corruption – Techdirt (original) (raw)

GOP Budget Bill Includes Massive Spectrum Handout To Large Wireless Carriers, Hurting WiFi Speeds

from the handouts-everywhere dept

From the massive handout to already-wealthy Americans to the likely fatal cuts to Medicaid, there’s plenty to be disgusted by in the GOP Budget bill approved by Congress today.

But there’s also a lot of little gifts in there to corporations that will likely fly under the radar, including a massive new handout of valuable federal wireless spectrum holdings to wireless giants like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. It’s just the wireless industry’s latest reward for being utterly feckless, sniveling boot lickers in the face of historic authoritarian corruption.

Senator Ted Cruz recently killed a program to provide free Wi-Fi to poor, rural school kids because the plan upset large carriers like AT&T. That was followed up by efforts to pull billions in federal funding from states that attempt any sort of AI oversight. Cruz’s latest telecom industry-friendly effort involves a massive handout of valuable federal spectrum to wireless giants like AT&T.

Cruz’s plan could take frequencies away from Wi-Fi and other, more publicly beneficial wireless efforts, and reallocate them for the exclusive use of wireless carriers:

“The Cruz plan could take 200 MHz or more away from the 1,200 MHz currently allocated to Wi-Fi between 5.925 and 7.125 GHz. It could also take spectrum from the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), which goes from 3.55 to 3.7 GHz.”

That means potentially slower Wi-Fi standards overall. The Wi-Fi 6E standard added support for 6 GHz spectrum, and the in-development Wi-Fi 7 is supposed to take full advantage of the band. Neither will wind up being as useful, fast, and robust if Congress just dumps a massive trove of that spectrum into the lap of AT&T.

The move would likely be particularly harmful for efforts to provide major connectivity at places where a lot of people gather, including schools and libraries. The move also has the potential to harm Internet of Things (IOT) development, given 6GHz’s particular benefits for indoor wireless use.

It’s ironic (?) because Trump’s first term FCC boss Ajit Pai was key in allocating the 6 GHz band to Wi-Fi in the first place back in 2020. Now that he’s shifted over to being the top lobbyist for the wireless industry, he’s playing a starring role in ensuring this public resource is handed over to major carriers.

Before Pai was a lobbyist, his FCC argued that “making the whole band available for Wi-Fi “promotes more efficient and productive use of the spectrum,” while “repurposing large portions of the 6 GHz band for new licensed services would diminish the benefits of such use to the American public.”

Funny how a new job as a lobbyist changed his outlook. New Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr is also busy trying to transfer a massive swath of valuable spectrum from Dish Network (which the first Trump FCC created as a distracted from industry consolidation) to Elon Musk’s Starlink Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite broadband network.

While wireless industry lobbyists insist the industry needs more spectrum, privately, many carriers like AT&T are telling investors they don’t really need it. They’re just pushing for a major chunk of 6 GHz spectrum because they can, and thanks to Trump 2.0, we’ve entered the golden age of corruption where the public interest is the very last thing on anybody’s mind.

Filed Under: 6ghz, broadband, corruption, cronyism, fcc, lobbying, revolving door, spectrum, telecom, wireless

Our National Robocall Nightmare Is Getting Worse Under Donald Trump

from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept

Wed, Jul 2nd 2025 01:40pm - Karl Bode

According to the latest data on robocalls from the YouMail Robocall Index, the scale of the U.S. robocall problem has grown by another eleven percent year over year. U.S. consumers received just over 4.8 billion robocalls in May. We’ve normalized ceding our primary voice communications platforms to corporations, debt collectors, and scammers, and there’s every indication it’s going to get worse under Donald Trump.

While the federal government had been making some progress in getting wireless companies to belatedly adopt anti-spoofing technology, the Trump administration’s decision to lobotomize whatever was left of U.S. regulatory independence and consumer protection will indisputably leave regulators flat-footed in the ongoing battle to reclaim U.S. voice networks from scumbags.

The FCC still technically exists, but under Trump it’s become a weird and pointless grievance machine run by zealots. Its primary function during Trump’s term so far has been to harass companies for not being sexist or racist enough, or threaten media companies that dare do journalism critical of King Dingus.

Consumer groups like the National Consumer Law Center have repeatedly warned Congress that the key reason our robocall problem never gets fixed is because Congress and regulators routinely fixate on scammers and not on the “legit” companies like debt collectors that use the same tactics and routinely undermine reform and enforcement efforts.

YouGov’s latest study found that “just” 14 percent of May’s robocall total was from “scammers.”

Even before Trump, a corrupted court system had consistently limited the FCC’s authority to combat robocalls. Corrupt lawmakers and regulators, cowed into blind obedience by a massive, generational, cross-industry-lobbying campaign, like to keep the focus on scammers, when many “legit” companies, again, leverage the exact same tactics as scammers.

As a result, federal regulators refuse to hold large phone companies accountable for their lagging efforts to combat fraud and spam. Case in point: Truecaller’s U.S. Spam and Scam Report found that half of all major U.S. phone companies earned a D or F in their efforts to combat annoying robocalls and scams. Functional, developed countries (even many less developed ones) don’t have these problems.

So while the FCC is supposed to enforce robocall offenses and levy fines, terrible court rulings mean they aren’t allowed to collect fines. That’s left to the DOJ, which routinely just… doesn’t bother. As a result a comically small volume of the overall fines levied are ever actually collected. For example between 2015 and 2019 the FCC issued 208.4millioninrobocallfines,butcollectedjust∗∗208.4 million in robocall fines, but collected just 208.4millioninrobocallfines,butcollectedjust∗∗6,790.

