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I’ve noted repeatedly how the Trump administration is going out of its way to not only destroy all oversight of the country’s shitty and predatory telecom monopolies, but to eliminate any and all systems that try to ensure that U.S. broadband access is actually affordable. This stuff often runs in parallel to the administration’s brutal attacks on free speech.
For example, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr and Texas Senator Ted Cruz recently joined forces to destroy a bipartisan, popular FCC program that made sure rural school kids could get access to free Wi-Fi. They made up a bunch of bullshit reasons for the attack (falsely claiming these programs were “censoring Conservative viewpoints and content”), but the real reason is big telecoms like AT&T don’t like the government giving people free broadband they might otherwise have to pay for.
Trump cronyism, corruption, censorship, and ideological extremism just keep intermingling in new and creative ways.
Last week Carr announced he’s now taking aim at the broader FCC E-Rate program with an eye on “reforms.” E-Rate is another historically bipartisan and uncontroversial program that helps bring affordable broadband to rural libraries, schools, and communities. Carr’s announcement proclaims he’s “taking a look” at the program because he’s worried about kids having too much “screen time”:
“Over the last several years—and especially during COVID—many schools dramatically increased screen time for kids, with many students now swiping for hours every day. Research has now been pouring in that America’s experiment with heightened screen time in schools may be related to the negative educational outcomes we are now seeing in classrooms across the country—from declining academic performance to diminished reading comprehension skills.”
Obviously, having the guy who illegally censors comedians and journalists at the behest of Donald Trump determining what kids should or shouldn’t be seeing is problematic, though it probably won’t get as much press attention as it should. It’s worth noting that lot of the “harm” science Carr is referencing — and even the term “screen time” — is based on a lot of misleading bullshit.
Other Republicans, like Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn, have also been focusing a lot on sudden concerns about “screen time,” but they’re using the term as a trojan horse to mask other goals — like forcing tech companies or schools to coddle far right wing ideologies. Unfortunately, the corporate U.S. press is too broken to inform people that nothing these folks do is in good faith.
They’re all so pickled in their own propaganda, most Trumpies genuinely believe that existing systems are currently filling kids’ heads with trans rights activism and “wokeness.” But they’re not interested in educational programming or internet access filters that necessarily work and are broadly fair, they’re interested in systems that give right wing ideology an advantage.
The E-Rate program spends about $3 billion a year driving affordable broadband into parts of the country left high-and-dry by the regional telecom monopolies Carr refuses to regulate. While there is sometimes fraud in programs like this, the vast majority of the time it’s caused by private companies Carr, again, refuses to competently regulate and is afraid to stand up to.
So if you were to seriously reform these programs, you’d start doing audits of major companies like AT&T, who have a long history of defrauding these and other initiatives. Instead, Carr’s trying to shift the focus to the idea that taxpayers are funding internet access that’s delivering “harmful content” to kids, which, if you’ve tracked Brendan Carr’s censorial extremism, should be a huge red flag for anybody:
I suspect there’s several motivations here. One being big telecoms like AT&T that want E-rate revamped in a way that financially benefits them. The other being Carr and the right wing extremist mission to extend their censorship and ideological dominance into every aspect of American life, starting with the classroom, where they’re compelled to root out any and all criticism of right wing ideology.
This is how he framed his new plan for E-Rate reforms on a recent appearance on Fox News:
“There are school districts that have read our law as only requiring them to put Internet safety procedures in place on the devices that the school owns. If you bring your own device to a network supported by this program, you don’t necessarily have any filters on where you can go. Kids are ultimately finding pornography, and that’s a problem.”
To be clear schools already employ filtering systems. Some work, some don’t. The nature of these systems is such that they not only tend to over-filter content, but they’re generally easy to bypass.
Still, it’s not the FCC’s job to determine what content is acceptable, or even to manage kid “screen time” on personally-owned devices. That’s not only an unworkable game of whack-a-mole that would waste a lot of taxpayer money, that’s the precise sort of weird overreach Carr (and Republicans, and “free market” Libertarians) have whined about for as long as I’ve been alive.
When Carr demolished the program that brought free Wi-Fi to school kids, he and Cruz simply made up a whole bunch of bullshit about how the free Wi-Fi systems (and firewall systems) being implemented were “censoring Conservative viewpoints.” Feeling emboldened from that weird performance, it’s clear he’s looking to expand his “reform” more broadly to other FCC programs.
If it’s not clear yet, nothing Carr does is in good faith, his government “efficiency reforms” always mask harmful, unpopular ideological extremism or cronyism (sometimes both), and like Trump often does, he’ll exploit our shitty press to drive a news cycle about “screen time” that will downplay or ignore all of Carr’s actual goals.
Filed Under: brendan carr, broadband, censorship, education, erate, fcc, schools, subsidies, taxpayers, telecom
A quick refresher: There was originally $42.5 billion in taxpayer-funded broadband grants headed to the states thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill most Republicans voted against (yet routinely try to take credit for among their constituents).
Last election season, Republicans (with Ezra Klein’s help) made a giant stink about how this program, the Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, was taking way too long to connect anybody. So for the whole 2024 election season, Republicans blasted the program’s bureaucracy and promised how once they were in power, they’d completely revamp it and save taxpayer billions.
