CNN brass have been waiting to get federal approval of their problematic $111 billion merger with Paramount. As we’ve detailed exhaustively, the high debt load from the CBS/Paramount and Warner Brothers merges is going to result in mass layoffs, higher consumer prices, and sagging quality control at the resulting company. It’s what always happens. It’s not really a debate.

Curiously, while CNN has been waiting for regulatory approval, their resident fact checker, Daniel Dale, appears to have curiously disappeared from the company’s cable TV schedule:

“In late February, Daniel Dale appeared on CNN to dismantle the more than 20 false or misleading claims that he identified during Donald Trump’s State of the Union address…But that appearance, more than three months ago, marked the last time Dale was seen on CNN’s air for his trademark rapid-fire fact checks.”

Shortly after the Status story popped up, Dale just as curiously appeared on air again. Along with a statement of denial from CNN that they’d ever try to court regulatory favoritism by dampening their journalism:

“There is no truth to this. Daniel is a multiplatform reporter whose regular fact checks of the President are an important part of CNN’s political coverage. Like all CNN reporters, his on-air appearances are determined by the news of the day — any suggestion otherwise is false.”

Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not. Nothing we’ve seen from major corporate media outlets during Trump’s tenure should indicate they’re deserving of any benefit of the doubt. Last Friday the Trump DOJ approved the deal, falsely claiming it will be great for competition and labor. CNN brass almost certainly already knew approval was coming before they put Dale back on the air.

One thing of note. There’s been a lot of hushed reverential commentary about what’s potentially happening to CBS and CNN. As if these corporate journalism outlets hadn’t been steadily degraded for years by corporate ownership. As if CNN and CBS didn’t go well out of their way to hire more lying on-air authoritarians as a direct act of appeasement to Trumpism even before the mergers.

That said terrible U.S. media can always get worse; and recall the reporting from last fall that Larry Ellison personally met with Trump to carve out which CNN analysts they’d have fired post-acquisition.

Like the CBS Ellison acquisition (where we saw Skydance execs making management decisions before the ink was dry), not yet having a signed deal won’t prevent companies like this — in a country with no working regulators — from getting a running head start on their ambitious censorship plans.

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.

The Trump “Department of Justice’s” “antitrust division” dumped its unsurprising approval of the terrible Paramount Warner Brothers merger late on Friday in the hopes people wouldn’t notice it.

As we’ve noted the $111 billion megadeal is a historically harmful mess. Backed by billions in Saudi and Chinese cash (raising all sorts of foreign media influence concerns), the giant deal will saddle the company with so much debt that mass layoffs, consumer price hikes, and quality erosion from corner cutting are guaranteed. This happens with every major media merger, but especially when Warner Bros is involved.

And that’s before you get to the problems with Larry Ellison and his Bari Weiss brigades trying to destroy what’s left of already soggy U.S. corporate journalism and replace it with right wing, oligarch-friendly agitprop.

Regardless, you’ll be comforted to know that the Trump Justice Department looked at the deal closely and found that not only does it not hurt competition, it’s going to improve competition:

“The evidence reviewed and carefully analyzed by the Division indicates that, post-merger, competition in SVOD is not likely to be harmed. To the contrary, the combined firm is likely to increase competition by offering consumers a more robust competitive alternative to the larger SVOD offerings.”

That is, again, not how any of this works.

The massive debt created by these deals always results in mass layoffs, higher consumer prices, and lower quality product due to corner cutting. It’s not debatable. Arguing against this is like trying to have a fist fight with a running river. You just have to look back at, well, every single major media consolidation effort in the last fifty years. Which the DOJ didn’t because, well, they didn’t care.

You’ll still have major competitors to Paramount like Netflix, Comcast/NBC, Apple, and Disney, but in a country obsessed with consolidation that no longer has functional regulators, there’s really nothing stopping any limit of predatory behaviors — and additional consolidation — moving forward. There’s ongoing pretense that our consumer and labor protections still function. They don’t.

The “funny” part is the Trump DOJ even acknowledges that the history of Warner Brothers has been pockmarked by all manner of terrible competition-eroding consolidation. They just pinky swear that this time will somehow be different. Based on… nothing:

“Warner Bros. has been a repeated acquisition target in the media and entertainment industry. It is thus familiar to the Division from prior investigations and enforcement actions, including AOL/TimeWarner (2001), AT&T/TimeWarner (2018), and WarnerBros./Discovery (2022). The legacy of these transactions illustrates the challenges that arise when the commercial rationale for a deal lacks clear alignment with competitive incentives of the acquiring firm or the competitive evolution of the marketplace. In technology-driven industries, the disruptors of the recent past may quickly become the entrenched monopolists of the present day. It is with this historical experience and present enforcement sensitivity to the contestability of dynamic markets that the Division conducted a thorough investigation of the proposed transaction to assess whether the proposed transaction presented any harm to competition. The extensive investigatory record reviewed by the Division suggests that the impact of the transaction will be to increase competition across the media and entertainment ecosystem, with benefits for American consumers and workers.”

