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You have less than a week to weigh in on Brendan Carr’s obviously bullshit retaliatory censorial attack on Disney. While it’s quite clear that Carr is likely to ignore the comments, they still very much matter. It needs to be in the public record that the public is against this attack on free speech and fundamental rights, rather than letting MAGA chuds stuff the comment box with nonsense.
Karl and I have detailed much of the history of how we got here. For many years, Carr has presented himself as a true defender of free speech and the First Amendment, but his actions made clear long ago that he only meant when Democrats were in the White House. During the first Trump administration, Trump demanded that his FCC support his plan to wreck Section 230 and enable greater censorship online. When one of the three GOP FCC commissioners — staunch Republican Mike O’Rielly — made a few tepid comments about how the FCC shouldn’t be in the business of messing with 230, Trump pulled his renomination. Carr, however, made it clear he’d be Trump’s little censorial lapdog.
He then spent the four Biden years once again pretending to care about free speech, but the second Trump was elected, Carr made it abundantly clear that if Trump made him chair of the FCC he’d be Trump’s loyal censor in chief. Since then he’s lived up to that promise and more. He’s launched a series of bogus investigations, always into perceived ideological enemies of Trump and MAGA, always pretending that he just has to do this. He held up the Ellisons’ takeover of Paramount and CBS until CBS agreed to pay Trump a bribe. And, most famously, he briefly got Jimmy Kimmel kicked off of TV for making a joke that Carr didn’t like.
His latest move, as we’ve covered, was to go after ABC’s The View for having Texas Senate candidate James Talarico on their show. It was yet another in Carr’s long line of bullshit, censorial investigations designed to intimidate broadcasters (but only those he deems too woke — if you’re MAGA, you get a total free pass) into only letting MAGA and MAGA-supportive guests on the air. This time, though, Disney fought back.
Rather than pathetically caving like CBS, Disney filed a petition for declaratory ruling that The View had done nothing wrong in having Talarico on as a guest. They even hired some big time litigators in Paul Clement and Jennifer Tatel to file the petition.
The underlying issue is the “equal time rule,” which was barely discussed for decades. But Carr has glommed onto it as his tool for attacking ABC for not being obsequious enough to Trump. The rule, which only applies to broadcast license holders, says that they have to provide equal time to competing candidates for public office. But there’s a clear exemption for a “bona fide newscast” or a “bona fide news interview.”
All the way back in 2002, the FCC made it clear that The View, and plenty of other shows like it, qualified for the “bona fide news exemption,” and it has been operating accordingly, as have many right-leaning radio and TV programs. Indeed, most local TV station affiliates (which these rules technically apply to) are owned by MAGA friendly media giants like Sinclair and Nexstar. Did Carr go after any of them? Of course not.
Instead, he manufactured a fake controversy. Most broadcaster affiliates (including Disney’s owned and operated affiliates) didn’t bother to file any paperwork regarding Talarico’s appearance because they (like everyone else) had been relying on the FCC’s granted exemption as a bona fide news interview. But Carr then got a few non-Disney owned affiliates (i.e., those owned by Trump-friendly media conglomerates) to file some paperwork in order to pretend that Disney’s owned and operated affiliates were somehow bucking the normal way of operating. As Disney noted in its filing, the whole thing was manufactured by Carr:
“The Bureau neglected to note, however, that while certain ABC affiliates documented Talarico’s appearance in their online public inspection files, the filings were made more than two weeks after Talarico’s appearance and apparently at the request of the FCC, which reportedly promised to eschew enforcement for the late filing. KTRK Television received no such request and no such offer, despite the Bureau specifically contacting it about the Talarico appearance less than 10 days after it occurred.”
With Disney filing its petition, Carr recognized he basically had to open a public comment period, even though he clearly has no intention of admitting that his entire investigation is bullshit.
But that doesn’t mean we should ignore it. As Karl noted, it’s quite likely that MAGA folks are spinning up their usual fake-comment-orama-generator, which Carr will undoubtedly use to claim there’s widespread public support for him punishing Disney.
But having comments on the record calling out how this is censorial nonsense, a massive abuse of Carr’s power, and blatantly unconstitutional still matter. The record is public, and it will be helpful to make it clear that Carr knows exactly what he’s doing and for whose benefit he’s doing this little charade. MAGA folks won’t be in charge forever, and dismantling the corrupt censorial rot represented by the likes of Brendan Carr needs to start with the basics: getting it on the record that we all know and see what he’s doing.