Yeah, well, about that.
After taking office this second time, the Trump administration rewrote the grant program’s guidance to eliminate provisions ensuring the resulting broadband is affordable, and to ensure that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos got billions in new broadband subsidies for fledgling, costly, and congested satellite broadband networks. Note: they’re potentially getting these billions for service they already planned to deploy (while both routinely going on TV to pretend they hate subsidies).
Years later and most people are still waiting for broadband. Only one ISP in the whole country is currently serving a handful of subscribers with BEAD money. And in the states where we are starting to see connections, like Nebraska, many people are getting slower satellite service instead of fiber.
This is being celebrated by state Republicans as some sort of major victory for the public:
“At an event earlier this month in Ogallala, Gov. Jim Pillen, alongside U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Communications and Information Arielle Roth, celebrated the state’s first household internet connection facilitated through the BEAD program.”
But if you look closer, things are extremely fucked up. After Trump completely revamped the program to prioritize shittier satellite broadband service and strip affordability requirements, states had to completely revamp their proposed broadband plans. That created a bunch of new delays and even higher costs for states to absorb. So while a few people in Nebraska have gotten substandard access, that’s it.
Of the $405 million Nebraska was initially awarded through BEAD to connect unserved Nebraska locations to broadband, just $44.5 million is now earmarked for use. Nebraska now ranks dead last in granting BEAD funds for fiber internet, at about 9%, compared to a national average of 62%.
In short, the Trump administration “fixed” the program by lowering our standards, creating all sorts of new delays, and redirecting a bunch of money to billionaires for inferior satellite service they already planned to deploy. In traditional autocratic fashion, this is being sold to locals as some sort of massive victory.
Former Ted Cruz staffer Arielle Roth, now head of the NTIA for some inexplicable reason, has been going around falsely claiming that the original plan to use taxpayer money to provide faster, better fiber service is why the program took so long. Others, like Republican Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen, are trying to pretend that lowering program standards are actually improving program standards:
“Roth argued that Biden had a “thumb on the scale” for one method — fiber — which was a cause for the slower progress. Pillen called the perception that fiber internet is the gold standard of internet connections outdated. He said it ignores rapid advancements in other technologies like satellite and cable. He said the internet speeds established in Nebraska’s first connection were “off the charts.”
“What makes Nebraskans great is we don’t settle for mediocre,” [Governor Jim] Pillen said in a press release from the Nebraska Broadband Office (NBO). “And through this process we found a group of providers that will meet the high standards we have for connectivity.”
However, not all broadband advocates buy the governor’s story. Gage County farmer Emily Haxby, said it feels like Pillen is trying to justify the major changes his team implemented — changes that she’s uncertain will work out for Nebraskans in the long run.”
As I tried to explain to Ezra Klein, there were some very good reasons why BEAD was taking so long (as opposed to ARPA, legislation crafted that same year, that deployed a lot of fiber to a lot of places).
For one, the infrastructure law mandated that states work with the federal government to completely remap U.S. broadband access, something that had been opposed by Republicans and monopoly providers for years for fear it would showcase broad competitive market failure.
For another, the infrastructure bill Congress also mandated the creation of the Digital Equity Act, requiring that this taxpayer fiber be deployed equitably to everybody (instead of just cherry picking the country’s whitest, wealthiest neighborhoods, which caused much of our digital divide in the first place).
While BEAD would never be confused as any sort of poster child for government efficiency, this sort of massive coordination between states and the federal government takes time. Part of the reason there were more rules on BEAD is because a different program overseen during the Trump administration (the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund), wound up with oodles of failed bidding and fraud.
But again, when Trump came in he “fixed” BEAD by killing off (in some cases illegally) all of these congressional mandates and redirecting a bunch of taxpayer money to Musk and Bezos for inferior access. They then patted themselves on the back for money saved, but the end result, as communities will come to discover for themselves over the next few years, is going to be an epic boondoggle. Much worse than anything the Trump administration claimed to be fixing.
But wait, there’s more! For one thing, many of the original grant bids have become less feasible because Trump tariffs and wars have driven up the cost of deployment significantly. So I suspect you’ll see a lot of defaults on bids as companies give up on participating at all. That’s going to create all manner of additional costly delays and lawsuits and fighting (much as we saw with broadband programs during Trump’s first term).
At the same time, the “savings” the Trump administration created by fucking the BEAD program up (and redirecting billions to lower-quality fiber alternatives) is creating a giant pool of money Republicans and states are now fighting over. Despite the fact Congress demanded that this money be specifically used for broadband access.
The Trump NTIA is supposed to be giving guidance to states on how this money can be spent, but they keep failing to provide clarity. I suspect because the administration and Republicans are pondering how they can legally hijack the money as part of a new slush fund. For example, here’s Nebraska:
“Subtracting the $44.5 million Nebraska received for BEAD broadband expansion, that leaves about $360 million in federal funds not yet steered. State officials have given varying estimates of how much of that amount the state could receive.
[Governor Jim] Pillen said he was looking for ways to invest $350 million in leftover funds, noting technological support for precision agriculture as a top preference for him. The NBO statement said the NTIA is evaluating uses of non-deployment funds that could bring $317 million of the funds into Nebraska.