And again, this is all before Trump 2.0. And before largely unregulated AI.

Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has been promising to take a hatchet to whatever is left of U.S. corporate oversight as part of his “delete, delete, delete” deregulatory initiative. Big telecoms and robocallers have been making it very clear they’re very excited about it. Debt collectors in particular are very eager to roll back already flimsy rules governing how badly they can harass people they already know can’t pay.

Like so many systemic U.S. problems, the robocall menace isn’t something that gets fixed without first embracing much broader corruption, campaign finance, lobbying, and legal reforms. That is, obviously and indisputably, not something that’s happening under Trump and his sycophantic regulators and telecom industry-coddling courts.

Filed Under: automation, corruption, cramming, fraud, phone calls, robocalls, scam, scammers, telecom

Supreme Court Cripples FCC Further, Making Robocall Enforcement Likely Impossible

from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept

Mon, Jun 30th 2025 05:23am - Karl Bode

Whether by dodgy Supreme Court ruling, executive order, mindless DOGE cuts, or captured regulators, the U.S. right wing, usually in lockstep with consolidated corporate power, are making massive, historic, and potentially irreversible inroads in destroying all federal corporate oversight, labor protections, public safety provisions, environmental standards, and regulatory autonomy.

I bolded that last bit because it’s not clear the U.S. press and a huge swath of the electorate (or even many people in policy circles) have figured this out yet.

A cornerstone of this effort has been the Supreme Court. Last year’s Loper Bright ruling effectively gutted any remaining independence of expert regulators, ensuring they literally can’t do much of anything without the explicit approval of a Congress too corrupt to function (and sometimes, not even then). If they do try, they’re all but guaranteed to be drowned in legal fights with deep-pocketed corporations for years.

You can easily see the immediate impact at agencies like the FCC. From net neutrality to privacy, the regulatory agency literally can’t accomplish any efforts to protect markets or consumers without being bogged down in endless legal quagmire, quite by design.

When the agency does shake off regulatory capture and actually try to act, Trump-stocked courts quickly kill the effort (see the 5th Circuit recently vacating an AT&T fine for repeatedly lying to customers about spying on their location data). Even basic, historically bipartisan and noncontroversial efforts to do things like help school kids get online are being destroyed by authoritarian Trump zealots.

Last week it got worse, with a new Supreme Court ruling that quietly crippled regulatory independence further, ensuring agencies like the FCC are even less able to do basic aspects of their jobs. The case, McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates, Inc. v. McKesson Corp., started more than a decade ago after McKesson sent unsolicited ads by fax to class members of the suit, including McLaughlin Chiropractic.

Class action plaintiffs in the case argued that the unsolicited faxes were in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which bans unsolicited communications with consumers without giving them a chance to opt out of the communications.

While the case was stumbling through our already broken court system, the FCC (under the leadership of now cable industry lobbyist Michael Powell) issued a ruling excluding online fax services from the TCPA. It was part of a steady erosion of our already flimsy consumer protections, and part of the reason the FCC already fails utterly to keep robocallers from annoying the shit out of you.

Consumer rights experts have long pointed out that shitheads and scammers have hijacked U.S. voice networks thanks to steady, generational lobbying by debt collectors and the marketing industry, who’ve ensured that oversight no longer functions. Still, every so often, the FCC would at least try to do something about the problem within the ever-shrinking confines of their legal authority.

The McLaughlin case found its way to the Supreme Court because the District Court found that it was required to follow the new FCC order, though it disagreed with the FCC’s interpretation of the TCPA. The District Court also felt constrained by the Hobbs Act, 1950s era legislation long interpreted as barring district courts from meddling with and undermining a federal agency’s interpretation of a statute.

On June 20th, the Supreme Court sided with the District Court by a 6-3 vote. The Supreme Court ruled that “The Hobbs Act does not preclude district courts from independently assessing whether an agency’s interpretation of the relevant statute is correct.”

This is, superficially, so fucking boring I probably lost most readers paragraphs ago. But it’s important and the majority’s convoluted legalese hides a much seedier agenda. Broadband industry consultant Doug Dawson put it this way in his excellent breakdown of what this will ultimately mean for the FCC:

“This is a significant ruling because it gives more explicit power to District Courts to disagree with an administrative ruling of a federal agency. It’s likely that there is a District Court somewhere in the country that will disagree with almost any federal agency ruling, meaning that it will be that much easier to tie up every decision made by the FCC or other federal agency in court.”

Bogging any and all government oversight of corporate power in endless legal hell is, of course, the entire point. But this effort has historically been dressed up by the right wing and “free market” Libertarian folks as some kind of noble rebalancing of constitutional power. The lie is that regulators were “running amok” (a joke if you’ve watched the FCC fail to do basic things), and this somehow “fixed” it.

The route the right wing is taking to effectively lobotomize corporate oversight is brutally efficient, but it’s also ironically so meandering, dull, and jam-packed with convoluted legalese, it barely gets covered by the press. In this case, only a handful of outlets bothered to mention the June 20th ruling.

But the real world harms of this entire movement will be kind of hard for the press and public to ignore. In the case of the FCC, it most assuredly means that the FCC will have even less authority to rein in shitty telecom monopolies. America’s already shitty robocall problem (a direct result of widespread corruption), will also absolutely be getting significantly worse:

“This new ruling also has practical implications since it explicitly weakens FCC enforcement of the TCPA. Among other things, the TCPA rules are the FCC’s primary tool for its effort to restrain the use of autodialers and artificial voices used in spam messages to consumers.”

You can see similar points made in the dissenting opinions. Great stuff! Very much the good faith, blue collar populism Trump is (ignorantly) lauded for.

