from the rewarded-for-being-an-invertebrate dept
Back in March, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr announced he was “investigating” Verizon because the company hadn’t scaled back its diversity and inclusion efforts quickly enough for the bigots in the Trump administration. Despite the investigation being completely baseless, Verizon was quick to comply, yanking materials related to its fleeting efforts to diversify its workforce offline.
Right around the same time, Elon Musk began trying to elbow Verizon out of its $2 billion contract with the FAA to help “improve” the nation’s air traffic control services. Verizon executives said nothing as the contract was stolen right out under its feet. In a recent Verge interview, Verizon CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath was a spineless coward, downplaying the Trump administration’s radical and illegal behaviors.
Now Verizon executives have been properly rewarded for their abject fecklessness. The Trump FCC has approved Verizon’s $20 billion merger with Frontier, yet another telecom sector megadeal. In approval documents, the Trump FCC is quick to single out Verizon’s willingness to “end DEI initiatives” (read: be less inclusive, and more racist and sexist):
“Verizon has also committed to ending DEI-related practices as specified in the FCC’s record and has reaffirmed the merged entity’s commitment to equal opportunity and nondiscrimination.”
This is part of the administration’s ongoing (and quite insane) claim that efforts to embrace diversity and end discrimination are somehow discriminatory to white people. It’s the same argument they’ve been using to flimsily justify efforts to role back federal efforts to stop racism in broadband deployment.
It’s documented that big telecoms like Verizon and AT&T have discriminated against minority and poor people when determining which areas to upgrade to fiber. It’s also been proven that U.S. telecoms often charge low-income and minority neighborhoods more money for slower broadband. The FCC under Biden had only just started to even acknowledge this was happening.
Both Verizon and the FCC have claimed that Verizon’s $20 billion (including debt) merger with Frontier will help improve fiber access. That is, however, unlikely; these two companies have been swapping assets in complicated transactions for years to nab huge tax cuts and drive temporary stock boosts; the end result so far has, fairly uniformly, been broad disappointment, a big mess, and a lot of empty promises.
The two companies don’t directly compete so this isn’t the worst merger imaginable. But in a functional country with operational antitrust enforcement we’d at least have a conversation about whether letting Verizon — a company with a generational history of anti-competitive behavior — get even larger serves the public interest. Especially given these two companies’ history of harmful asset swaps.
Instead we’re stuck in this weird performance art by authoritarian bigots; zealots and assholes keen on launching fake inquiries into companies for doing the bare minimum on gender and racial equality. We’re plumbing new depths of pathetic “governance” on the daily. And Verizon executives are fully committed to the authoritarian mission.
Filed Under: bigotry, brendan carr, competition, consolidation, dei, fcc, mergers, pathetic, racism, telecom
Companies: frontier, verizon