These funds could be used for “any use determined necessary by the assistant secretary to facilitate the goals of (BEAD),” according to the statement. Borchers-Williams said NTIA officials had said they would issue this guidance by March 11 — two months ago — but he has yet to receive word.”
I suspect a lot of this funding will be redirected to tech companies and AI data center construction (tangentially deemed broadband related). Some might even be actually directed to broadband, as promised. But this being Trumpism, I suspect there’s a very real chance that a lot of the money gets pocketed by Trump Incorporated and its allies.
And five years from now, when states and municipalities realize the full scale of the con being perpetrated here on taxpayers, architects like NTIA boss Arielle Roth and U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick will, as per tradition in Republican policy, be nowhere to be found. Smart opposition party strategists, were there any, would be currently formulating their oversight hearing questions.
Filed Under: bead, boondoggle, broadband, broadband equity access and deployment, fiber, infrastructure bill, jeff bezos, jim pillen, nebraska, ntia, satellite, subsidies, telecom
Five years years ago AT&T effectively stopped selling DSL and started hanging up on DSL and copper phone line customers. While killing landlines and DSL is understandable given the limitations of the dated copper-based tech, the problem is that thanks to concentrated telecom monopolization, many of these customers were left without any replacement options due to a lack of competition.
There are other issues at play too. AT&T has, for decades, received countless billions in tax cuts, subsidies, merger approvals, and regulatory favors in exchange for building infrastructure it either didn’t complete, didn’t maintain, or didn’t upgrade. There’s a rich back history of AT&T taking taxpayer money and then failing to deliver upgrades that were promised local municipalities.
Many of folks impacted by AT&T’s decision to hang up on copper are rural or elderly folks who relied on traditional landlines for reliable 911 access but are either outside the range of cellular, or find cellular to be less reliable and significantly more expensive on fixed budgets. The system has a tendency to downplay or ignore these folks.
So you can see how there’s a tension between private telecom monopolies and public interest regulators (the few we still have) tasked with protecting taxpayers and the public interest.
In 20 of the 21 states AT&T operates in, its lobbyists have managed to sell lawmakers on eliminating Carrier of Last Resort (COLR) obligations requiring it provide landline telephone service to any potential customer in its service territory. It’s easy to lobby lawmakers on the idea that the company needs to “move forward past outdated regulations,” and ignore the actual real-world impact or AT&T’s rich history of subsidy fraud or limitations of wireless as a fixed-line alternative.
But they’ve run into trouble in California, after the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) told AT&T in 2024 it can’t just hang up on these unwanted (taxpayer subsidized) connections. The CPUC said it’s not blocking AT&T from retiring its aging copper networks, but it wants some AT&T dedication to upgrading failing infrastructure to more modern fiber, not just throw “good enough” wireless at the problem.
Last week AT&T sued California and CPUC (full lawsuit here). AT&T is also asking the Trump FCC to intervene and prevent the CPUC from doing its job. AT&T, for its part, sells this as a story of California leveraging outdated regulations to block AT&T from embracing modernization:
“The federal government and virtually all States where AT&T historically offered POTS [Plain Old Telephone Service] have now eliminated outdated regulatory obstacles, allowing AT&T to begin powering down its POTS network and increasing its investments in modern communication technologies. California stands alone in resisting this progress.”
CPUC counters by saying they don’t want customers who used to have reliable landline service shoveled off to costly and less reliable wireless services instead of fiber. Or left without any connection whatsoever after spending the last four decades slathering AT&T with subsidies.
But it’s worth noting that AT&T’s legal assault is about more than just the fate of dying copper landlines.
California’s CPUC has been filling the void left by Trump regulators and attempting to ensure U.S. broadband is somewhat affordable. That’s involved conditions affixed to grants, affordability conditions applied to recent telecom mergers, and public safety requirements in response to climate-related risks. AT&T, as you might expect, doesn’t like that. Their goal is, with no hyperbole, no oversight at all.
So in addition to this lawsuit, they appear to be leveraging Dem politicians (like Assemblymember Tasha Boerner) in the state to push amendments to the state constitution that would strip the CPUC of its independence, ensuring that AT&T would have more direct lobbying control over the CPUC’s makeup through its robust lobbying control of state legislators.
The changes, which were approved by a California State Assembly vote (67-1), would need to be voted on by California residents later this year. As such, they are being sold to local state folks as a way to keep CPUC focused on soaring electrical utility rates. But the timing of the effort to limit CPUC’s oversight of broadband, just as AT&T tries to deliver the killing blow to the agency, is hard to miss.
Ultimately the broader narrative in the press sold to voters will be that California regulators are engaged in broad over-reach and hampering AT&T’s potential innovation. Downplayed or ignored will be the fact that federal consumer protection has largely been destroyed, and semi-independent regulators like the CPUC in a handful of states are the last line of defense in a country being devoured by corruption.
It’s a lopsided fight that historically telecom monopolies tend to win, which is why, as you can see with your own eyes, most U.S. broadband is patchy, expensive, sluggish, with abysmal customer service. Instead of empowering regulators that protect affordability and competition, we have a nasty tendency to lobotomize them on behalf of “free market competition” that isn’t real, and that monopolies don’t want.
