from the assholes-everywhere dept
T-Mobile has long kissed the ass of the Trump regime. You might recall when the company wanted its competition-eroding merger with Sprint approved, it spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at Trump hotel properties. It hired Trump advisor Corey Lewandowski not long after he publicly mocked a child with Down Syndrome. It worked with Trump to kill U.S. consumer protection standards.
A company that used to at least pretend to be consumer-focused is now anything but. More recently, T-Mobile (just like Verizon) quickly folded to Trump administration demands that the company be more sexist and racist if the company wanted several pending mergers approved. And T-Mobile, as usual, was more than happy to coddle authoritarians in order to get what it wanted.
T-Mobile was looking for FCC and DOJ approval of two mergers, its acquisition of fiber-provider Lumos, and its merger with wireless provider U.S. Cellular. To grease both deals, T-Mobile General Counsel Mark Nelson made it clear he was more than happy to throw ethics in the trash in a recent FCC filing spotted by Ars Technica:
“As T-Mobile indicated earlier this year, we recognize that the legal and policy landscape surrounding DEI under federal law has changed and we remain fully committed to ensuring that T-Mobile does not have any policies or practices that enable invidious discrimination, whether in fulfillment of DEI or any other purpose. We have conducted a comprehensive review of T-Mobile’s policies, programs, and activities, and pursuant to this review, T-Mobile is ending its DEI-related policies as described below, not just in name, but in substance.”
Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has consistently tried to (falsely) claim that any efforts to correct systemic racism or sexism are themselves inherently discriminatory against white people. Notice how eagerly Nelson is willing to parrot this sort of addle-brained dogshit white supremacist thinking.
The only Democrat left at the FCC, Anna Gomez, was correct to single out how pathetic T-Mobile has been in the Trump era:
“In yet another cynical bid to win FCC regulatory approval, T-Mobile is making a mockery of its professed commitment to eliminating discrimination, promoting fairness, and amplifying underrepresented voices. History will not be kind to this cowardly corporate capitulation.”
Of course, thanks to the rubber stamping of mindless consolidation during the Trump era, consumers have fewer choices than ever if they wanted to switch to a more ethical company. And thanks to the Trump destruction of consumer protection, regulators have less authority than ever to do anything about the increasingly bad behavior of large, unethical telecoms.
I’d like to say America will remember and T-Mobile executives will ultimately be held accountable for their lack of backbone by the public, press, and future administrations, but that’s clearly not how the United States works.
Filed Under: consolidation, dei, doj, fcc, mergers, racist, sexist, spineless, telecom, wireless