The first round of comments are due on June 22nd. It’s a simple form and you can just fill it out. Or if you’d prefer, write out a document, save it as a PDF, and attach it via that form as well. Just get it on the record that you don’t support Carr’s censorial retaliation campaign. There will also be a second round of comments due July 6th, but it would be nice to get more people to file in this first round and make it clear that the public knows what Carr is up to.
For what it’s worth, in any such filing, I would recommend making your arguments as clearly and compellingly as possible. I know that sometimes people just file pure angry screeds but those are less effective than a few paragraphs explaining why you don’t support Carr’s censorial campaign and asking the FCC to knock it off.
Filed Under: brendan carr, broadcast licenses, censorship, comment period, donald trump, equal time rule, fcc, intimidation, james talarico, jimmy kimmel, the view
Companies: abc, disney
Last week Elon Musk successfully conned America and U.S. regulators into signing off on his preposterous SpaceX IPO, which immediately generated Musk $75 billion by comically over-stating the value of SpaceX, xAI, and Starlink. Then bone-grafting the entire pile of bullshit to the U.S. economy and your retirement account under the pretense that space data centers and Mars colonization are just around the corner.
A handful of remaining useful journalists have repeatedly explained how xAI and Musk’s racist 5th place chatbot — which comprises the lion’s share of the ridiculous IPO valuation — is a gargantuan loser. Both SpaceX and xAI aren’t profitable and may never be, and the claims of Mars colonization and space data centers are unworkable bullshit designed to distract people with toddler-level critical thinking skills.
Anyway I’m sure it will go fine.
As a multi-decade telecom beat reporter I’d say I’m better positioned to talk about Starlink — the only actually profitable company in the SpaceX IPO prospectus (and that’s assuming Starlink is being honest about their financial numbers in a country too corrupt to have working financial regulators).
I’ve long noted how Starlink is great for people with no other options, but data has shown how it’s too congested to meaningfully scale. It’s also often too expensive for the sorts of Americans struggling with access. There’s also the problem with it ruining astronomical research and degrading the ozone layer. So Starlink is great for RVs or a guy with an extra cabin in the woods, but it’s not a miracle.
In terms of broadband policy, it’s supposed to be a niche solution. The kind of technology you use to fill in the gaps after you’ve pushed fiber, 5G, and fixed wireless out as far as you can into unserved areas.
But as I’ve mentioned previously, folks in the Trump administration and extended Rogan infotainment universe see Starlink as akin to magic. They think it’s just a sort of pixie dust you sprinkle over the entire of U.S. connectivity woes. There was a soggy Bulwark interview last week with Jason Calacanis that kind of reveals how deep the delusion goes in terms of what Starlink actually is:
The SpaceX IPO insists — and Calacanis dutifully believes — that it’s trivial for Starlink to jump from a niche satellite broadband solution with a little over 10 million subscribers to a massive economic powerhouse with 300-500 million subscribers. Calacanis waxes poetic about Starlink providing bandwidth to every phone in the world and surpassing even Netflix in terms of total subscribers.
But in a way that’s highly representative of modern Silicon Valley, Calacanis doesn’t actually care about how the tech works, or even if it works. Calacanis is interested in unchecked wealth accumulation, and propping up the unbridled profit-seeking of a personal friend.
The thing is: to meaningfully grow, Starlink will need to start seriously competing on price to counter competitors (like Amazon) coming into the space. But the cost of endlessly replacing LEO (low Earth orbit satellites) is immense (SpaceX says each satellite has a five year lifespan, but it’s arguably much lower). And ARPU is already dropping for Starlink as the company tries to drum up new subscribers.
Calacanis insists Starlink’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from being even bigger than Netflix. But for Starlink to even sniff those kinds of numbers, it would have to intensely compete with deeply-entrenched and politically-powerful telecom monopolies, and fiber optic broadband and 5G/6G networks less constrained by the rules of physics. They’ve also got to compete with a rising tide of community-owned fiber.
As Starlink grows its subscriber base, it’s not only going to see its ARPU drop faster, but data shows it’s going to run into new capacity constraints. That means more annoying network management practices that throttle video, limit services, and generally degrade performance. We’re already starting to see the impact of this with network slowdowns and “congestion fees” ranging upwards of $750 in some areas.