Filed Under: affordability, california, california public utilities commission, cpuc, dsl, fiber, telecom, upgrades
Companies: at&t
Like most of the U.S., Western Massachusetts towns and cities have spent decades dealing with expensive, spotty, and slow broadband from private telecom monopolies like Comcast and Verizon. As a result, a lot of these towns and cities have explored building their own community owned fiber networks.
Community broadband has been increasingly popular since COVID, with many networks offering locals symmetrical gigabit for as low as $60 a month. Data shows these networks offer faster, cheaper, better service overall. These efforts can take many forms, from public/private partnerships, to city-owned utilities, to joint municipal collaborations like Communications Union Districts (CUDs).
Community broadband isn’t some magic panacea. The quality of a city’s plan and local leaders matters. Being able to financially handle the project is important. But equally important is it’s an organic, popular, grass roots response to decades of telecom market failure. Created by regulatory capture, corruption, unchecked consolidation, and monopoly power.
Recently, Longmeadow, Massachusetts residents voted down an effort by city leaders to build a community-owned broadband fiber network providing affordable fiber access to every last city resident. More specifically, the city was exploring whether to take out an $8.6 million loan for the initial phase of the $27 million fiber project, paid for by a property tax increase of $97 per year, and run by a city utility.
While Longmeadow locals clearly didn’t like idea of higher taxes, it was revealed that local telecoms (most likely Comcast) had also been covertly funding a dark money group named “Mass Priorities” that had been misleading locals about the proposed project via texts, calls, mailers, and door to door visits:
“But while building a municipal fiber network in the region’s more rural towns has faced little opposition, as private internet service providers have little intention of building infrastructure for small customer bases, a shadowy, difficult-to-trace group calling itself Mass Priorities has run apparently well-funded campaigns against municipal broadband in communities like West Springfield and Southwick.”
Such groups generally like to lie and insist that all community broadband networks are always doomed to failure. Or that there’s no real problem that needs fixing. Often they’ll take on the guise of local citizen activists, simply concerned about the taxpayer (but only when applicable to community broadband; monopolies getting slathered with subsidies for half completed networks is never criticized).
Mass Priorities is actually part of the Domestic Policy Caucus, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that refuses to disclose its funding sources. Something Gigi Sohn (who you’ll recall had her FCC nomination scuttled by a sleazy telecom industry backed smear campaign before moving on to advocate for community broadband) didn’t mince words about:
“In a feeble attempt to appear Massachusetts-based, the Domestic Policy Caucus calls itself ‘Mass Priorities,’ but the Caucus is based in Minnesota. The organization, which for years has targeted multiple communities across the country that have built, or have considered building, their own broadband networks, has consistently refused to disclose its donors. That lack of transparency matters.”
It’s impossible to state clearly that Mass Priorities swung the vote. Getting a two-thirds majority vote for a project like this is tough to accomplish. And again, many simply have a violent allergy to higher taxes.
But it matters that the group refuses to clearly disclose who is funding its operations. Such groups have no limitations on how much they can spend to influence voters, whereas the Longmeadow, Massachusetts utility can’t legally lobby the public with its own messaging. That puts these dodgy groups, which the telecom lobby has a long history of funding, on superior footing.
Charter, for example, was caught using a fake consumer group to spread distrust about community broadband in Maine. AT&T has, for years, either funded fake consumer groups or “co-opted” existing groups with malleable ethics to do the same thing. Both companies also broadly fund “free market think tanks” that will attack community broadband, but completely ignore private sector dysfunction and fraud.
If the U.S. telecom market was functioning properly, you wouldn’t see countless towns and cities pursuing the option. It’s generally far cheaper for a monopoly to throw a $10-20k at one of these “astroturfing” groups than it is for them to lower prices or improve availability. So, as is often the case in America, we get market failure, captured regulators, and expensive second-tier service instead.
All propped up by a bunch of proxy organizations that refuse to disclose their funding. Speaking on behalf of broadly disliked companies like Comcast and Verizon, that know they can’t honestly engage on this (or any other) subject in public settings without being laughed out of the room.
Filed Under: broadband, community broadband, competition, fiber, longmeadow, massachusetts, municipal, subsidies, telecom
Back in February the Trump FCC announced it was launching new “reforms” of a major bipartisan FCC program that helps poor people afford broadband. Dubbed Lifeline, the program provides a modest $9.25 stipend to help low-income Americans afford either broadband or phone service.
Lifeline, developed and supported as a popular bipartisan initiative, is one of countless government programs being gutted by the Trump administration under the pretense of reform and cost savings. Earlier this year, FCC boss Brendan Carr falsely claimed that the “reform” (read: destruction) of the program was necessary due to a bunch of fraud by immigrants. From his original press statement:
“Lifeline providers received nearly $5 million in federal dollars to provide phone or Internet service to more than 116,000 dead people in the three optout states. Over 80% of those scams took place in California alone. That type of waste, fraud, and abuse is completely unacceptable.”