The FCC’s inability to police scams and fraud is only a small part of the picture. More broadly, regulators that govern every sensitive aspect of your lives — from health insurance to undercooked car automation — are finding themselves literally incapable of standing up to corporate power in the United States. That’s going to have dramatic, often deadly impacts on every last aspect of your lives.

I genuinely don’t know what it takes to get the press and public to truly comprehend what’s happening. We’re going to see a steady parade of concussive, systemic failures to systems people to take for granted everywhere you look. All because rich corporate executives and their proxy “free market innovation” think tanks wanted to dress up unbridled greed as some sort of sophisticated, academic ethos.

The last year has been a brutal, generational win for unchecked corporate power. The check is coming due, and none of it’s going to be subtle.

Filed Under: consumers, corruption, fcc, loper bright, mclaughlin v mckesson, regulators, regulatory independence, robocalls, supreme court

We Have All Become Too Comfortable With Corruption

from the seems-bad dept

For years, we’ve written about the concept of “soft corruption,” which is the idea that there are certain actions that may not mean the full definition of corrupt practices in the legal sense, but are so obviously corrupt that they make people more cynical towards those who claim to represent our interests in the government.

Lately, of course, it feels like the corruption is becoming more and more blatant. But there’s something telling about how soft corruption works: it operates by creating an atmosphere where everyone implicitly understands the game, but no one says it out loud. Though, apparently, that may be changing. Teddy Schleifer got a fascinating quote from Wall Street investor (and LimeWire founder… and RFK Jr. anti-vax funder) Mark Gorton, who was one of Andrew Cuomo’s biggest donors in his complete flop of a New York City mayoral run/comeback from disgrace:

If you can’t read the screenshot, it reads:

As donors try to assess their next moves in the mayoral race, one of the biggest donors to Andrew Cuomo’s super PAC, the investor Mark Gorton, said he is likely to back Mamdani. That is because of the support that Mamdani had gotten from Brad Lander, who Gorton said he ranked first. “I feel like people misunderstood my $250,000 for Cuomo for real enthusiasm,” Gorton said in an interview. “It was basically, ‘Oh, looks like Cuomo is coming back. We don’t want to be shut out. Let’s try and get on his good side.’ That’s kind of how things work with Cuomo. It’s sad political pragmatism. I wish we lived in a world where those sort of things were not useful things to do.”

Read that again. “That’s kind of how things work with Cuomo.” A quarter-million dollar donation, described casually as protection money to avoid being “shut out” by a politician with a reputation for vindictive retaliation against those who cross him. And Gorton’s matter-of-fact tone suggests this isn’t scandalous—it’s just Wednesday in American politics.

This is notable on multiple levels, starting with the fact that one of Cuomo’s biggest donors didn’t even rank Cuomo first on the ranked-choice ballot. But, the real story is the honest admission from Gorton that the only reason he felt he needed to cough up a quarter of a million dollars to Cuomo was to stay in his good graces.

This is soft corruption in its purest form: not a quid pro quo, not a bag of cash, just the quiet understanding that those who don’t pay tribute risk being frozen out when decisions get made.

What makes Gorton’s admission so damning isn’t just what it says about Cuomo—it’s what it reveals about how normalized this has become. We’re not talking about some back-room deal or smoking-gun evidence. We’re talking about a major political donor casually explaining, to a reporter, that a $250,000 contribution was essentially protection money. The fact that he’s comfortable saying this publicly suggests that everyone already knows this is how the game works.

Of course, in this case, it may have also contributed to Cuomo’s loss to Zohran Mamdani. Even as some people remained critical or cautious of Mamdani’s policy proposals, he came across as real and earnestly wanting to help actual people in New York, whereas Andrew Cuomo came across as… Andrew Fucking Cuomo, deeply cynical and a career political opportunist with no fundamental principles or beliefs beyond the pursuit of power.

This kind of soft corruption creates a feedback loop that undermines democratic governance in ways that are harder to prosecute but just as destructive as outright bribery. When wealthy donors make contributions not because they believe in a candidate but because they fear retaliation, it distorts the entire political process. Politicians learn that intimidation works better than persuasion. Donors learn that access requires tribute. And the public learns that their representatives answer to whoever can afford the protection money.

It’s also worth noting how this normalizes the harder (and even more blatant) corruption we’re seeing at the federal level. When “stay on his good side” donations become routine political pragmatism, it’s a shorter leap to the kind of brazen pay-to-play schemes we’re witnessing with Trump’s corporate deal approval power and Meta’s $25 million protection payment. The soft corruption creates the cultural infrastructure that makes the hard corruption possible.

But, really, the main takeaway from this is that we’ve become so inured to the corruption all around us that major political donors can casually describe protection rackets to reporters without expecting any blowback.

When the quiet part gets said out loud—and nobody seems particularly surprised—we’ve crossed a line. We’ve moved from a system where corruption hides in shadows to one where it operates in plain sight, confident that we’ve all accepted it as just how things work.

The real question isn’t whether we’ll slide into a system where corruption operates openly—we’re already there. Trump’s presidency has made it clear that the “soft” and “hard” corruption aren’t sequential phases but parallel systems. While Gorton was cutting checks to stay in Cuomo’s good graces, Trump was openly selling access, handing out get out of jail free cards to those who help him, and now requiring corporate executives to kiss his ring for deal approvals.

What Gorton’s casual admission reveals isn’t a warning about where we might be headed—it’s evidence of how thoroughly we’ve normalized the foundation that makes brazen kleptocracy possible. When protection rackets become “sad political pragmatism” that donors discuss matter-of-factly with reporters, we’ve already crossed every meaningful line.