Fun fact: Paramount’s top lawyer is Makan Delrahim, Trump’s “DOJ enforcer” from the first administration. Delrahim personally worked to make sure Sprint could merge with T-Mobile during the first term. They promised that deal would result in untold synergies and new competition. Instead, 8,000+ people lost their jobs and U.S. wireless carriers immediately stopped competing on price. It’s been memory holed.

As far as the inevitable layoffs that always result from these deals (recall that AT&T’s merger with Warner Brothers and DirecTV resulted in 50,000 lost jobs), the DOJ simply declares that won’t be happening this time. Why? Because Larry and David Ellison said they’ll keep pumping out brick-and-mortar movies at the same or greater pace (they won’t):

“While taking seriously the potential impact of the proposed transaction on the creative community and domestic labor groups, the substantial evidence does not suggest a likelihood of reduction in output. That is because the demand for creative workers and labor is correlated with the Parties’ incentives to maintain or expand output. Thus, the expressed labor concerns do not raise actionable antitrust concerns.”

In three years, after the resulting company has fired 10,000+ employees, consumers have been price gouged to reduce debt, and the resulting flailing mess is acquired for half (or less) of the price, all the folks involved with this will have moved on to hyping other terrible ventures. Nobody will own any of this or engage in a single moment of meaningful reflection. That’s how this always works.

And the corporate press (and pundits like Matt Stoller) will still try to tell you that Republicans are to be taken seriously on antitrust reform.

Granted DOJ approval of a terrible merger isn’t the final word. State AGs have hinted repeatedly at a looming collaborative antitrust lawsuit that, at a minimum, is likely to drag any integration out considerably. If that lines up with a potential AI bubble pop and economic reverberations, that massive debt load from gobbling up CBS/Paramount and Warner Bros will be an even larger albatross.

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).

Michigan lawmakers are pushing legislation that wouldn’t just ban the sales of Chinese-made cars in the The Great Lakes State, it would ban cars with Chinese tags from even visiting. The Protecting America From Chinese Cars Act joins the Connected Vehicle Security Act aiming to protect U.S. car companies from cheaper Chinese EV competition in an election season where every campaign contribution dollar matters.

This new legislation is required, we’re told by Michigan Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin and Rep. Haley Stevens, because the country simply cares that much about jobs, consumer privacy, and national security:

“We’re gonna be aggressive here because Michigan jobs are on the line, but also so is national security. So close our border to Chinese vehicles and Chinese technology in the vehicles, even for day trips. That’s how aggressive we believe we need to be right now,” Stevens said while speaking at a policy conference.

Her partner in the legislation went much further. “They can certainly come across the border, drive up to Selfridge Air Force base, take some video with the car. The car is a traveling surveillance package. And all of that data that the car is collecting is being sent straight back to Beijing,” Slotkin said.”

So, a few things. One, it’s curious how normally very vocal “free market” Libertarian groups always mysteriously get quiet when this sort of obvious anti-competitive pandering to large corporate campaign donors pops up. Two, it’s adorable how Slotkin and Stevens want you to believe that simply banning Chinese cars somehow solves the major privacy issues inherent with modern, connected cars.

For one, U.S. and most of the overseas vehicles sold in the U.S. basically have nonexistent security standards. Carmakers collect an ocean of biometric, location and phone data, and then sell that data to a parade of largely unregulated data brokers, who in turn sell access to that data to any random asshole with money to spend — including domestic and foreign intelligence.

They then lie about it when asked. And if they do openly acknowledge it, they insist it’s okay because the resulting data has been “anonymized” (a term that means absolutely nothing).

Which is to say the Chinese, if they really want access to detailed U.S. street information and public movement data, don’t need to sell their cars in the U.S. to obtain it. Because Congress has been too corrupt to pass a meaningful internet-era privacy law any time in the last quarter century. In part because we’re greedy, but also in part because the U.S. government also buys this data to avoid getting warrants.

As a result of this country’s grotesque corruption, we’ve been awash in major privacy and national security scandals for 25 years, including the recent revelation that sensitive U.S. location data obtained by telecoms, apps, and every other device we use (whether it’s made in China or not) is being bought from data brokers by other countries and then utilized to track, target, and kill U.S. troops.