This was, you’ll be surprised to learn, a lie. One that mirrors similarly racist claims made by the Trump administration as it targets what’s left of the U.S. social safety net. It didn’t take long for Carr’s lie that “California immigrants are stealing taxpayer dollars” to bounce around the right wing propagandaverse.
But as the California Public Utilities Commission noted shortly thereafter, the 116,000 people cited died while on the program. There was no fraud. There’s not even coherent evidence they were immigrants (as if that would matter one way or the other):
The Trump FCC reforms aren’t finalized yet. There’s first a public comment period where Brendan Carr will pretend to listen to outside parties and the public. So groups like Public Knowledge and the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) recently filed their complaints about the proposed changes with the FCC (spotted first by Light Reading).
They make several excellent points, one being that historically, most of the fraud occurring in the Lifeline program has been at the hands of private companies:
“The Q-Link case in 2025, the Armstrong Group in 2024, and the 2022 San Francisco whistleblower complaint each illustrate that providers, not eligible and subscribing Lifeline households, are the primary entities engaging in fraud and abuse concerns within USF programs.”
Brendan Carr’s policies generally involve a strange fusion of racism and gutting oversight of corporations. U.S. broadband wouldn’t be so expensive if regulators like Brendan Carr actually believed in holding regional monopolies accountable. Instead, Carr’s policies generally involve mindless deregulation of industry, resulting in muted competition, high prices, spotty access, and poor customer service.
Groups say Carr’s goal of imposing new Lifeline restrictions are particularly problematic because only somewhere between 19 and 22 percent of all eligible homes sign up for the program, suggesting it could benefit from improved outreach and education, not cumbersome new barriers to participation.
The groups also stated they were “extremely concerned” about the potential that data collected will be used to harass minority Americans:
“For a program that garnered bipartisan support and cooperation for decades, it is difficult to ignore the timing of this proposal alongside expanded federal data-sharing initiatives targeting immigrant communities among other anti-immigrant strategies deployed by the Trump Administration.”
The Trump administration attacks on Lifeline mirror other simultaneous efforts to make broadband less affordable for everyone, whether they’re fresh immigrants or Trump supporters in the deepest red state. In just the last year or two, Republicans and the Trump administration have:
You can probably see why Brendan Carr and Donald Trump would want misinformed voters focused on “immigrant fraud.”
Filed Under: affordability, bigotry, brendan carr, broadband, cpuc, fcc, fraud, immigrants, lifeline, racism, telecom, wireless
In late 2023, I wrote a feature for The Verge exploring the FCC’s attempt to stop race and class discrimination in broadband deployment. For decades, big telecoms have not only refused to evenly upgrade broadband in low income and poor areas (despite billions in subsidies for this exact purpose), they’ve provably charged poor and minority neighborhoods significantly more money for worse service.
To be clear: the Biden FCC’s plan didn’t actually stop such discrimination. The previous FCC didn’t even have the moral courage to call out big telecoms with a history of such practices (see: AT&T’s “digital redlining” in cities like Cleveland and Detroit). The FCC simply acknowledged that this discrimination clearly exists and set up a complaint process for consumers who had been discriminated against.
I’m not sure the loophole-filled rules would have ever resulted in meaningful accountability for providers, given holding telecom monopolies accountable has never been a serious priority for either party. But it was at least an acknowledgement that this obvious discrimination exists. For the first time ever. Which was important for what I would hope is obvious reasons.
No longer: the Republican-stocked 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down the entire FCC effort in a ruling, stating the FCC exceeded its legal authority by imposing liability for actions resulting in “disparate impact,” instead of merely policing “disparate treatment.” And by extending the complaint process to include subcontractors who help ISPs with deployment:
“[The FCC] exceeded its statutory authority in two respects that are the core of the final rule—disparate impact liability and the definition of covered entities. We therefore vacate the final rule in its entirety, leaving the FCC with an unfinished obligation to ‘adopt final rules to facilitate equal access to broadband Internet access service’ in compliance with 47 U.S.C. § 1754.”
That resulted in the whole effort being discarded.
The FCC could try to re-establish the rules with a new effort, but that new effort likely wouldn’t survive our new reality created by our corrupt courts dismantling Chevron Deference. Republicans and corporate power have made holding large U.S. companies accountable for almost anything illegal, and it’s still somehow not being talked about enough, given the vast (and quite deadly) looming ramifications.
While the Judges and case intervenors like to put on a very serious adult face and pretend they’re engaging in very serious legalese, the goal here really is no meaningful oversight of telecom monopolies. There’s always something they concoct to suggest the U.S. government can’t engage in basic consumer protection oversight of telecoms. If it wasn’t this, it would be something else.
The impact of this assault on the U.S. federal regulatory state is everywhere you look. Especially in broadband access, where dominant regional monopolies and state and federal regulatory capture (read: corruption) result in spotty access, slow speeds, and abysmal consumer service for everyone. Minorities and marginalized communities just get hit hardest, and usually first.
The ruling, issued unanimously by three judges appointed by Republican presidents, is a double win for folks like FCC boss Brendan Carr, who likely enjoys both the racism and protecting lumbering telecom monopolies from accountability for decades of predatory behavior. As usual, Carr insisted in a statement that fighting discrimination somehow discriminates against white people:
“Today’s appellate court decision is another common-sense win for nondiscrimination.