The question now is whether we have any capacity left to recognize that this isn’t normal, isn’t inevitable, and isn’t something we have to accept. Because once we’ve shrugged our way through both the soft corruption and the hard corruption, what’s left to protect?

Filed Under: andrew cuomo, corruption, mark gorton, nyc, politics, protection rackets, soft corruption, zohran mamdani

Corporate Deal Making Made Easy: Just Give Donald Trump Personal Power To Approve All Strategic Decisions

from the steelman-this-corruption dept

Here’s a fun corporate governance puzzle for you. Suppose you’re a foreign company trying to buy an American steel producer. The previous administration blocked your deal. The current president promised during his campaign to block it too, saying he’d stop it “instantaneously. Absolutely.” How do you get the deal approved?

If you guessed “write the president’s name directly into your corporate charter and give him personal veto power over your business decisions,” congratulations! You understand modern American capitalism.

That is, more or less, what happened with Nippon Steel’s acquisition of US Steel. The company has filed amended corporate documents with the SEC that contain what might be the most extraordinary governance provision in corporate history: a section that literally names “Donald J. Trump” and grants him veto power over everything from plant closures to pricing strategies to executive compensation.

Initial reporting described this as a “golden share” arrangement with the US government, but that turns out to be wrong in an important way.

Historically, when governments privatized state-owned companies, they sometimes kept what’s called a “golden share”—a special ownership stake that gives the government veto power over certain decisions even though they no longer run the company day-to-day or even have a direct economic stake in the company. The idea was “we’re selling this to private investors, but we still care about some strategic decisions.”

More recently, golden shares have become associated with China’s approach to tech companies. Beijing lets companies operate with private investment but maintains golden share arrangements that give the government control over key decisions. Indeed, supporters of a TikTok ban often point to the supposed “golden share” that the Chinese government holds in the company (something TikTok kinda denies, by suggesting it only applies to the Douyin subsidiary, and not ByteDance proper or international TikTok).

To simplify: golden shares are a way for countries to pretend they have privatized industries that are actually nationalized. You know: the kind of thing MAGA Republicans used to call socialism or communism.

Trump supporters hated such things just a few weeks ago. Senator Lindsey Graham recently promised legislation to “remove any existing company that has a golden share structure from any American exchange.” Apparently, that principled stance expires when the golden share goes to Trump personally.

That’s a tweet from Lindsey Graham, just months ago, claiming:

I will soon introduce legislation with my Senate colleagues that prevents any company that has a “Chinese golden share” from being listed on any American exchange and further, remove any existing company that has a golden share structure from any American exchange.

Which makes it pretty wild that the US has now created its own version, except weirder: instead of “the government” having control, Donald Trump personally has control.

The SEC filing contains what may be the most extraordinary corporate governance provision ever written:

ARTICLE VI

1. The Corporation shall not, either directly or indirectly by amendment, merger, consolidation or otherwise, without (in addition to any other vote required by law or this Certificate of Incorporation) (i) at any time when Donald J. Trump is serving as President of the United States of America, the written consent of Donald J. Trump or President Trump’s Designee, or (ii) at any other time, the written consent of the CMAs (as parties to the NSA) (and any such act or transaction entered into without such consent or vote shall be null and void ab initio, ultra vires and of no force or effect):

(a) alter, amend, repeal or waive any provision of this Certificate of Incorporation, except as contemplated by Article XII of the NSA;

(b) change the Corporation’s name from “United States Steel Corporation”, change the Corporation’s headquarters from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, or change the Corporation’s domicile to a jurisdiction other than a state, commonwealth, district or territory of the United States;

(c) reduce, waive or delay any Capital Investment (as defined in Schedule 2 to this Certificate of Incorporation), subject to receipt of necessary approvals and permits on an expedited basis;

(d) (A) prior to June 18, 2027, close, idle or sell the Corporation’s Granite City Works or (B) prior to June 18, 2035, close, idle or sell any other Production Location, except, in each case of (A) and (B), any Temporary Idling or in response to, or as a result of, a Force Majeure Event;

(e) fail to follow the recommendation of the CMAs (as parties to the NSA) with respect to Trade Actions;

(f) effect any material acquisition of a business that is domiciled in the United States that competes with the Corporation or its suppliers;

(g) implement pricing of the Corporation’s average spot sales price during any rolling six (6)-month period below eighty-five percent (85%) of the corresponding six (6)-month average for that applicable steel product as publicly published by the U.S. Midwest Domestic Hot-Rolled Coil Steel Index (i.e., Hot-rolled, Cold-rolled, and Coated steel); provided, that, for the avoidance of doubt, the average spot sales price will be calculated monthly and will be based on the average spot price for the applicable steel product for each individual customer transaction in the United States;

(h) accept direct financial assistance from the Japanese government, excluding (a) financing obtained from Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), Nippon Export and Investment Insurance (NEXI) or other equivalent Japanese government related financial institutions on commercially reasonable terms and (b) financial assistance for research and development in Japan;

(i) prior to June 18, 2030, reduce the base salary of employees of the Corporation; and

(j) make material changes to the Corporation’s existing raw materials and steel sourcing strategy in the United States, unless such changes are intended to benefit the Corporation, its operations or customers, which changes, among others, include: to the extent steel making raw materials or inputs are or become inadequate in quantity or quality; and initial imports to the Corporation to accelerate the transfer of technology or commissioning or qualification of facilities committed to being built in the United States (e.g., grain oriented electrical steel).

The practical effect is that Donald Trump now has personal veto power over US Steel’s pricing, plant closures, executive compensation, acquisitions, and corporate governance changes. The company literally cannot make major strategic decisions without Trump’s written consent.