And this is, so we’re clear, a company that’s never seen fit to meaningfully invest in customer service, so as these problems grow, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to handle customer annoyance well.
Anybody claiming that Starlink is the ticket to vast riches is either lying to you or doesn’t understand how the technology actually works. Even if it can maintain its success as a viable niche connectivity option useful in rural markets and global battlezones, the high cost of maintenance means this is never going to be a major money maker. Though they clearly hope it will prove to be a semi-useful backbone for a major pump and dump scheme.
The ace Elon Musk is holding is corruption and cronyism leading to regulatory favors and massive new subsidies, but it’s not clear even that’s going to be enough.
Cecilia Kang at the New York Times has an interesting article about how the Trump FCC has been doing cartwheels trying to prop up the Musk IPO — especially as it pertains to Starlink. That has included not just abandoning any meaningful regulatory oversight of “space junk” and orbital safety, but launching dodgy investigations into companies that hold spectrum Musk wants for himself.
Elon Musk bought himself a Presidency, and it continues to pay off handsomely:
“Carr has taken multiple actions for which Musk was the prime beneficiary,” said Blair Levin, an adviser to New Street Research, an investment research firm, and a former chief of staff at the F.C.C. He added that Starlink “has gotten a huge amount from the Trump administration and Carr.”
Carr has tried to justify his favoritism of Musk by saying he’s also rubber stamped the LEO satellite policy interests of Jeff Bezos and Amazon. But as we’ve consistently established around here, nothing Carr does is driven by any sort of good faith concern about the public interest.
The funny part is that the New York Times doesn’t even mention that the Trump administration has also hijacked the 2021 infrastructure bill to redirect potentially billions of dollars to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos (I should have an upcoming feature on this over at The Verge). This is money being directed away from affordable fiber and toward two billionaires — for networks they already planned to build.
More specifically, the Trump NTIA under former Ted Cruz staffer Arielle Roth changed the language of the $42.5 billion Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program so that Musk and Bezos would be the prime beneficiaries. They also stripped out any language requiring that internet access built with taxpayer money had to be affordable or equitably deployed with an eye on fairness.
Musk and Calacanis types try to brush functional oversight for taxpayer spending as unnecessary “wokeness.” But the ongoing BEAD saga involves an historic hijacking of Congressionally-mandated funds by bad faith actors; so it’s curious the New York Times didn’t think it was worth mentioning in a story about how unethically cozy the Trump administration and Musk are.
Like most of the SpaceX IPO this will all be proven out over time. Long after people have had their retirements account raided, or small towns have had their infrastructure hopes hijacked. Consumers, taxpayers, and labor will, as is usually the case, be left holding the bag. And the folks that made it possible will already be off to the next big thing leaving people of conscience to clean up the mess.
Filed Under: competition, corruption, cronyism, elon musk, fcc, leo satellites, spacex ipo, taxpayers, telecom
Companies: spacex, starlink, twitter, x, xai
Last month I noted how the Trump FCC had unveiled a brand new plan to “stop robocalls.”
As with most efforts the proposal doesn’t actually do much to stop robocalls because a well-lobbied U.S. government (1) refuses to hold big companies accountable or collect fines, (2) constantly embraces weak rules that make telemarketers and debt collectors happy through endlessly loopholes scammers then exploit, and (3) has an unhealthy fixation with undermining regulators at the behest of large companies.
But buried in the Trump FCC plan was another new effort we mentioned: one that involves cracking down on burner phones by forcing telecoms (the ones bone-grafted to our domestic surveillance operations) to dramatically scale up the information they collect from consumers.
That’s… understandably raised concerns among privacy advocates and civil rights groups well aware that greater surveillance will be abused by the Trump administration and beyond. It also ignores that there’s often very good reasons why abuse victims, whistleblowers, journalists, refugees, and others might be seeking an anonymous prepaid burner phone, privacy advocate Eric Null told 404 media:
“To address the scourge of illegal robocalls, the FCC has unfortunately proposed to force every wireless subscriber in the nation to sacrifice their privacy and give up significant personal details before receiving or renewing a wireless line. While some carriers already collect such details, there are specific circumstances where a person may need privacy and anonymity when seeking a cell phone, including if that person is a victim of domestic violence, or is a journalist or whistleblower. This proposal represents a loss of privacy across the board, and from an agency whose remit includes protecting privacy. The FCC might let a few bad apples spoil the whole bunch.”