…the FCC’s decision to adopt those illegal rules only made it harder for providers to bridge the digital divide and took the FCC’s focus off of our core mission.
Now, the FCC is focused on advancing our Build America Agenda and ensuring that regulated entities do not discriminate, including through our efforts to end invidious forms of DEI discrimination. I commend the appellate court for correcting the FCC’s misguided 2023 decision. The court’s ruling follows the Supreme Court’s decision last week making clear that intentional discrimination is unlawful.”
That is, well, patently false. And weird. And an extremely dystopian inversion of reality by zealots. Consumer groups fighting for equitable and affordable broadband (like Public Knowledge) were, in contrast, not impressed. From Public Knowledge’s Legal Director, John Bergmayer:
“The practical effect is to eliminate a rule that addresses a documented problem,” he said. “Lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color get slower service, older equipment, and higher prices for the same product their richer neighbors buy. After today, the FCC can act only when it proves a smoking-gun case of conscious bias, which almost never exists in writing.”
This is just one of several efforts by Republicans to destroy efforts to mandate equitable and affordable broadband access, including Trump’s illegal destruction of the Digital Equity Act, the dismantling of programs that provide free Wi-Fi hotspots to rural school kids, and the general destruction of FCC authority to hold telecoms accountable for stuff like spying on you.
This is occurring at the same time that Trump Republicans are leveraging Carr’s same twisted, inverted logic on “DEI” and inverted discrimination to do everything from censor journalists and comedians to gerrymander maps, stripping representation rights away from millions of American minorities.
Great stuff. Thanks again to all the folks (especially rich Silicon Valley CEOs) who decided that a corrupt kakistocracy at the hands of racist zealots was just what an already struggling America needed.
Filed Under: 8th circuit, brendan carr, broadband, discrimination, fcc, fiber, high speed internet, racism, redlining
Elon Musk is desperate to dominate the Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite broadband market. So is Jeff Bezos. And now the two billionaires are engaged in proxy fights at Trump’s FCC over who’ll get the honor.
Amazon’s LEO offering, Project Leo, is significantly behind Musk’s Starlink, and has been rushing to build out its LEO satellite constellation. To slow down their pace, Musk’s Starlink has started complaining to the FCC, insisting that Amazon violated orbital debris requirements by launching satellites into orbital altitudes that are too high, increasing the risks to other satellites and spacecraft.
Amazon has responded by basically saying Musk’s Starlink is lying to slow the arrival of a competitor to market:
“SpaceX only objected to the launch parameters after moving its Starlink satellites into nearby altitudes, Amazon said. Changing the altitude of a recent Leo launch would have delayed it by months, according to Amazon. Both Amazon and SpaceX have accused each other of using Federal Communications Commission proceedings to delay the other’s satellite launches at various times over the years.”
Hoping to avoid harming “free market innovation,” it took years for the FCC to finally recently implement some bare bones “space junk” LEO collision guidance, though enforcement has been sporadic, and I’m doubtful two billionaire Trump donors will ever see much in the way of accountability.
Both billionaires are hoping to leverage their ongoing support of Trump to their own benefit. Both have already had significant success on that front; Musk and Bezos convinced the Trump administration to redirect billions in infrastructure bill subsidies (earmarked for reliable, faster fiber) over to their LEO satellite broadband businesses for service they already planned to deploy.
I’m not inclined to believe either billionaire or their companies. Nor am I inclined to believe that FCC boss Brendan Carr has the integrity or competence to manage this dispute or to protect the public longer term. Starlink has recently seen several satellites blow up in orbit and has been very murky about the reasons for it. Tens of thousands more LEO satellites are slated for launch in the next few years.
The grand irony is that the mad dash toward LEO satellite broadband doesn’t really deliver on the promise of significantly better broadband. LEO satellite connectivity is great for folks who have no other option, but the technology comes with a long list of caveats.
The resulting networks will be too congested to truly scale or provide real competition for local telecom monopolies. The resulting services are also routinely too expensive for the folks who currently can’t afford access. Then there’s the problem of LEO satellite launches harming astronomy research and the ozone layer, issues I suspect won’t be a priority for Bezos, Musk, or Carr.
I’d expect to see much more orbital (and terrestrial consumer) chaos in the years to come, given absolutely none of these folks tend to think too deeply about the public interest.
Filed Under: brendan carr, elon musk, fcc, jeff bezos, leo, leo satellites
Companies: amazon, project leo, spacex, starlink
Hey look everyone! More of that famous populism Trump rode into power on!
The Trump FCC has announced they’re rubber stamping the approval of a merger between two of the nation’s biggest cable companies (Charter, Cox), creating the biggest cable company in the U.S. Struggling Americans were surely clamoring in support of their local shitty cable company getting even bigger, right?
As a condition of the deal, the two companies have promised to be more racist and sexist. More specifically, they’ve promised the FCC they’ll eliminate already fairly pathetic corporate programs acknowledging that systemic racism and sexism exist. The FCC posted this handy infographic on social media that breaks down all of their lies about the deal in an easily digestible way:
Literally none of those claims are true. These deals never result in any of these benefits. There’s more than forty years of concrete evidence proving it. Consolidation across U.S. telecom has consistently resulted in spotty service, high prices, and routinely abysmal customer service.
