fcc – 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

from the unavoidable-slowdowns dept

Tue, Jul 1st 2025 05:27am - Karl Bode

Republicans are rewriting an infrastructure bill grant program to redirect billions of dollars to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite broadband service. The claim is that this is necessary because Starlink is the perfect solution for the country’s rural broadband users and deserves this money. The reality is that Starlink continues to show that it lacks the capacity or affordability to actually accomplish the job.

Low-Earth Orbit satellite broadband services like Starlink have their uses, but will always be dealing with capacity constraints. That means higher prices, weird restrictions, and, as of November 2024, a $100 “congestion charge” for a service that’s already too expensive for many of the rural Americans who could most benefit.

It didn’t take long for that “congestion charge” to soar to 500insomeareas.Nowit’s[alreadyrisenashighas500 in some areas. Now it’s [already risen as high as 500insomeareas.Nowit’salreadyrisenashighas750 in states like Washington as Starlink is forced to try and deter users in some markets from using the increasingly congested network:

“The change can crank up the starting price simply to own the Starlink dish on a residential plan to $1,099.”

Other parts of the country see no congestion charge, but there’s no guarantee that they won’t see one down the line as the network subscribership grows. It’s also very likely the company will increasingly have to resort to doing things like throttling higher definition videos, or engaging in other network management tricks to try and keep the service semi-reliable.

You might recall that Republicans and Elon Musk threw a hissy fit a few years ago when the Biden FCC prioritized “future-proof” fiber and higher-capacity 5G services over Starlink in previous government subsidy programs, (correctly) expressing concerns that the service lacked the capacity to provide consistently reliable speeds on the taxpayer dime.

Ever since then Republicans and Musk have been working tirelessly to “correct” this oversight, to the point where they’re now rewriting a major $45 billion infrastructure bill broadband grant program to ensure Starlink gets a massive portion of taxpayer subsidies. Many right wingers, like c-tier comedian turned podcaster and fashy-apologist Joe Rogan, act as if Starlink is akin to magic.

But the technology has been criticized for harming astronomical research and the ozone layer. Starlink customer service is largely nonexistent. It’s too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access. The nature of satellite physics and capacity means slowdowns and annoying restrictions are inevitable, and making it scale to permanently meet real-world demand is expensive and not guaranteed.

These are all things Republican Elon Musk ass kissers either don’t know, or don’t care about as they work to reward their billionaire benefactor. It will be up to their constituents to figure it out later. But money redirected to Starlink is money redirected to cheaper and better broadband alternatives, including super cheap gigabit fiber access and community-owned and operated broadband networks.

So again, Starlink is a nice step up if you’re in the middle of nowhere, lack any other connectivity options, can afford it, and don’t care about its potential environmental impact. But it shouldn’t be taking priority in terms of taxpayer subsidies. Unless, of course, you only care about kissing Elon Musk’s ass and don’t actually care about the constituents you claim to serve.

Filed Under: broadband, congestion, elon musk, fcc, fiber, high speed internet, low earth orbit satellite, subsidies, taxpayers, telecom
Companies: spacex, starlink

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

Supremes Reject Radical Right Wing Effort To Destroy $8 Billion FCC Rural Broadband Subsidy Program

from the good-decisions,-bad-intentions dept

Fri, Jun 27th 2025 09:41am - Karl Bode

In a day full of terrible Supreme Court rulings there was one bit of good news: in their FCC v. Consumers’ Research ruling, the court rejected a bid by radical right wing Republicans to destroy a popular $8 billion FCC program that connects poor and rural schools and communities to the internet.

The plaintiff in this case, Consumers’ Research, isn’t really a consumers’ group. It’s a right wing political project designed to put a veneer of pleb-friendly populism on efforts to destroy corporate oversight. The organization (which maintains a part of their website tasked with tut-scolding “woke” companies) sued the FCC claiming that the Universal Service Fund (USF) was unconstitutional.

The USF applies a small surcharge on traditional phone lines to fund broadband expansion to rural unserved locations (of which the U.S. has a lot thanks to rampant telecom monopolization and the corruption that coddles it). The program has had some problems with subsidy fraud in decades’ past, but more recently it’s been cleaned up and proven hugely beneficial for rural communities.