Anonymity is one of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. The EFF notes this also isn’t likely to really stop criminals from finding ways to communicate anonymously:
“This proposal by the FCC will do little to combat scams and robocalls, since most people doing that will have no trouble creating fake documentation or identities,” Cooper Quintin, security researcher and senior public interest technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told 404 Media. “Given this administration’s crackdown on free expression, protest, immigrants, and women’s health we have trouble seeing this as a bold attack on freedom of communication. They want to take away our ability to make an anonymous phone call.”
So, in short, it won’t actually stop robocalls or criminal activity, but it will harm people who need anonymous communications tools to survive, and it will almost certainly lead to greater surveillance abuses by America’s corrupt, authoritarian government.
One plus side: the rules aren’t official yet. The FCC’s proposed plan is open to public input until June 25. You can file an express comment here; (the specific proceeding discussing new prepaid phone restrictions is 13-97).
Filed Under: anonymity, brendan carr, burner phones, civil rights, eff, fcc, free speech, privacy, surveillance, telecom
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
If you recall, Trump FCC censor Brendan Carr recently launched numerous sham investigations of Disney/ABC because a comedian made fun of the President.
One of those sham investigations includes the bogus claim that Disney should be stripped of its eight broadcast licenses because the company is sometimes nice to women and minorities. Another involves the false claim that an ABC affiliate violated the law because an ABC affiliate broadcast an interview with Texas Democratic Senate hopeful James Talarico without filling out the appropriate paperwork.
The inquiries are complete bullshit, but that hasn’t stopped the press from helping Carr pretend otherwise. And Disney and their lawyers have had to jump through costly hoops all the same.
Like last week, when Disney filed its application for broadcast license renewal, something an attached letter notes the company did “in protest.” It’s a pretty heated retort, as far as giant corporations go:
“WABC-TV (“WABC” or the “Station”) submits this license renewal application under
protest in response to an unlawful, arbitrary, and unconstitutional Order issued on April 28, 2026, by the Media Bureau. The Commission had not demanded early renewal in over five decades. And it has never before demanded simultaneous license renewal applications from a group of stations commonly owned with a network as it has here.The Order has no legitimate purpose. There is no information that the application will reveal that the Commission could not obtain through other means. The Order is inconsistent with a legitimate exercise of investigative authority and is plainly incompatible with the First Amendment. Worse, the Order opens the door to an assault on the Station’s license, while the Commission searches for a legal pretext to achieve its desired goal. This effort to suppress speech under the guise of bureaucratic process must not prevail. WABC files this application without waiving any rights, and calls on the Commission to rescind the Order.”
Carr’s attacks on Disney are legally incoherent. But such assaults are not really designed to win in court, they’re designed to chill speech. They’re designed to send the message that if you criticize the president (whether via comedian or journalist), you’ll face all manner of costly legal headaches.
It’s a pathetic assault on the First Amendment, and while Trump early second tenure threats have had some notable successes among the country’s pathetic corporate media giants, the effectiveness will only dwindle as Trump’s polling, health, and political power wanes, leaving Carr holding an empty bag and a terrible reputation as a cowardly zealot.
Carr’s legal efforts are in particular hot water here given that, as one previous ABC filing indicated, he appears to have collaborated with right wing local broadcasters to create the illusion that ABC-owned Houston affiliate KTRK had violated the law. It’s just the sort of thing you’d hope would result in corporations thinking twice the next time they’re keen on electing censorial fascists.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, brendan carr, broadcast license, censorship, fcc, free speech, james talarico, jimmy kimmel
Companies: abc, disney
Last month the FCC quietly issued a public notice saying the Brendan Carr run agency was demanding that the TV Oversight Management Board (TVOMB) create new TV ratings to alert viewers to “transgender and gender non-binary programming” and “the discussion or promotion of gender identity themes” included in children’s programming.
You are to ignore that the FCC has no actual authority to even be proposing this. The TV Oversight Management Board is an independent, industry-created coalition that manages the TV ratings system without legal influence by the FCC.
The FCC’s justification for these demanded changes are based entirely on the false claims of a bunch of anonymous “parents” who may or may not even exist:
“Recently, parents have raised concerns that controversial gender identity issues are being
included or promoted in children’s programs without providing any disclosure or transparency to parents. Specifically, the industry guidelines that parents rely on are rating shows with transgender and gender non-binary programming as appropriate for children and young children, and doing so without providing this information to parents, thereby undermining the ability of parents to make informed choices for their families.”
