from the this-is-why-we-can’t-have-nice-things dept
Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr was recently hauled before Congress to discuss his numerous, often illegal abuses of FCC authority. The hearing mostly fixated on Carr’s failed, clumsy attempt to censor a comedian, and clumsy lie that the FCC now serves exclusively at the whims of our mad, idiot king.
Which are certainly important things to discuss, given that Carr’s actions are extremist, illegal, and dangerous.
But what struck me reading the transcript is how little time was actually spent pressing Carr on the numerous other problematic behaviors he’s been engaged in, including Carr’s baseless attacks on public media, his dismantling of media consolidation rules, or his effort to destroy consumer protection.
These are things that will cause generational harm to markets, consumers, and the public interest. We’ve discussed at length about how Carr’s “leadership” has involved the complete decimation of corporate oversight as part of his cutesy-named “delete, delete, delete” agenda, which attempts to disguise regulatory capture and wholesale corruption as a government efficiency initiative.
These “reforms” have involved making life easier on robocallers and scammers, making it easier for prison telecom monopolies to rip off inmate families, making it easier for your local cable and phone monopolies to rip you off with bogus surcharges, making it easier for right-wing propaganda operations posing as local news (Sinclair) to dominate dying local media, making it harder to switch wireless phone carriers, and generally just doing whatever America’s biggest, shittiest companies tell him to, including doing significant harm to national security and telecom cybersecurity oversight.
When this stuff was fleetingly mentioned at the hearing, it was by the likes of men like Ted Cruz, who helped prop up the lazy idea that Carr’s just “clearing regulatory underbrush:”
“On day one of the new administration, the FCC, under Chairman Carr, hit the ground running and already has an impressive list of accomplishments to show. These include the Delete, Delete, Delete docket, which continues to clear out the regulatory underbrush.”
The stuff Carr is doing is the stuff consolidated industry lobbyists asked him to do. Virtually none of it is actually in the public interest. We’ve had corrupt revolving door FCC leaders many times before, but never to the level of Carr’s extremism. To her credit, a tiny portion of this stuff was brought up by Senator Maria Cantwell, but it was clearly a hearing afterthought with no serious follow up.
In his responses, Carr was repeated allowed to take a page from Elon Musk’s playbook and pretend that his dismantling of oversight of shitty broadband monopolies and large media conglomerates is an act of modernized efficiency:
“…the FCC is now pursuing the largest deregulatory effort in the agency’s history. To date, we’ve teed up for removal over 1000 rules or regulations and terminated a record 2000 inactive proceedings. Eliminating those costly regulations is part of our affordability work too. For instance, we shut down a Biden era plan that could have spiked the price of internet for millions of Americans living in apartments by up to 50%.”
That last bit? Where Carr claims to have lowered broadband costs for apartment dwellers? He’s actually referring to a Trump FCC action at the beginning of the year to kill rules preventing your landlord and your local ISP from colluding to strike predatory deals that block other competitors from doing business in your building, driving up broadband access costs. It was a complete lie, with no follow up.
Carr is, as we’ve well covered, a shameless opportunist and liar who’ll do whatever he’s told by industry or Donald Trump. If Donald Trump was a brony, you’d see Carr immediately prancing around in a velour zebra onesie. It’s not actually clear Carr believes in much of anything outside of a general disdain for corporate oversight and his post-FCC revolving door career opportunities, which likely involve being a telecom sector lobbyist so he can continue basically doing the same “work.”
Carr’s juggling two jobs at the moment; one involving keeping the party’s radical authoritarians happy with censorship and a frontal assault on what’s left of U.S. journalism and public media. But his primary job, the one he’s been groomed for by industry for decades, is in destroying whatever’s left of the FCC’s ability to rein in unchecked corporate power in all of its various forms.
In some ways, the more headline grabbing (and genuinely problematic) authoritarian censorship operates as cover for corruption. While the former role gets oodles of attention, the latter gets summarily downplayed if not outright ignored. There were no serious congressional follow up questions about Carr’s efforts to destroy functional consumer protection. It was generally congressional oversight kayfabe.
I was also struck by press coverage of Carr’s testimony. More specifically, how literally none of the press coverage could be bothered to mention any aspect of Carr’s brutal destruction of what’s left of U.S. consumer protection. Even in passing.
As a life long consumer protection reporter, it often feels like I’m Roddy Piper living in the 1988 film They Live, facing a broad, existential threat while the public and press (and even many policy folks) stumble around obliviously drinking cappuccino.
Again the harms here are generational. Whether it’s letting predatory telecom monopolies run amok and off the public, or it’s scaling back robocall protections because they might upset a “legit” telemarketer, Carr is doing generational, lasting damage to the public interest, and even in the rare instance we feign to hold him accountable before Congress, it’s treated as some kind of distant afterthought.
This has been generally true beyond the confines of the FCC as well. The Trump-loaded Supreme Court, 5th Circuit, and 6th Circuit in particular have put a generational bullet in the head of consumer protection, public safety, labor protection, and corporate oversight, making it largely impossible to hold corporate giants accountable for literally anything.
The implications and scope of this corruption are incalculable. Yet you’ll notice, across the vast majority of the consolidated corporate press (and even many policy circles), the decimation of consumer protection and corporate oversight is treated as a distant, boring, anecdotal tangent if not outright ignored completely.
Filed Under: brendan carr, broadband, corruption, cybersecurity, fcc, labor, oversight, public safety, regulatory capture, revolving door, robocallers
