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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
Ted Cruz last week chaired a Senate hearing dubbed “Plugged Out: Examining the Impact of Technology on America’s Youth.” The hearing spent a lot of time doubling down on the scary-sounding, often-baseless stories lawmakers tell themselves as they push terrible laws like KOSMA to “protect the children” from a completely unproven link between social media and mental health problems.
Laws like KOSMA, as we’ve repeatedly reported, are unconstitutional messes that often create more problems than they profess to solve. And lawmakers like Ted Cruz, which we’ve also documented repeatedly, have shown time and time again how they aren’t actually interested in protecting kids (from tech giants or anything else), or doing any of the heavy lifting (like, say ensuring everyone has access to affordable mental health care or affordable broadband) required to actually help anybody.
But when it comes to Ted Cruz, it’s even worse than all that. Last year we noted how Cruz was at the forefront of efforts to kill FCC reforms that made it easier and cheaper for kids to access the internet and do their homework.
More specifically, Cruz leveraged the Congressional Review Act to kill FCC modifications to the E-Rate program that allowed school libraries to offer kids free Wi-Fi hotspots. This was a broadly popular, uncontroversial program that made it easier for rural, low-income kids to get online. And Cruz killed it because companies like AT&T don’t want the government offering alternatives to their overpriced service.
Cruz, of course, couldn’t just openly announce that telecom lobbyist corruption resulted in him killing a helpful program with broad, bipartisan support. So he made up a whole bunch of bullshit about how this Wi-Fi program was “censoring Conservative viewpoints” and resulting in kids running amok unsupervised online. As we debunked in detail it was all lies; he just threw a bunch of nonsense at the wall, and our lazy, shitty press parroted much of it unskeptically.
Fast forward to last week and Cruz’s support for the awful KOSMA bill. Cruz actually took time out in his grandstanding “protect the children!” hearing testimony to pat himself on the back for the fact he made it harder for rural American schoolchildren to access the internet:
“During the Biden administration, not only did Congressional Democrats give billions of dollars to the FCC to buy personal internet devices for children, but the Biden FCC sought to bankroll kids’ unsupervised internet access and undermine parental rights by expanding the E-Rate program to install Wi-Fi hotspots off campus, including on school buses and in students’ homes.“
Cruz is, as usual, lying. The expanded Wi-Fi hotspot program didn’t cost the FCC any additional taxpayer money whatsoever. They leveraged existing E-Rate funds to ensure the most disadvantaged, rural kids (many of whose parents voted for Trump) had access to affordable Internet when not on school grounds, either via a cheap access point at home, or a cheap access point on a local bus or bookmobile.
Again, the Republican opposition to this wasn’t rooted in any sort of good intention. AT&T and Verizon simply don’t like the precedent of the government offering affordable (or free) broadband internet access to people. Even people in areas their networks don’t reach. They’d much rather those families be stuck paying an arm and a leg for spotty, expensive, often unreliable broadband access.
Cruz dressed up his lazy corruption as some sort of noble “protection of the children,” a pretty common refrain in DC policy circles. And because the U.S. press generally sucks (in part due to the Republican assault on media consolidation and ownership limits), he was broadly allowed to lie repeatedly about this without being seriously challenged in the media.
To make matters worse, he’s leveraging his corrupt protection of the Republican-coddled telecom industry as some sort of noble justification for passing shitty, half-cooked legislation on a completely different front. But as is so often the case, the “protect the children” and race-baiting, culture war trolling generally exists to divide and disorient the public so they don’t cooperatively target the real problem: rich assholes.
In the case of KOSKA, as we saw with the fake GOP antitrust inquiries into “big tech,” or fake concerns about “free speech,” Cruz’s interest isn’t in actually reining in big tech or helping kids. His interest is in finding leverage points over modern media giants that can be used to bully them into protecting and coddling authoritarians and their rank propaganda, a gambit that’s proven to be quite successful so far.
Filed Under: broadband, corruption, erate, fcc, hotspot, hotspots, kosma, protect the children, ted cruz, telecom
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