Of course these issues have only been made “controversial” by Republicans, who have taken brutal and ignorant aim at a very small segment of the population in order to actively hurt marginalized people and divide, misinform, and disorient the electorate. Like gay marriage was during the George W. Bush administration, trans rights are an effective wedge issue that exploits public fear, bigotry, and ignorance to redirect public attention away from things like, say, historic levels of corruption.
The idea that media and tech companies are actively flooding the population with a bunch of dangerous “gender non-binary programming” aimed specifically at children is a popular Republican lie designed to agitate and mislead, but there’s no evidence to support the claim. Still it pops up a lot; like Josh Hawley’s false claim at a recent hearing that Netflix is pushing trans-heavy kids programming.
Understandably the proposal didn’t sit well with organizations like GLAAD, which pointed out that it’s grotesque, ignorant, and dangerous to conflate gender fluidity with obscenities, drug abuse, and violence:
“And the Public Notice does not state how a change in TV ratings will impact gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters and stories on TV. Applying warning labels to programs with transgender and nonbinary characters and stories incorrectly equates them to programming with coarse and crude language, sexual situations, or violence.
This makes life harder for LGBTQ Americans. It sends a message that the FCC can pressure the TVOMB to add even more ratings that stigmatize other diverse groups.”
A broader coalition of 40+ public interest groups ranging from Free Press to Public Knowledge were equally disgusted by the proposal:
“This is Carr’s latest attempt to shut down speech and shift U.S. public discourse to please President Trump. Television-program ratings are wholly outside of the FCC’s control, and the use of this public-comment procedure to coerce change raises constitutional concerns. The FCC should abandon this contrived and morally repugnant exercise.”
Part of Carr’s actual job at the FCC is supposed to involve protecting the public from corporate power, whether it’s a telecom monopoly that leverages corruption to rip off broadband customers, to a cable company using sleazy fees to jack up the cost of TV service. Carr’s not interested in that. He’s repeatedly given large companies free reign to engage in whatever consumer abuses they see fit.
Carr likely figures that the more time the public spends freaking out about nonexistent trans kids’ programming, the less time they have to realize that he’s been captured by industry to the detriment of everyone.
Instead of doing his job, Carr’s obsessed with being a weird little zealot and authoritarian lapdog, whose post-FCC legacy, if he has one, will be one of ignorance, censorship, distraction, and fear.
Filed Under: brendan carr, bullying, censor, fcc, free speech, lgbtq, media, regulator, trans panic, trans rights, tv, tvomb
Companies: glaad
As we’ve previously noted, Brendan Carr recently launched a series of phony inquiries into ABC because Jimmy Kimmel made fun of the president’s wife. Carr can’t just come out and say that, so he’s launched a series of fake (and legally laughable) “investigations” into the company. They’re all designed to scare ABC, and other big media companies, away from platforming critics of the unpopular president.
“If you platform voices critical of the president you’ll face an endless barrage of costly and annoying legal headaches and bad press in the right wing media,” is the unsubtle threat.
So Carr has falsely claimed ABC is violating the Communications Act by embracing diversity practices. He’s also falsely claimed that ABC violated the dated FCC “equal time” rule by not platforming more right wing Trump supporters. And he’s repeatedly lied and stated ABC is violating the FCC’s antiquated and never used “news distortion” rule because Kimmel made fun of Charlie Kirk.
It’s all a very big pile of racism, ignorance, zealotry, and censorship pretending to be serious adult policy. And you’ll notice the inquiries only go one way: Carr has nothing to say about Fox News (or countless local right wing broadcast new affiliates and AM radio stations) routinely airing right wing propaganda. Right wing outlets can do whatever they’d like without criticism or repercussion. Funny, that.
As part of the proceedings, Carr has repeatedly threatened to pull one of ABC’s eight broadcast licenses if they refuse to roll over to the administration (they haven’t… so far).
Last week, Carr pretended he was open to receiving public input about the whole ignorant mess. The FCC Media bureau issued a public notice seeking opinions on whether The View qualifies for the bona fide news exemption to the FCC’s equal-time rule, which requires equal time for opposing political candidates on non-news programming. From the notice:
“Does The View qualify as a bona fide news interview program? Does the federal equal opportunities statute pass relevant constitutional scrutiny, either as a general matter or as applied here? Are the relevant decisions on The View, including on format and participants, based on newsworthiness or on an attempt to oppose or support particular candidates within the meaning of FCC precedent? We welcome comment on these and any other relevant points.”