There’s something genuinely novel here. American corporations do not typically write individual politicians into their governance documents. Some might even argue it looks quite corrupt.

Many people have claimed that this is nationalizing US steel and embracing socialism (some claiming this is good, many others more correctly being horrified by it).

That latter link, by trade expert Scott Lincicome, points out how absolutely ridiculous this is:

As we’ve already discussed (twice), there is no reason for the U.S. government to be involved in what is inarguably a small transaction involving two publicly traded companies that are both eager to seal the deal on mutually acceptable terms. The “national security” arguments for blocking or amending those terms are bogus: As I explained in December, “the U.S. military needs a tiny amount of domestic steel output and gets none of it from U.S. Steel,” and security experts across the political spectrum—including officials in both the Trump 1.0 and Biden administrations—saw no serious concerns. The government’s involvement was and remains about politics, and the whole drama serves as a serious black mark on U.S. international economic policy (and Biden’s time in office).

But calling this “nationalization” doesn’t quite capture what’s happening. Nationalization suggests the government taking control of strategically important industries for policy reasons. This is more like… “Trumpalization”? The personal capture of corporate governance by an individual politician.

The structure makes this clear. When Trump is president, he controls US Steel directly. When he’s not, control transfers to Treasury and Commerce—the “CFIUS Monitoring Agencies” referenced in the documents.

This dual structure—Trump when in office, federal agencies otherwise—makes it impossible to defend this as standard CFIUS oversight. Normal foreign investment reviews don’t write specific politicians into corporate charters. They create institutional safeguards, not personal fiefdoms. If this were really about national security oversight, the control would run through established government agencies with expertise and continuity, no matter who was President.

This seems unprecedented, and not in a good way. A private corporation has voluntarily surrendered key governance decisions to Donald Trump personally, apparently as payment for his approval of their deal. It’s the kind of arrangement you’d expect to see in a kleptocracy, not a constitutional democracy.

And somehow we’re supposed to pretend this is normal corporate governance.

Filed Under: cfius, corporate governance, corruption, donald trump, foreign ownership, golden shares
Companies: nippon steel, us steel

GOP Moves Forward With Plan To Pull Billions In Broadband Grants From States That Attempt ANY AI Oversight

from the the-dumbest-and-cruelest-people-imaginable dept

Wed, Jun 25th 2025 05:35am - Karl Bode

Republicans are currently trying to force through a massive and cruel new legislation package that will impose historic cuts in public services to the benefit of the nation’s richest assholes. The bill will add $3.8 trillion to the deficit over a decade and includes an unlimited number of major hand outs to the wealthiest individuals and biggest corporations.

One key part of the bill is a proposal to ban all AI oversight over the next decade. This is part of the so-far successful GOP effort to destroy all federal consumer protection, corporate oversight, environmental protections, and public safety oversight. Unfortunately the U.S. press hasn’t done a very good job illustrating what this means for everything from public health to national security.

The rich assholes and corporations pushing for this have a problem. If you kill federal consumer protection, states may rush in and fill the void. You saw this happen in areas like net neutrality and privacy. Courts have repeatedly ruled that if the federal government abdicates its responsibility for things like consumer protection, it can’t then turn around and tell states what they can do.

So to prevent states from doing basic corporate oversight the GOP has had to get creative.

For example, to try and stop individual states from regulating AI in the wake of federal apathy, the GOP is including provisions in their giant bill that will try to ban states from receiving their share of $45 billion in broadband grants if they engage in any oversight of AI giants in the next decade. Any oversight. Even bare-bones environmental standards (see: Elon Musk’s xAI pollution problem in Memphis, or similar concerns about Meta’s AI data center environmental impact on parts of Louisiana).

The idea was proposed in early June by Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and since then both the House and Senate have taken steps to codify it into the proposed bill.

“States that refuse to impose a moratorium will not get those dollars. Amba Kak, co-executive director of AI Now Institute, an independent research institute, said the change could leave states in an uncomfortable dilemma, choosing between broadband dollars and the power to protect their constituents from AI harm.

“I can imagine that for lawmakers, Republican or Democrat, whose districts rely on BEAD funding for broadband access to their rural communities, it’s really a strange bargain,” Kak said.”

Some of what was originally in the gargantuan, ugly-ass bill has been jettisoned after the Senate Parliamentarian found they violated Senate norms and the law. But the state and federal ban on all AI oversight remains somewhat intact.

Granted anything done through reconciliation can be undone through reconciliation, so a “ten year ban” isn’t written in stone. And there’s some indication that the idea’s architect, Ted Cruz, is struggling to gain full Republican support for the ploy as he tries to thread the needle. With any luck that may result in the proposal being watered down and/or killed.

Still, it’s stupid and harmful and opens the door to a lot of potential problems.

As we noted previously, these broadband funds had already been awarded. States had already spent years carefully crafting their fiber investment plans on the basis of awarded funds. Now, if they attempt oversight of an AI industry that’s shown itself so far to be amoral and reckless, they risk harming their own communities by leaving them stuck without broadband access.

Unlike many past U.S. broadband subsidy programs, a lot of thought was actually put into this infrastructure bill program (BEAD, or the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program). It’s a major reason its taken so long. They tried to accurately map broadband access. Many states tried to ensure that a lot of money went to popular community-owned alternatives, and not just giant telecoms. It took years of collaboration between states, feds, and local communities to jointly develop these plans.

But there are also several layers of irony for long-time Techdirt readers. The GOP’s plan is harming their longstanding allies in “big telecom” (who risk losing billions in subsidies) to the benefit of their supposed ideological enemies in “big tech.” They’re also likely delaying the implementation of a broadband grant program they spent most of election season whining about taking too long.

