from the assholes-are-in-charge dept
Last year, the Biden FCC passed a new rule that would help bring Wi-Fi access to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, the rule allowed schools to leverage the FCC’s E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses, making it easier for kids who lack broadband (or can’t afford broadband) to get online.
The FCC E-Rate budget was not increased, meaning the public didn’t have to pay a penny.
Enter Ted Cruz, who recently tried to kill the program based on a bunch of lies and gibberish about how the program was somehow “censoring Conservative viewpoints.” Cruz’s proposal didn’t make it through the House of Representatives, but Trump’s extremist lackey at the FCC, Brendan Carr, is now picking up the campaign:
“Today, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr asked his commission colleagues to vote on two items that would reverse the agency’s unlawful, Biden-era decisions to expand COVID spending programs,” Carr’s announcement said. “Those FCC decisions spent scarce taxpayer dollars on funding unsupervised screen time for kids without accounting for the significant attendant risks.”
Again, this program helped kids in poor, rural communities do their homework via portable hotspots doled out at the school library to folks out of range of traditional broadband access. There are no “significant, attendant risks.” It was not “illegal.” These are completely fabricated lies to feebly justify the pointless destruction of a useful program that didn’t cost taxpayers an additional cent.
Cruz’s effort would have leveraged the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to not only eliminate the program, but to also ban the FCC from ever creating something similar ever again (Republicans used similar tactics in 2017 to kill new FCC rules that would have held telecom giants accountable for repeated privacy violations).
Carr’s proposal, in turn, would eliminate the program now, but wouldn’t forbid the FCC from restoring it under future administrations. In a statement, Cruz applauded Carr’s pointless destruction, but urged Congress to make it permanent:
“Kudos to Chairman Carr for moving to undo the Biden hotspot program and protect children, but now it’s time for Congress to step up and codify this change,” Cruz said in the FCC press release. “In May, the Senate passed my Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution overturning the illegal Biden hotspot rule. I urge the House to act on the resolution and prevent this or similar harmful rules in the future.”
Again, there is no money being saved here. No U.S. citizens were asking for this helpful program to be destroyed. This is just wanton destruction by terrible assholes, who know that because “the left” (read: people across political ideologies who actually care about kids being able to do their homework in a country with shitty and expensive broadband access) supported it.
The other underlying motivation is the fact AT&T didn’t like rural kids getting free access to the Internet (instead of overpaying AT&T for cellular access). These terrible assholes can’t just come out and admit any of this, so you get this weird performative bullshit about “Biden illegality” and “protecting the children” as flimsy cover.
Filed Under: assholes, brendan carr, broadband, education, hotspots, internet access, portable hotspot, schools, ted cruz, telecom, wifi
