FCC Approves Cox, Charter Merger On Condition They Promise To Be More Racist
from the merge-ALL-the-things! dept
Hey look everyone! More of that famous populism Trump rode into power on!
The Trump FCC has announced they’re rubber stamping the approval of a merger between two of the nation’s biggest cable companies (Charter, Cox), creating the biggest cable company in the U.S. Struggling Americans were surely clamoring in support of their local shitty cable company getting even bigger, right?
As a condition of the deal, the two companies have promised to be more racist and sexist. More specifically, they’ve promised the FCC they’ll eliminate already fairly pathetic corporate programs acknowledging that systemic racism and sexism exist. The FCC posted this handy infographic on social media that breaks down all of their lies about the deal in an easily digestible way:
Literally none of those claims are true. These deals never result in any of these benefits. There’s more than forty years of concrete evidence proving it. Consolidation across U.S. telecom has consistently resulted in spotty service, high prices, and routinely abysmal customer service.
Cox and Charter don’t directly compete, but their large scale, size, and political influence ensures they’ll have more power than ever to lobby against robust competition more generally.
Remember when Charter was caught creating a fake consumer group to undermine community-owned broadband access in Maine? Or that time New York State regulators found the company was so shitty, and lied so often, that they almost resorted to kicking them out of the state? If you liked that sort of thing, you can now expect more of it, better resourced, at scale. Very exciting!
The debt from the kinds of deals is also always predominately paid off by labor and consumers in the form of mass layoffs and higher prices. These deals never meaningfully serve the public interest, but our captured regulators, consolidated telecoms, and shitty press work together to help pretend otherwise.
The FCC explains the “DEI” provisions this way in their news release:
“Charter has committed to new safeguards to protect against DEI discrimination and has reaffirmed the merged entity’s commitment to equal opportunity and nondiscrimination. Specifically, Charter commits to recruiting, hiring, and promoting individuals based on the factors that matter most: skills, qualifications, and experience.”
You’re not told what these “safeguards” actually are. Just that Cox and Charter won’t try to give minorities or women a leg up in country full of systemic hatred and intolerance because that might be unfair to a dude.
The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to insist that simply acknowledging that systemic racism and sexism exists — or doing literally anything about it — is somehow discriminatory to white men. This is diseased white supremacist thinking; the sheer delusional hubris to think this way, let alone integrate this ignorance into already problematic pro-monopoly policy, is the mind garbage of simpletons.
If you pop around and read the news coverage of this deal (see: this piece from Reuters or this piece at CNN), you’ll notice the consolidated corporate press helps sell the lie that more consolidation somehow serves the public interest. These kinds of stories will parrot the companies’ claims, ignore their history of monopolistic predation, and even downplay the mandated racism as a droll policy bullet point.
CNN author Jordan Valinsky even went so far as to write this sentence with a straight face:
“The transaction is contingent on regulatory approval and could be a litmus test for President Donald Trump’s views on major companies combining.”
Trump’s FCC has rubber stamped every single shitty telecom merger that has crossed its desk. We know Trump loves harmful consolidation, provided he can personally get something from it. A cornerstone of GOP policy has been to coddle monopoly power for literally fifty fucking years! Across every industry in America. None of this is really up for debate. Any “litmus” test was failed long ago.
It’s important to really stop and recognize the way the press routinely normalizes corruption and gives Trump Republicans policy credibility in areas like antitrust that they never had to actually earn. Because there’s just generally so much going on, this merger will largely be ignored. And when the layoffs and higher prices arrive later this year or early next, press and policy folks will be nowhere to be found.
If this country is going to have any sort of real future, it has to seriously come to grips with the fact that it’s broadly too corrupt to function in the public interest (across government, media, policy, and culturally). If future federal and state governments don’t make antitrust and corruption reform a central pillar of all policy in every sector, we’re quite literally cooked.
Filed Under: antitrust, brendan carr, broadband, cable, consolidation, dei, fcc, media, mergers, racism
Companies: charter, cox
Comments on “FCC Approves Cox, Charter Merger On Condition They Promise To Be More Racist”
Karl’s unbridled venom for this shit was like a spoonful of ambrosia added to my morning coffee.
Even after this spasm of fascism ends, this country will continue to die of corruption and feudalism until we get our act together and eat the rich.
But first, Charter will mostly laying off based on theses factors.
“If this country is going to have any sort of real future, it has to seriously come to grips with the fact that it’s broadly too corrupt to function in the public interest.”
I think that goes too far as in, end it at ‘fact’ and add an ‘s’–If this country is going to have any sort of real future, it has to seriously come to grips with the facts. We’re becoming increasingly untethered to reality and at an accelerating rate. Denial of reality is a very poor strategy and it won’t end well.
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That is what happens when bullshit rises to the top. Facts become optional next to sophistry.
Fuck all three of ’em.
It is not the job of the FCC to make deals serve the public
The FCC is there to ensure the deals and other operations follow the regulations. In the U.S., those are generally drafted under the premise that the desire to make a profit will always steer choices to the best option, and profiteering only needs to be kept in check once there no longer is any choice for the consumer.
So “they are screwing the consumer and their workers and making everything more expensive” is fine. As long as they are not the only remaining one doing so.
Now why they feel the necessity to do the all-hailing their choice not to get involved here, which is at best neutral, is a question of government culture. In the current environment, any agency that does not claim to be part of the greatest thing since sliced bread for every voter (or rather every “legal” voter which is code for everyone voting Republican) is likely to get gutted like a telecom customer service operator.
It’s 2026 and this shit just doesn’t work anymore.
Those “programs” are designed to discriminate based on race and sex against a specific demographic in particular. Those programs are the racist and sexist bit. (also illegal)
It tickles me how how horrified you are that your ideas are being rejected on every front.
Please note this actually results in a much smaller company than a merger with netflix.
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Orchestras started hiring a lot more women when auditions were run with a curtain between the auditionee and the proctors, and with the auditionee entering the room first to prevent the sound of a woman’s high heels from influencing the decision of the proctors.
The assumption that any minorities being hired must have been through DEI/affirmative action instead of because they were the most qualified person is itself racist/sexist, because it’s assuming that minorities cannot possibly be the most qualified person.
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It’s amazing how your identitarian nonsense flys in 2026.
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Facts not in evidence
The other big complaint I have with these giant corporations is, they move away from customer service. It’s like the bigger they are the more they see customers as adversaries as opposed to customers to serve. Add in the current “AI agents” that give you the fucking insane, annoying runaround loop when you need help from a human and they all need to die a fiery death. I don’t know how we alter it and force them back into hiring humans again. There is a special place in hell reserved…
“Freedom of speech”
You wanted “Freedom of speech” you got “Freedom of speech”.
Perhaps you should have considered the merits of restricting corporate speech? That has generally worked out quite well for Australia, New Zealand, and most of europe.