an open question, but the very fact he has a very good chance is an embarrassing joke.