Cox and Charter don’t directly compete, but their large scale, size, and political influence ensures they’ll have more power than ever to lobby against robust competition more generally.
Remember when Charter was caught creating a fake consumer group to undermine community-owned broadband access in Maine? Or that time New York State regulators found the company was so shitty, and lied so often, that they almost resorted to kicking them out of the state? If you liked that sort of thing, you can now expect more of it, better resourced, at scale. Very exciting!
The debt from the kinds of deals is also always predominately paid off by labor and consumers in the form of mass layoffs and higher prices. These deals never meaningfully serve the public interest, but our captured regulators, consolidated telecoms, and shitty press work together to help pretend otherwise.
The FCC explains the “DEI” provisions this way in their news release:
“Charter has committed to new safeguards to protect against DEI discrimination and has reaffirmed the merged entity’s commitment to equal opportunity and nondiscrimination. Specifically, Charter commits to recruiting, hiring, and promoting individuals based on the factors that matter most: skills, qualifications, and experience.”
You’re not told what these “safeguards” actually are. Just that Cox and Charter won’t try to give minorities or women a leg up in country full of systemic hatred and intolerance because that might be unfair to a dude.
The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to insist that simply acknowledging that systemic racism and sexism exists — or doing literally anything about it — is somehow discriminatory to white men. This is diseased white supremacist thinking; the sheer delusional hubris to think this way, let alone integrate this ignorance into already problematic pro-monopoly policy, is the mind garbage of simpletons.
If you pop around and read the news coverage of this deal (see: this piece from Reuters or this piece at CNN), you’ll notice the consolidated corporate press helps sell the lie that more consolidation somehow serves the public interest. These kinds of stories will parrot the companies’ claims, ignore their history of monopolistic predation, and even downplay the mandated racism as a droll policy bullet point.
CNN author Jordan Valinsky even went so far as to write this sentence with a straight face:
“The transaction is contingent on regulatory approval and could be a litmus test for President Donald Trump’s views on major companies combining.”
Trump’s FCC has rubber stamped every single shitty telecom merger that has crossed its desk. We know Trump loves harmful consolidation, provided he can personally get something from it. A cornerstone of GOP policy has been to coddle monopoly power for literally fifty fucking years! Across every industry in America. None of this is really up for debate. Any “litmus” test was failed long ago.
It’s important to really stop and recognize the way the press routinely normalizes corruption and gives Trump Republicans policy credibility in areas like antitrust that they never had to actually earn. Because there’s just generally so much going on, this merger will largely be ignored. And when the layoffs and higher prices arrive later this year or early next, press and policy folks will be nowhere to be found.
If this country is going to have any sort of real future, it has to seriously come to grips with the fact that it’s broadly too corrupt to function in the public interest (across government, media, policy, and culturally). If future federal and state governments don’t make antitrust and corruption reform a central pillar of all policy in every sector, we’re quite literally cooked.
Filed Under: antitrust, brendan carr, broadband, cable, consolidation, dei, fcc, media, mergers, racism
Companies: charter, cox
In late 2024, Trump Republicans killed a very popular program that provided low-income Americans $30 off of their monthly broadband bill. The FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) was, unsurprisingly, very popular, with more than 23 million Americans benefiting at its peak.
At the time, the GOP claimed they were simply looking to save money. The real reason the program was killed, of course, was that the ACP was popular with their constituents (the majority of ACP participants were in red states) and they didn’t want Dems to take credit during an election season.
A follow up report by The Brattle Group actually found that the $7-$8 billion annual taxpayer cost of the program generated between $28.9 and $29.5 billion in savings thanks to expanded access to affordable internet, remote work opportunities, online education tools, and remote telehealth services. The study also found the ACP generated $3.7 billion in increased annual earnings for students due to expanded remote education opportunities, and $2.1 to $4.3 billion in annual wage gains from expanded labor force participation.
In other words: the program more than paid for itself via downstream benefits (something DOGE dudebros and other Trump cultists can’t or won’t think deeply about).
With the feds completely apathetic to issues like affordability (despite a lot of empty rhetoric to the contrary), it’s falling to states to fill the void. Enter states like New Mexico, which just passed the first statewide replacement for the ACP. It provides every low-income New Mexico resident with cheaper broadband access. And from drafting to passage it took all of 25 days:
“Senate Bill 152 – first filed on January 26 of this year by State Sen. Michael Padilla, (D) Majority Whip – will update the state’s Rural Telecommunications Act and empower the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission (PRC) to offer up to $30/month for qualified households to pay for Internet service.
The broadband bill, known as the Low-Income Telecommunications Assistance Program (LITAP), passed through the formal legislative session in high-speed fashion. It was first introduced at the end of January, passed by the House, and then the Senate by a 38-0 margin last Thursday (Feb. 12), making its way to the governor’s desk to be signed into law today. That’s a 25-day marathon from legislative start-to-finish.”