The last page of this document has details on how you can formally comment. Of course, Brendan Carr doesn’t really welcome public input; they’re looking to make this appear like a meaningful public policy initiative, and not the censorial witch hunt it actually is. I suspect the call for comments, as is usually the case, will be flooded with all sorts of bots and fake people.
As we’ve mentioned previously, ABC’s daytime talk show The View hosted Texas Democrat James Talerico last February. The Trump administration is apparently unhappy with the inroads Talerico has been making with Texas Christians and independents. So Carr has falsely claimed that platforming Talerico violated the FCC’s equal time rule, requiring ABC file appropriate paperwork and platform a Republican voice in opposition.
But as ABC’s recent notice to the FCC makes clear, The View was clearly granted an FCC Bona Fide Exemption to the rule back in 2002. Most talk shows have broadly been viewed as exempt since 1984 or so (and increasingly so, as the Internet challenged TV’s supremacy). So there’s nothing to really debate.
Carr knows that, so instead he manufactured a controversy. But it’s worse than that: as ABC’s filing made clear, Carr appears to have worked collaboratively with right wing local broadcasters to make it seem like ABC-owned Houston affiliate KTRK had done something wrong. They collaborated on a big performance to make it seem like KTRK broke the law.
This is all so profoundly stupid it would be laughed immediately out of court in a functional country. But a corporate media, worried they won’t get mergers approved (or could face costly legal headaches for having a spine), has generally chosen to roll over both in their official capacity, and as reflected by their journalism.
As a result, most of the reporting on Carr’s censorship has generally either failed to call out Carr’s behaviors as radical or extreme, or they’ve taken a “both sides” approach to the story where they frame everything as a matter of two equally valid opinions, in turn normalizing authoritarian censorship.
But make no mistake: Carr’s a censorial authoritarian zealot engaged in a laughable and racist government harassment campaign because the U.S. President is a giant baby with a historically fragile ego. And Brendan Carr should never be allowed to live it down.
Filed Under: authoritarian, brendan carr, bully, censorship, equal time, fcc, first amendment, free speech, james talerico, the view
Companies: abc, disney
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
We’ve talked a lot about how Americans have somehow accepted the fact that our voice networks are now saturated with scammers, fraudsters, and robocallers (no, that’s not something that happens in well run, functionally regulated countries).
I’ve also explained for years how the U.S. government solutions to the problems are usually ineffective because they’re endlessly trying to create rules (or undermine existing ones) to carve out exceptions for big “legitimate corporations,” which routinely engage in the same sleazy behavior as scammers.
Regulatory capture and corruption means that you wind up with a lot of performative solutions that sound good, but don’t fix anything. And some of the progress we had made on robocalls is being undermined by the Trump administration’s brutal assault on the federal regulatory state, something that still, somehow, isn’t getting enough public and press attention.
Now the Trump administration is cooking up a new “fix” that once again isn’t likely to fix the robocall problem (because our consumer protection regulators don’t function and the Trump administration doesn’t actually care about the subject anyway), but is likely to introduce all manner of new privacy and surveillance headaches. If it’s even implemented.
In late April, the Trump FCC announced it was considering the development of new “Know Your Customer” rules requiring that the buyer of any new phone present a government ID, a physical address, a full legal name, and an existing phone number at the point of sale. This has raised eyebrows both among activists and telecom industry lawyers, albeit for understandably different reasons.
A Trump FCC press release frames this new layer as a big fix for robocalls:
“We must bring meaningful robocall relief to consumers. The FCC is attacking the problem of illegal robocalls at every point in the call path in order to help consumers and restore trust in America’s voice networks. These proposals set the stage for significant advancement toward those goals by aiming to get providers to take accountability and step up their game in our shared battle against illegal robocalls.”
Telecom lawyers are nervous because the rules propose a $2,500 penalty, per call, per carrier, in a country that sees around 4.2 billion robocalls per month. So yeah, in a theoretical country where we actually had functioning consumer protections this would be quite a shift.
But accountability requires consumer protection enforcement, and this is Brendan Carr. A guy who generally doesn’t believe in holding major corporations accountable for literally anything. And who believes in defanging the federal regulatory state. It’s once again this interesting intersection between the Trump administration’s claims, and their very unsubtle effort to lobotomize government.