Consumers’ Research claimed the FCC was illegally overstepping its authority by levying the fee. The Trump-stocked Fifth Circuit, pretty radically, agreed with them last summer.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 (with Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissenting) in favor of the FCC. It’s a curious reversal of a broader (and very successful so far) Republican court trend attempting to destroy all remaining government oversight of corporate power and dismantle whatever’s left of regulatory independence. You know, for rural small town populism or whatever.

A Good Ruling, Driven By Less Ethical Motivations

Why did the right-wing Supreme Court buck its broader trend of boxing in regulatory autonomy? Largely because of the influence of telecom giants like AT&T. While the USF does genuinely fund a lot of useful broadband expansion, it also throws billions of dollars into the laps of telecom giants like AT&T, Verizon, Charter, T-Mobile, and Comcast.

These telecoms were opposed to destroying the USF for what should be obvious reasons. And there had been hints for several months that they had managed to convince several Supremes that the USF should be maintained. Though it speaks volumes that Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch thought nothing of destroying a hugely-popular program built over decades with broad bipartisan support.

But the remaining Republican majority rejected Consumers’ Research because the telecom industry has a plan underway to get much more taxpayer money in the next few years.

With traditional phone lines dying, the USF program risks running out of money. So there’s been a long-standing conversation about how to expand the contribution base so you can keep funding the program and keep connecting rural schools, libraries, and communities to the internet. This conversation, as is usually the case in the U.S. telecom policy, is being dominated by self-serving giants like AT&T.

AT&T and their friends have a proposal they’ve been planning for years: they want to have the FCC apply a new tax on streaming video services like Netflix to theoretically help fund broadband expansion.

On the surface, having tech companies help fund broadband expansion isn’t a terrible idea. The problem is that companies like AT&T have an extremely long history ripping off subsidy programs, overbilling schools, and pocketing money that was earmarked for rural communities. And Republicans have an even longer history of badly mismanaging subsidy programs and ignoring corporate subsidy fraud.

So what’s far more likely to happen is the USF gets dramatically expanded once the FCC has a working voting Republican majority, and steadily becomes a much larger and much worse-managed slush fund that dumps billions in additional money in telecom monopolies’ laps in exchange for fiber networks that are mysteriously somehow never fully deployed.

There’s an obvious a tension here between right wing and Libertarian zealots who want to destroy all federal governance, and right wing grifters who want to steal taxpayer money in new and creative ways. There’s also tension within telecom monopolies’ like AT&T’s interest to destroy all remaining FCC oversight, yet keep the FCC just functional enough to keep slathering it with billions in taxpayer dollars.

There are good faith people (including consumer groups) who support some sort of streaming tax expansion just to keep the USF alive. But in a government where the expansion will be literally written by AT&T lawyers and overseen by weird lackeys like Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr, I think assuming this will be done and enforced competently and ethically is delusional wishcasting.

Such a Netflix tax would generate untold billions in additional subsidies for telecoms, at the cost of much higher streaming prices for consumers. Which should help you understand why some members of the Republican Supreme Court suddenly and mysteriously grew an uncharacteristic conscience. Kill the USF, and you kill the opportunity to make telecom monopolies significantly wealthier in the years to come.

Filed Under: big tech tax, brendan carr, broadband, consumers' research, fcc, fiber, netflix tax, rural, slush fund, subsidy, supreme court, taxpayers, telecom, usf

The Trump Admin’s Dish Network Con Reaches Its Ultimate Conclusion: Failure, Bankruptcy, And Rich New Spectrum Holdings For Elon Musk

from the one-big-giant-head-fake dept

Mon, Jun 16th 2025 05:26am - Karl Bode

Back in 2019, the Trump DOJ and FCC cobbled together a dumb plan to try and hide the problems created by their rubber stamping of the competition-eroding T-Mobile and Sprint merger: they’d pretend they were helping satellite TV company Dish Network create a new 5G wireless network out of vibes and twine. As we noted back in 2019, the entire gambit was doomed to failure for a long list of reasons.

Dish never had any real experience building wireless networks. The Trump administration had no real interest in fostering competition (its “antitrust enforcer” at the time used his personal phone to help the companies dodge regulatory scrutiny). Multiple companies always wanted the spectrum Dish was collecting, and nobody in wireless really wanted to have to seriously compete on price.