The program, which goes live this July, will cost around $10 million the first year, and then $42 million each year after that. It won’t be taxpayer funded; instead it’s funded by the state universal service fund (SRUSF) program (a small $1.50 fee on existing telecom services).
While myopic types will complain, I’ll repeat that the data we have on programs like this clearly show immense downstream cost savings thanks to lower income folks having access to employment, health care, education, and other remote opportunities. You’re paying a little up front to avoid paying a lot more down the road for a society that doesn’t function all that well.
That you might spend money up front to avoid significant costs (both financial and cultural) downstream is just a bridge too far for Elon Musk type hustlebros and assorted big thinkers, who think government should exist exclusively to slather our biggest telecom monopolies with unaccountable subsidies in exchange for taxpayer-funded broadband networks always mysteriously left half completed.
All of that said, I will note that you wouldn’t need programs like this (or you’d at least pay less for them) if you had more competition in the broadband sector. And you can create more competition in the U.S. broadband sector by taking aim at the giant regional monopolies that have bribed state and federal lawmakers into feckless compliance for forty-odd years, resulting in high prices, spotty access, and abysmal customer service.
Instead, we tend to pay money to these entrenched monopolies to temporarily lower broadband prices that wouldn’t be so high in the first place if we had lawmakers capable of standing up to monopoly power. That can often come in the form of embracing cooperatives, city-owned utilities, or municipal open access fiber projects in areas these giants have long refused to adequately serve.
An ideal, functioning government would probably shore up antitrust reform and crack down on telecom monopoly power, embolden community alternatives, and establish programs that benefit the poor to help society better manage downstream costs and harms. But America, clearly now too corrupt to function in the public interest, simply can’t see that far out beyond its campaign contribution skis.
Filed Under: ACP, affordability, antitrust, broadband, fiber, high speed internet, low income, monopoly, new mexico, telecom
The Trump administration keeps demonstrating that it really hates affordable broadband. It particularly hates it when the government tries to make broadband affordable to poor people or rural school kids.
In just the last year the Trump administration has:
I’m sure I missed a few.
This week, the administration’s war on affordable broadband shifted back to attacking the FCC Lifeline program, a traditionally uncontroversial, bipartisan effort to try and extend broadband to low income Americans. Brendan Carr (R, AT&T) has been ramping up his attacks on these programs, claiming (falsely) that they’re riddled with state-sanctioned fraud:
“Carr’s office said this week that the FCC will vote next month on rule changes to ensure that Lifeline money goes to “only living and lawful Americans” who meet low-income eligibility guidelines. Lifeline spends nearly $1 billion a year and gives eligible households up to $9.25 per month toward phone and Internet bills, or up to $34.25 per month in tribal areas.”
For one, $9.25 is a pittance. It barely offsets the incredibly high prices U.S. telecom monopolies charge. Monopolies, it should be noted, only exist thanks to the coddling of decades of corrupt lawmakers like Carr, who’ve effectively exempted them from all accountability. That’s resulted in heavy monopolization, limited competition, high prices, and low-quality service.
Two, there’s lots of fraud in telecom. Most of it, unfortunately, is conducted by our biggest companies with the tacit approval of folks like FCC boss Brendan Carr. AT&T, for example, has spent decades ripping off U.S. schools and various subsidy programs, and you’ll never see Carr make a peep about that. Fraud is, in MAGA world, only something involving minorities and poor people.
The irony is that the lion’s share of the fraud in the Lifeline program has involved big telecom giants, like AT&T or Verizon, which, time and time again, take taxpayer money for poor people that the just made up. This sort of fraud, where corporations are involved, isn’t of interest to Brendan Carr.
In this case, Carr is alleging (without evidence) that certain left wing states are intentionally ripping off the federal government, throwing untold millions of dollars at dead people for Lifeline broadband access. Something the California Public Utilities Commission has had to spend the week debunking:
“The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) this week said that “people pass away while enrolled in Lifeline—in California and in red states like Texas. That’s not fraud. That’s the reality of administering a large public program serving millions of Americans over many years. The FCC’s own advisory acknowledges that the vast majority of California subscribers were eligible and enrolled while alive, and that any improper payments largely reflect lag time between a death and account closure, not failures at enrollment.”
Brendan Carr can’t overtly admit this (because he’s a corrupt zealot), but his ideal telecom policy agenda involves throwing billions of dollars at AT&T and Comcast in exchange for doing nothing. That’s it. That’s the grand Republican plan for U.S. telecom. It gets dressed up as something more ideologically rigid, but coddling predatory monopolies has always been the foundational belief structure.
This latest effort by Carr and Trump largely appears to be a political gambit targeting California Governor Gavin Newsom, suggesting they’re worried about his chances in the next presidential election. This isn’t to defend Newsom; I’ve certainly noted how his state has a mixed track record on broadband affordability. But it appears this is mostly about painting a picture of Newsom, as they did with Walz in Minnesota, as a political opponent that just really loves taxpayer fraud.
Again though, actually policing fraud is genuinely the last thing on Brendan Carr’s mind. If it was, he’d actually target the worst culprits on this front: corporate America.
Filed Under: affordability, brendan carr, broadband, fraud, lifeline, telecom
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