Republicans are also busy trying to redirect billions of BEAD program dollars to their increasingly incoherent billionaire benefactor Elon Musk. It’s all just utterly, transparently buffoonish and corrupt, yet our press (and even many policy people) seem intent on normalizing it.

There are still a lot of moving parts. Again, several terrible aspects of the bill violate the law and Senate procedural norms and may be jettisoned. Others, like the plans to sell 250 million acres of public land, are getting no shortage of bipartisan blow-back. There are still chances for the bill to get better or much worse; but even any sort of “best” case scenario will be a historically corrupt (and historically deadly) piece of gargantuan shit that utterly fails to serve the public interest.

Filed Under: ai, automation, bead, broadband, corruption, fiber, oversight, regulation, ted cruz

Trump Plan To Redirect Billions In Broadband Subsidies To Elon Musk Starts Seeing Blowback From States

from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept

Wed, Jun 11th 2025 05:27am - Karl Bode

After spending election season whining that the program was taking too long, Republicans have been introducing massive new changes to a $42.5 billion infrastructure bill broadband grant program (BEAD) that not only don’t serve the public interest, but could also introduce years of potential new delays.

Their changes are twofold: one, they want to strip away requirements that the resulting taxpayer-funded broadband is (gasp) affordable to poor people. Two, they want to slather Elon Musk’s low-earth-orbit satellite service Starlink with billions in new subsidies, redirecting that money away from other, higher-capacity, better alternatives (like community-owned open access fiber).

Speaking last week to a Senate Appropriations Committee, Trump administration Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick confirmed that the NTIA will “soon” issue a new Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) that states will have 90 days to respond to. That will require states to basically reboot years of work in developing their state broadband plans, something outside groups say could take years.

It’s important to understand that numerous states were just a few steps away from deploying next-generation fiber to communities that had never had internet access before when Republicans decided they’d “fix” the program by shifting billions in funds to Elon Musk’s expensive, congested, environmentally problematic satellite service. This while the press writes numerous stories about “Elon Musk leaving politics” and he and Donald Trump have their public falling out (which has now been more muted).

The Western Governor’s Association was quick to send a polite letter to Lutnick noting that “significant required alterations to state and territory plans could cause further delays by up to 12 months,” which again seems like a generous estimation. Senate Democrats also wrote a very polite May 30 letter to Lutnick lamenting the unnecessary delays:

“States have already developed plans to address these needs, and restarting or slowing down the process will only hold back progress,” the Democrats’ letter said. “States must maintain the flexibility to choose the highest quality broadband options, rather than be forced by bureaucrats in Washington to funnel funds to Elon Musk’s Starlink, which lacks the scalability, reliability, and speed of fiber or other terrestrial broadband solutions.”

When the former boss of the BEAD program, Evan Feinman, left his post in March he noted how numerous states were just steps away from launching their massive fiber expansions. Feinman wasn’t subtle about his belief that the revisions are a cronyistic hand out to Elon Musk that will actually harm the goal of bringing affordable, reliable, and fast internet access to the masses.

“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” Feinman said.

The original BEAD program prioritized fiber investment because high-capacity, future proof fiber is the best use of taxpayer money. Ideally you want to drive fiber into as many areas as possible, then fill in the rest with 5G wireless and fixed wireless. After that, you can fill in any remaining gaps with LEO satellite broadband options.

Again though, LEO satellite lacks the capacity to scale to actually address U.S. broadband gaps, and is too expensive for the rural Americans most in need of access. Not only is Starlink expensive and increasingly congested, it harms scientific research and there’s evidence that the disposable nature of the satellites as they burn up in orbit may ultimately erode the ozone layer.

But because Elon Musk runs the company, Republicans think Starlink is some kind of magic. Unfortunately for many Trump supporters, money directed to Starlink is money directed away from better options, including the cooperatives, city-owned utilities, and municipal broadband operations providing locals gigabit fiber, sometimes for as little as $55 a month.

“What this probably means is that most states will have to re-write their grant proposals and rerun their grant programs from scratch, and then NTIA will have to approve them,” Gigi Sohn, the Director for the American Association for Public Broadband, said in a post to LinkedIn. “This makes disbursement in 7 months largely a fantasy.”

Forcing your constituents to use shittier, more expensive broadband is very on brand for Republicans, who, in just the last year, have declared that the government helping poor people afford broadband is unconstitutional, killed a popular program providing $30 broadband discounts for low-income Americans, effectively banned holding your broadband ISP accountable for literally anything, and even banned schoolkids from getting access to free Wi-Fi hotspots.

In its place is basically a federal policy that rubber stamps every last whim of terrible regional monopolies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast. And rich benefactors like Elon Musk. Anybody consciously voting for this level of sleazy self-serving corruption shouldn’t be allowed to operate heavy machinery.

Filed Under: bead, broadband, corruption, fcc, fiber, gigabit, grants, infrastructure, states
Companies: spacex, starlink

Trump 2.0 Is Proving To Be A Bonanza For More Harmful Consolidation Among Broadband Giants

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

Mon, Jun 9th 2025 05:27am - Karl Bode

Despite the ongoing fake promise of “populism,” so far Trump 2.0 has proven to be a bonanza for telecom giants seeking to get even bigger. As usual that means higher broadband prices and shittier broadband service are just over the horizon.