So maybe Stevens and Slotkin actually care about this stuff, but generally privacy is used as a lazy talking point by politicians who have other motivations; in this case making giant U.S. carmakers who don’t want to face meaningful price competition happy ahead of the midterms to ensure the campaign financing funding keeps flowing.

Slotkin was one of numerous Dems who supported the “banning of TikTok,” which really just involved offloading most of the app and its profits to Trump’s billionaire friends, who are as bad, if not worse, on issues like privacy and propaganda than ByteDance ever was. Now Slotkin is going around calling cheaper Chinese EVs “TikTok on wheels,” as if the whole Dem TikTok face plant never happened.

Pretending you’re being extra tough on privacy by going so far as to even ban cars with Chinese tags from visiting from Canada (as if Canadians want to visit the U.S. right now anyway) is particularly weird, performative, and ignores the real problem.

U.S. politicians need to pass a meaningful internet-era privacy law and tightly regulate data brokers, or shut up about how much they care about consumer privacy and national security.

Back in March I noted how the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr had announced a “new ban” on all routers made overseas (which is pretty much all of them). At the time we also noted how this was less of a ban and more of a shakedown, with router manufacturers required to beg the Trump FCC for conditional waivers (fees, favors, whatever) to continue doing business in the States.

Several router manufacturers (like Amazon’s Eero and Netgear) have subsequently received exemptions from the Trump administration, but because there is zero transparency to the process, we have no idea what they agreed to. Did they pay the Trump administration a bribe? Did they agree to surveillance backdoors for ICE operations? Who knows? Great stuff.

Now the cable lobby appears to be balking at the purported foreign router ban. In a petition filed with the FCC last week (spotted by Ars Technica) NCTA (The Internet & Television Association) — the cable industry’s biggest lobbying org — asked for a massive exemption from the restrictions, noting that they’re simply not practical in real-world practice:

“NCTA requests an expedited grant of this waiver to enable its members and their suppliers to navigate unavoidable supply chain shortages and prevent disruptions in the availability of broadband for NCTA members’ customers, while still fulfilling the rules’ national security and public safety purpose.”

So basically you’ve got a ban on foreign routers that is more about extortion than protecting national security. Which the cable industry says it can’t adhere to because AI hype, tariffs and unnecessary wars have driven up the costs of many internal router components, making adherence expensive if not impossible. Great stuff, very savvy policymaking by people who definitely know what they’re doing.

Part of the “foreign router ban” was supposed to involve forcing hardware manufacturing to return to the states. But because Trump and much of his administration have a fourth-grader-level understanding about how this stuff works (like his desire to suddenly have smartphones built in the U.S.), the cable industry’s filing notes that the “onshoring” of manufacturing and supply chains isn’t realistically possible either:

“Like AT&T, NCTA members are encouraging their suppliers to quickly pursue required onshoring, and, in the meantime, seek Conditional Approvals for Covered Routers as necessary. However, unavoidable supply chain shortages in critical substrate material and memory modules (including both volatile and nonvolatile memory) significantly constrain the industry. AT&T’s suppliers are not unique; the same impediments they are experiencing impose inevitable limitations on NCTA’s suppliers. Accordingly, NCTA seeks the same relief on behalf of its suppliers. Given the immediacy of these issues and the concrete harms that would result from disruptions to the availability of broadband to large swaths of US consumers and businesses, the grant of this Petition is warranted.”

These companies, many of which supported and enabled Trump, now have to pretend this all makes sense as they navigate a costly minefield of weird bullshit that won’t accomplish any of its purported goals.

This is all exceptionally chaotic and dumb, and it’s unlikely that Brendan Carr, who spends most of his time trying to censor comedians and whining about “wokeness,” is capable of managing the scale of this sort of overhaul — even if it were practical, which it isn’t.

When you read most press coverage of this router ban, they don’t really make it clear to readers that this is all very unworkable and stupid. Trump and his administration are given undeserved credit on competency and policy, as the press, companies, and policymakers all try to trip over themselves to normalize the sheer pointless stupidity and expense of it all.

If the country cared about national security we’d focus on corruption. We’d pass a meaningful modern internet privacy law. We’d shore up, staff, and properly fund cybersecurity regulators. We’d regulate data brokers. Instead we get a giant pile of unworkable extortion slop being overseen by weird zealots.

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.

On one hand, the Trump administration wants to destroy most corporate oversight, consumer protection, labor rights, and regulatory autonomy. On the other hand, the administration very much wants to abuse government power and wield regulatory oversight in all sorts of terrible ways that censor speech, stifle journalism, and enable corrupt cronyism.