Dish CEO Charlie Ergen, who had long been hoarding valuable spectrum, needed to pretend to the government he was serious about using it, and not just waiting for its value to appreciate so he could cash out later. The entire plan always seemed like a decorative con.

Fast forward to 2025 and the Dish 5G network is a joke nobody really uses, and Dish owner Echostar is now preparing for bankruptcy, precisely as we predicted all along.

Elon Musk’s Starlink wants a lot of the spectrum Dish is using in the 2GHz band. Verizon and AT&T would likely enjoy owning some of Dish’s other spectrum assets. So Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr is suddenly pretending to care about holding corporations accountable, and has launched a new inquiry into whether Dish is stringing regulators along (which I’d argue the Trump FCC knew was the plan all along).

Echostar has been missing millions of dollars of interest payments on its notes. Once it’s threatened by bankruptcy, it likely will find itself in a vulnerable position with the Trump FCC:

“A looming potential bankruptcy proceeding may force EchoStar back to the negotiation table with the FCC.”

And that “negotiation” most likely ends with the FCC forcing Dish to sell its spectrum assets to Elon Musk, Verizon, and AT&T. Outlets like the Wall Street Journal will of course cover this unskeptically as if the FCC is doing a serious investigation and this is all very serious business.

But it’s all been the greasiest of cons. A half-assed network was built as cover for industry consolidation and spectrum hoarding. When it inevitably failed, it gets stripped for parts with the help of captured regulators in dutiful sway to a billionaire. Dish CEO Charlie Ergen sells his rich hoard of spectrum and heads off into retirement, while the company’s employees get shitcanned.

The wireless industry consolidates further, competition erodes, consumer prices continue to rise, and captured regulators and U.S. business leaders all ignore all of the problems they helped create, and we all forget about the half-decade-worth of fictions they leveraged to pull the wool over the press’ and public’s eyes. I’d still argue that all of this was very likely the plan from the start.

All very serious business and extremely innovative stuff in a very serious country full of savvy and very serious deal-makers.

Filed Under: competition, consolidation, elon musk, fcc, spectrum, telecom, wireless
Companies: at&t, dish, echostar, spacex, starlink, verizon

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

Unqualified Right Wing Zealot Gavin Wax Poised To Be Nominated To Trump’s FCC

from the weirdos-and-zealots dept

Mon, Jun 9th 2025 01:10pm - Karl Bode

Last week, Republican FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington abruptly announced that he would be stepping down from the FCC. Simington gave all of two-days notice of his departure, which was odd not only because of the short notice, but because it delays Trump Republicans from getting a voting majority allowing them to actually do anything real.

In his wake, right wing media outlets like Fox News are suggesting that Simington may be replaced by Gavin Wax, a far right wing MAGA cheerleader. Wax has absolutely no serious qualifications for the role, but right wing outlets like Fox News are already busy pretending otherwise:

“Gavin Wax is being seriously considered by the White House to fill the vacancy that will be left by Commissioner Simington’s departure,” a source close to the FCC told Fox News Digital. “He’s seen as a strong conservative voice on tech and media policy, with close ties to key figures in both the policy and political arenas.”

Wax, an unabashed Trump earlobe nibbler, was promoted as Simington’s Chief of Staff a few months ago. If confirmed by the Senate, the 31-year-old Wax would be the youngest FCC Commissioner to ever serve. Wax has no meaningful experience in media and telecom policy outside of occasionally whining about media companies that don’t kiss Donald Trump’s ass:

“Once President Trump is back in office,” Wax said at the 2023 NYYRC annual dinner, according to Politico, “we won’t be playing nice anymore. It will be a time for retribution. All those responsible for destroying our once-great country will be held to account after baseless years of investigations and government lies and media lies against this man.”

Wax has been criticized by the Southern Poverty Law Center for, among other things, overseeing a private right wing Facebook chat from 2014-2017 where members “frequently used racial slurs, made jokes about the Holocaust and discussed topics like ‘race realism.'”

Wax is clearly being considered to help FCC boss Brendan Carr’s campaign to launch bogus investigations into media and telecom companies the administration either deems not suitably racist enough, or for the cardinal sin of occasionally doing journalism loosely critical of Trump.