As a reward for promising to be more racist, Verizon recently saw its 20billionmergerwithFrontierapprovedbytheTrumpFCC.ComcastisrumoredtobeeyeingamergerwithT−Mobile.AndcablegiantCharterispushingforanew[20 billion merger with Frontier approved by the Trump FCC. Comcast is rumored to be eyeing a merger with T-Mobile. And cable giant Charter is pushing for a new [20billionmergerwithFrontierapprovedbytheTrumpFCC.ComcastisrumoredtobeeyeingamergerwithT−Mobile.AndcablegiantCharterispushingforanew34.5 billion merger with Cox Communications. As usual, the two companies are promising that more industry mergers will somehow make the sector more competitive:

“This combination will augment our ability to innovate and provide high-quality, competitively priced products, delivered with outstanding customer service, to millions of homes and businesses,” Charter CEO Chris Winfrey said in the press release. “We will continue to deliver high-value products that save American families money, and we’ll onshore jobs from overseas to create new, good-paying careers for U.S. employees.”

We’ve got forty years of hard data illustrating that this is not what happens when you let the U.S. telecom industry consolidate. Even if two merging companies don’t directly compete, the resulting telecom companies tend to be more politically powerful than ever. And one of their favorite pastimes involves abusing that political power to crush all competition and regulatory oversight.

Charter is, you might recall, the company that almost got kicked out of New York State after it lied to regulators repeatedly about whether it was meeting requirements fixed to its merger with Time Warner Cable.

These mergers never serve the public interest. And America’s historically too corrupt to care. Such consolidation helps temporarily boost stock valuations and generate rich tax cuts, while overcompensated executives celebrate their savvy deal-making acumen. The public harms of consolidation is then swept under the carpet with the help of an equally consolidated corporate press and captured regulators.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

So Trump 2.0 is both encouraging more of this harmful consolidation at the same time they’re taking an absolute hatchet to whatever was left of regulatory autonomy and corporate oversight. It’s the culmination of a generation of delusion by right wingers and Libertarian “free market” guys who (quite falsely) claim that unchecked monopolization results in near-mystical Utopian outcomes.

It doesn’t: letting telecom giants like Verizon and Comcast get bigger while you dismantle government oversight only results in those giants doubling down on existing bad behaviors. Again, that always means exploiting regional geographic monopolies and duopolies to drive up prices, undermining small business, fraudulently obtaining more taxpayer subsidies, and eroding the exact free market competition the supporters of these deals claim to be such huge proponents of. It’s utterly theatrical.

The same thing is playing out in media, with companies like Time Warner Discovery calling for even more mergers and greater media consolidation under Trump — at a time when the enshittification from such consolidation couldn’t be any more apparent. That’s simultaneously resulting in shittier journalism, higher prices, lower quality choices, and a flood of corporatist bullshit and right wing propaganda.

U.S. broadband is a patchwork of regional monopolies, coddled by corrupt federal and state lawmakers, who’ve worked tirelessly to demolish anything closely resembling competition in local broadband markets. U.S. media is a lazy patchwork of consolidated corporate giants obsessed with “growth for growth’s sake.” More mindless consolidation is the exact opposite of what these industries need.

We’ve taken that already broken model and somehow managed to make it dumber and more harmful under Trump 2.0, by fusing it all to the erratic whims of authoritarian zealots. Zealots looking to further exploit the merger approval process in exchange for these companies’ promises that they’ll be more racist and shittier than ever. Great stuff. What could go wrong?

Filed Under: antitrust, broadband, competition, consolidation, corruption, fcc, mergers, oversight, racism, regulation, trump
Companies: charter, cox communications

Republicans Rewrite Infrastructure Broadband Grant Program To Give Elon Musk Billions, Potentially Delaying Deployments By Years

from the fixing-things-by-breaking-them dept

Fri, May 30th 2025 05:37am - Karl Bode

So you might recall that Republicans recently have been making a gigantic stink about how the $42.5 billion in broadband grants included in the infrastructure bill hadn’t actually connected anybody yet. I pointed out in detail why things have been admittedly slow; a big reason being that we had to completely remap broadband access after decades of corruption and incompetence.

After whining endlessly about the slow cadence of this particular broadband grant program (the Broadband Equity, Deployment, and Access program, or BEAD), Republicans, earlier this year, began making changes to it that largely helped giant telecoms and Elon Musk.

They’re eliminating requirements that resulting broadband be affordable for poor people. They’re eliminating already fairly decorative labor and climate build requirements. And most importantly, they’re rewriting the language so less money goes to local, high-capacity fiber ISPs, and more money goes to Elon Musk’s congested, expensive, Ozone-layer-depleting Starlink satellite broadband service.

The changes are, ironically enough, likely to cause some major additional delays in people actually getting broadband as states are forced to retool their compliance strategies after years of planning. One organization, the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society, estimates that the changes could result in up to a two year additional delay in people getting broadband:

“Mandated changes—if they come from either Congress or the U.S. Department of Commerce—could force states to rerun their entire BEAD sub-grantee selection processes. The resulting delays will cost ISPs across the country hundreds of millions of dollars in time and resources to plan for the new program guidelines and reapply for awards.”

Again, very ironic that Republicans would spend much of the last year complaining about delays in this program, only to introduce massive new delays. And not delays that are actually beneficial to the public, but delays that mostly help their buddies at AT&T/Comcast/Verizon and Elon Musk.

Apparently under the belief he was helping matters, Ezra Klein recently jumped into the broadband debate to make the unoriginal observation that government should make big promises and deliver on them. But his analysis of broadband was simplistically puerile; most of it seemed based on Republican angst, and ignored the real progress made on affordable fiber via ARPA and other initiatives.

Klein also ignored that a major reason BEAD moved slowly was due to corruption and telecom lobbyists trying to weaken and change the bill to their direct benefit (softening speed definitions, weakening map coverage, preventing competitors from getting grants). Corruption is something Klein’s new book tends to downplay as a primary issue of concern, despite its starring role in U.S. dysfunction.