I’ve long noted how FCC boss Brendan Carr in particular personifies this inconsistency. He wants to abuse FCC authority to bully companies he doesn’t regulate (TikTok) and stifle journalistic criticism of the president (ABC, CBS), but he also routinely wants to try and claim that his agency lacks the authority to do anything to protect consumers or hold telecom and media giants accountable for bad behavior.

Those inconsistencies came to a head last week when the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in favor of the Biden FCC’s attempt to fine AT&T and Verizon for spying on customer location data, selling access to that data to any random old nitwit, and failing to tell their paying customers about it.

A 2018 New York Times story showcased how stalkers, police, people pretending to be police, and the prison system routinely bought access to this data and then failed completely to secure it. Six years later the Biden FCC finally proposed fining wireless carriers $196 million ($91 million for T-Mobile, $57 million for AT&T, $48 million for Verizon) for the abuses.

But the efforts were upended by a 5th Circuit ruling last year declaring that the FCC fines somehow violated AT&T’s Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial (one of several arguments AT&T and Verizon lawyers through at a wall to see what would stick). The 5th circuit had been supportive of a broader Trump administration second term initiative to basically defang the entirety of regulatory corporate oversight.

The wireless carriers’ case leaned heavily on the Supreme Court’s June 2024 ruling in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, which declared that the SEC system for issuing fines violated the right to a jury trial. Verizon and AT&T lawyers insisted that they couldn’t be fined by the FCC for privacy violations, because it violated their Seventh Amendment rights.

So the Trump-stocked Supreme Court had a tricky choice. Do they support the administration’s effort to defang and neuter corporate oversight? Or do they protect their ambition to wield regulatory agencies as a blunt weapon? The Supreme Court decided to go with the latter, though the ruling shouldn’t be construed as any sort of good faith protection of consumer privacy rights or the public interest.

Only Clarence Thomas decided to buy into the telecom industry’s flimsy arguments.

“The Supreme Court got this one right,” John Bergmayer, Legal Director at consumer group Public Knowledge said in a statement. “AT&T and Verizon sold access to their customers’ location data, then failed to stop bounty hunters and even a rogue sheriff from using it to track people who had no idea they were being followed. The FCC investigated, found the carriers liable, and proposed penalties—which the carriers were always free to challenge in court.”

It’s a useful win, but it bucks the broader Trump court trend of declaring most regulatory agencies largely powerless to hold corporate power accountable across a wide variety of industries. And even here you’ll notice the FCC fines came six years after the initial revelations of wireless carrier misbehavior. They never would have come at all if not for the Biden FCC.

It may likely be years more before fines are collected (assuming Carr bothers), and they’ll still likely only comprise a fraction of the money made on the back of abusing consumer privacy. But in the golden age of corruption and incoherent Trump court rulings, you take whatever victories you can get.

So last week we noted how Meta’s AI support assistant doled out access to high-profile Instagram accounts after hackers simply asked for it. Outside of using a VPN to match the account holder’s region, the hackers didn’t have to do literally anything of note to convince the Meta AI chatbot to provide access, suggesting like so many AI offerings, Meta incompetently rushed undercooked software to market.

Meta has subsequently confirmed the issues and outlined the full scope of the problem. In a data breach notice filed with Maine’s attorney general’s office late on Friday and noticed by Techcrunch, Meta notified at least 20,225 people that their accounts had been compromised, including 30 people in Maine.

“The compromises allowed the hackers to take over the person’s entire Instagram and any linked accounts, including obtaining contact information, dates of birth, and profile information, as well as the ability to access the person’s posts, direct messages, and account activity, the notice reads.” 

Meta’s notice confirmed the problem began with “a vulnerability in an AI-assisted account recovery system for Instagram,” that was exploited to “perform password resets on Instagram user accounts.” Fortunately, the “trick” didn’t work if users had two-factor authentication enabled.

The company also claims it’s “unaware” of specifically what information was compromised during the three-week long hacking spree. Which is to say that, as with so many security breaches, the full scope of this could be worse than what’s been revealed.

Meta/Facebook is, so we’re clear, a company with 70,000 employees and a $1.57 trillion market cap. That they rushed an AI support chatbot into widespread service across roughly 3 billion active Instagram accounts is just a stunning level of incompetence.

As we saw with a different massive AI-related fuck up by Google last week (where all search queries were interpreted as AI prompts across the entire company’s search system), these companies are apparently in such a rush to justify their massive, lopsided AI spending that they’ve forgotten to do basic development testing and quality control.

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.