Which is to say I’m not even sure this proposal passes, much less sees any enforcement. And if it does pass, and does get enforced, it likely won’t actually help stop robocalls, because that would require a government willing to be tough on the biggest telecom giants which have historically not done enough to police fraud on their networks (at points because they were profiting from the fraud).
So what is Brendan Carr actually thinking? Like all dutiful autocrats, he’s thinking about his administration’s own power, and he’s thinking about surveillance.
There are, of course, numerous instances where you might want legal but covert ownership of a cell phone (a refugee seeking government punishment, a domestic abuse victim fleeing an abusive relationship, a journalist trying to protect a source identity, an activist planning a demonstration). Reclaim the Net is particularly concerned on the restrictions impacting the prepaid cell phone market:
“The real privacy stakes sit in the proposal’s section on prepaid service. Right now, you can pay cash for a prepaid phone and SIM card without showing identification. Journalists use prepaid phones to protect sources, domestic violence survivors use them to avoid being traced, and whistleblowers, activists, or anyone with a reason to separate phone activity from legal identity relies on this.”
So yeah, if Brendan Carr, a censorial autocratic zealot with a history of disdain for corporate accountability and consumer protection, is suddenly pitching you a quick and easy solution for a complicated consumer-facing issue, you should probably raise a skeptical eyebrow. Especially if you’re a journalist.
Filed Under: brendan carr, fcc, identification, know your customer, prepaid, privacy, robocalls, scams, surveillance, wireless
A new “Christian” mobile phone provider named Radiant Mobile is promising to offer a wireless service that censors all LGBTQ+ content. The MVNO (mobile virtual network operator), which runs on the T-Mobile network, says it’s keen to deliver “faith-focused mobile service,” according to the company’s website.
According to NIT Technology Review, the MVNO is working alongside Israeli cybersecurity firm Allot to impose a network-level blockade of not just all pornography on the internet, but all LGBTQ+ content as well:
“We are going to create—and we think we have every right to do so—an environment that is Jesus-centric, that is void of pornography, void of LGBT, void of trans, Radiant Mobile’s founder, Paul Fisher, told MIT Technology Review.”
“Void of trans,” indeed. Good luck with all that. Porn filter systems, no matter whether device or network centric, are notoriously fickle and routinely make all manner of filtering mistakes that wind up blocking all manner of additional content. They’re also historically easy to bypass, depending on how they’re designed.
The article makes it clear that Fisher’s primary target is porn, and it sounds like censoring gay and trans related content isn’t something that’s been particularly well thought out. They’ll figure out in practice that trying to “sanitize” the internet on the network level to somehow conform to narrow worldviews isn’t technically possible, no matter what promises Allot is making to Reliant to justify their price tag:
“The technology to do this blocking is a blunt instrument: Allot groups website domains into more than a hundred categories, which include pornography but also violence, malware, gaming, and in Radiant Mobile’s case “sects,” which includes websites about Satanism. If one of its users tries to visit a website that belongs to a blocked category, the page won’t load.”
Yes, this would technically violate FCC net neutrality rules if the corrupt U.S. courts hadn’t dismantled them, but even if the rules still existed they wouldn’t have been enforced by the Trump FCC anyway. And yes, this raises all sorts of First Amendment and privacy legal questions, which is probably why T-Mobile tried to distance itself from things when contacted by MIT Technology Review:
“A representative for T-Mobile did not comment on whether these content blocks violate any of its policies. In a statement, the representative added that T-Mobile does not have a direct relationship with Radiant Mobile but instead works through the MVNO manager CompaxDigital.”
Fisher, who is apparently pivoting from a career as a supermodel agent to sell this heavily censored version of the internet to purportedly moral religious folks, is trying to strike brand partnerships with evangelical churches. Fisher’s backed by $17.5 million in investment from Compax Ventures and Roger Bringmann, a vice president at Nvidia.
There’s been a flood of these lazy MVNOs that pander to Trump zealots and operate on the T-Mobile network, not least of which is the Trump Organization’s Trump Mobile, which promised customers an expensive new Trump reskinned phone “made in America” that was being made in China and it never actually delivered (despite a lot of down payments). So: It’s all quite on brand.
Filed Under: bigots, censorship, fcc, filtering, lgbtq, mobile, mvno, net neutrality, network, paul fisher, roger bringmann, telecom, wireless
Companies: allot, compax ventures, nvidia, radiant mobile, t-mobile
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