In recent months, Wax has been co-writing ignorant op-eds with the softer-spoken Simington calling for the DOGE-like obliteration of whatever is left of the FCC’s consumer protection and corporate oversight capabilities, and the elimination of any government programs that help minority communities or the poor (such as helping poor rural schoolkids get online to do homework).

We’ve noted how the Trump administration’s effort to lobotomize regulatory independence will ultimately leave the FCC without any authority to do much of anything real, outside of grievance-fueled tirades and fake investigations by the kind of people who get angry that Star Wars now has more black people.

Simington himself was never qualified for his role. Wax is somehow worse; a radical MAGA zealot with a long history of dodgy bedfellows (including white supremacists), who has less-than-zero qualifications to be making important choices about absolutely any of this. In other words: perfect for the Trump administration and it’s bizarre (and often illegal) war on equity and corporate oversight.

The selection of Wax is particularly insulting to actual adults, given the 2023 railroading of the FCC nomination of popular consumer advocate Gigi Sohn in 2023. Sohn’s nomination to the agency was scuttled after a joint GOP and telecom/media industry homophobic smear campaign falsely accused her of being a “radical extremist” who “hated police.”

That attack, if you recall, was aided by key Democrats like Joe Manchin and Mark Kelly, and successfully left the Biden FCC without a voting majority for the better part of two years. It’s worth highlighting the speed at which unqualified zealots and rank corporatists get confirmed to the agency, compared to the blockades and slowdowns seen for those, like Sohn, who actually represent the public interest.

Whether Wax can survive the Senate nomination process and get the needed 51 one vote majority remains an open question, but the very fact he has a very good chance is an embarrassing joke.

Filed Under: brendan carr, broadband, consumer protection, donald trump, fcc, gavin wax, journalism, media, meritocracy, nathan simington, policy, racism, telecom

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

AT&T Claims It Won’t Scale Back Its ‘DEI Initiatives’ To Please Trump, Despite Having Just Scaled Back Its DEI Initiatives To Please Trump

from the actions-not-words dept

Mon, Jun 2nd 2025 05:22am - Karl Bode

We recently noted how U.S. telecom giant Verizon was more than happy to kiss Trump’s ass in exchange for FCC approval of its $20 billion merger with Frontier. That included quickly kowtowing to the administration’s demands that it do its best to be more racist and sexist.

For its part, Verizon counterpart AT&T claims it’s not following on Verizon’s heels. Despite the fact that AT&T will be seeking approval to purchase Lumen’s residential fiber network for $5.75 billion, CEO John Stankey says it won’t be retreating from its “DEI initiatives” (read: he claims it won’t start being more racist and sexist just because the Trump administration asks it to):

“We don’t have to roll back anything. Our policies and our approach at AT&T have always been that we progress people on merit. That any employee that comes to work here should have an opportunity to grow their career, work on building their skills, have an opportunity to succeed and earn a living. “And our goal is to make sure that every employee that walks through the door of AT&T feels like they belong here and it’s a good place for them to work.”

On one hand, with a merger approval pending at the FCC, Stankey could have easily followed Verizon’s lead and behaved like a feckless coward. Verizon’s CEO, you might recall, couldn’t even be bothered to acknowledge that anything out of the ordinary was happening when interviewed by The Verge recently.

That said, it’s not clear how much value AT&T’s words and promises have.

For one thing, AT&T had already indicated it was walking back its support for LGBTQ causes, including cancelling funding support for a suicide hotline for LGBTQ youth. It cancelled a long list of programs and renamed some others to get in the good graces of the administration already. It also throws a ton of money at extremist right wing politicians after specifically claiming it wouldn’t do that.

AT&T also has a long history of hijacking or “co-opting” civil rights groups in bizarre and unethical ways. AT&T has often been caught paying civil rights groups with malleable ethics in exchange for support for shitty policies (merger approvals, the elimination of consumer protections, the death of net neutrality) that often harm these groups’ real-world constituents.

In effect, AT&T has a long history of using diversity as a lobbying marionette to pretend there’s broad support for widely unpopular policies.

Still, Stankey’s comments resulted in a bunch of headlines suggesting that AT&T was a corporate leader when it comes to not being a bunch of obnoxious bigots:

Again, I’m not sure AT&T’s doing anything particularly courageous here, but with a merger awaiting approval the company could have followed Verizon’s route and simply become a spineless pumpkin operating in blind fealty to a bunch of weird, authoritarian zealots. So, good job. I guess.