BEAD was never going to win any awards for government efficiency. The bill was passed in 2021, yet states were only just starting to finalize deployment plans. But again there were some good reasons for this; creating a vast coalition of federal and local governments tasked with completely remapping broadband access, then vetting applicants to ensure they could deliver — takes a little time.

The great irony is that most of these delays were the direct result of government not wanting to repeat mistakes in past broadband government subsidy programs. Such as the FCC’s Rural Deployment Opportunity Fund, which was a giant boondoggle under the first Trump administration because the government didn’t do its homework on broadband mapping, or grant applicant credibility.

BEAD’s slower cadence was a direct result of fighting corruption and trying (with mixed results) to do things the right way. It was on the cusp of delivering real-world affordable fiber when Republicans showed up to fix things. By, again, making the resulting, reconstituted program take longer and deliver less. Ingenious. We are truly living in the golden age of populist abundance.

Republican (and Ezra Klein’s) angst over the slow speed of the BEAD broadband grant managed to get the press all hot and bothered for months. I’d wager that this angst curiously won’t be repeated now that pointless new delays were introduced by Republicans to the direct benefit of Elon Musk.

Filed Under: abundance, bead, corruption, elon musk, ezra klein, fiber, grants, high speed internet, infrastructure bill, satellite

from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept

Tue, May 27th 2025 05:24am - Karl Bode

Last year Trumplicans killed a popular program that provided poor people with $30 off of their monthly broadband bill. The FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) was, unsurprisingly, very popular, with more than 23 million Americans benefitting at its peak.

At the time, the GOP claimed they were simply looking to save money. The real reason the program was killed, of course, was that the ACP was popular with their constituents (the majority of ACP participants were in red states) and they didn’t want Dems to take credit during an election season.

A recent report by The Brattle Group actually found that the 7−7-7−8 billion annual taxpayer cost of the program generated between 28.9and28.9 and 28.9and29.5 billion in savings thanks to expanded access to affordable internet, remote work opportunities, online education tools, and remote telehealth services. In other words: the program more than paid for itself via downstream benefits (something DOGE dudebros and other Trump cultists refuse to think about).

But new data coming out of Ookla indicates that the Republican attack on the ACP had a measurable, harmful impact on the U.S. broadband digital divide. Ookla’s full data shows some progress in connecting urban residents to speeds of at least 100 Mbps, but major problems in shoring up access to rural communities, especially in rural parts of Washington, Oregon, Illinois, Missouri and New Mexico:

“We suspect that some of this [broadband divide] was attributed to the ACP ending,” Sue Marek, editorial director at Ookla and author of the report, told CNET. “We might see some more examples of that by the end of 2025.”

These are, once again, many parts of the country that tend to vote in favor of Trump. In large part because we’ve been slowly killing off critical journalism and replacing it with either corporatist infotainment or right wing propaganda that obscures the impact of their voting choices.

But the truth is, a lot of recent broadband progress has been made thanks to legislation passed in 2021 that Republicans opposed. That includes the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which included $25 billion in subsidies that have gone to a lot of community-owned or cooperative fiber expansion efforts. In many of those markets, rural users are seeing dirt cheap gigabit fiber access for the first time ever.

We’re also poised to see an infusion of fiber expansion thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill and BEAD (Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment) program, which is leveraging an additional $42.5 billion in subsidies flowing to the states. There’s been some fussing (by both the GOP and pundits like Ezra Klein) about the delays in getting this BEAD money to market; though a big reason for said delays was the need to completely remap U.S. broadband access after years of corruption-plagued policy failure.

BEAD money should start flowing this year, with a high discrepancy state by state based on which party is in control. Republican-controlled state BEAD money is more likely to be thrown in the lap of Elon Musk or AT&T and Comcast. Democrat-controlled state BEAD money is more likely to be leveraged to build open access middle mile networks, fund popular community owned broadband, or bolster local competition.

So U.S. state broadband data in ten years or show should tell a very interesting story.

These programs–from the ACP to ARPA and BEAD–were almost exclusively the byproduct of Democratic policy (not to suggest Democratic broadband policy hasn’t been without its own ugly problems and corruption issues). Republicans voted against all of them — yet will routinely try to take credit for the programs among their local, rural constituents.

Democrats at least make an effort. Republican telecom policy has involved either coddling monopoly power, destroying the regulatory ability to hold shitty telecoms accountable, or taking an illegal wrecking ball to Congressional-passed laws like the Digital Equity Act (which mandated that government and industry must make very basic efforts to ensure affordable broadband is deployed equitably).

Right now, a key priority for the administration is rewriting key parts of the infrastructure bill in a bid to redirect billions of subsidies away from better alternatives to Elon Musk’s expensive, congested, and environmentally harmful Starlink satellite broadband service. And lobotomizing whatever’s left of federal broadband consumer protection standards.

Official Republican policy on telecom is cronyism, corruption and making everything shittier and more expensive to the benefit of a handful of rich men and their companies (see: Ted Cruz’s latest effort to make it harder for rural school kids to get broadband). Yet when you read the vast majority of mainstream corporate journalism on telecom policy, this undeniable fact isn’t made clear to readers or the electorate.

Republicans rarely have to take agency for poor and unpopular telecom policy in most of the U.S. press, even when data repeatedly shows said policies documentably and intentionally harms their own purported constituents. It is, as they say, why we can’t have nice things.

Filed Under: access, affordability, bead, corruption, digital divide, fiber, high speed internet, infrastructure bill, maps, state broadband
Companies: ookla