The Trump administration and the Brendan Carr FCC have been launching a bunch of “investigations” into companies for not being racist enough. The cornerstone of these efforts is the laughable legal claim that diversity and inclusion efforts are, themselves, somehow discriminatory against white people. AT&T has good lawyers, and likely knows these efforts don’t have much legal standing.

AT&T lawyers also know that at the same time the Trump FCC claims to have all this authority to bully companies, Trump court rulings and executive orders are effectively destroying all remaining U.S. corporate oversight and regulatory power, something AT&T’s been lobbying for for decades. AT&T lawyers and executives know that the trajectory we’re on ultimately ensures that nobody can tell AT&T what to do on any subject, whether it’s racism, taxpayer fraud, anti-consumer protection efforts, or its longstanding quest to crush competition underfoot.

Filed Under: bigotry, broadband, dei, fcc, mergers, racism, telecom, trump administration, wireless
Companies: at&t

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

Wed, May 28th 2025 05:29am - Karl Bode

If you’ve been around a while you might recall that Verizon used to be utterly obnoxious when it came to absolutely everything about using your mobile phone. Once upon a time, the company banned you from even using third-party apps (including basics like GPS), forcing you to use extremely shitty Verizon apps. It also used to be absolutely horrendous when it came to unlocking phones, switching carriers, and using the device of your choice on the Verizon network.

Two things changed all that. One, back in 2008 when the company acquired spectrum that came with requirements that users be allowed to use the devices of their choice. And two, as part of merger conditions affixed to its 2021 acquisition of Tracfone. Thanks to those two events Verizon was dragged, kicking and screaming, into a new era of openness that was of huge benefit to the public.

Now, with the Trump administration openly destroying whatever’s left of U.S. federal corporate oversight and consumer protection standards, Verizon sees an opportunity. As Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica notes, Verizon’s attempting to get the Trump administration to kill all unlocking requirements, in a bid to drag everyone back to the dark ages of cellphone use.

Verizon being Verizon, they can’t help but lie about it in a petition to the Trump FCC, claiming that they simply must be allowed to unfairly lock down mobile devices, because doing anything else harms competition and helps criminals:

“The Unlocking Rule applies only to particular providers—mainly Verizon—and distorts the marketplace in a critical US industry,” the Verizon petition said. “The rule has resulted in unintended consequences that harm consumers, competition, and Verizon, while propping up international criminal organizations that profit from fraud, including device trafficking of subsidized devices from the United States. These bad actors target and harm American consumers and US carriers like Verizon for their own profit, by diverting unlocked trafficked devices to consumers in foreign countries.”

Verizon, which quickly folded to Trump administration demands that it wasn’t sexist or racist enough in exchange for Frontier merger approval, has a long history of being completely full of shit on issues relating to consumer rights. And they’re particularly full of shit here.

Historical requirements on this front make it easier for you to bring any device you’d like to the Verizon network (assuming it doesn’t harm network security). Without them, Verizon could revert to only letting you use phones Verizon chooses and sells, jacking up the price for devices. Taking it further, we could easily return to the era where Verizon only lets you use apps approved or sold by Verizon.

These openness requirements are somewhat scattershot across carriers, which is why the Biden FCC had been proposing a uniform rule that would have required that all wireless providers unlock devices within 60 days of purchase.

Not only is that effort dead now thanks to Trump’s election, but Verizon’s pushing to eliminate all such requirements, driving progress violently backward. Verizon’s hoping that such rollbacks can be part of FCC boss Brendan Carr’s “Delete, Delete, Delete” deregulatory bonanza, in which he’s destroying longstanding consumer protection standards under the pretense of government efficiency.

Verizon even name drops Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts in their petition, insisting that longstanding and popular consumer protection standards on wireless devices are “the perfect example of the type of rule that the Commission should eliminate as part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s Deregulatory Initiative.”

Even if the rules aren’t destroyed by the Trump FCC, numerous recent Trump court rulings and executive orders make it all but impossible for regulators to enforce most consumer protection rules. But Verizon, ever a fan of crushing consumer protection standards and competition, wants to make doubly sure.

Filed Under: 5g, consumers, fcc, jailbreaking, locked phones, merger conditions, open access, telecom, unlock rule, wireless
Companies: verizon