FCC Commish Brendan Carr Takes A Break From Crying About TikTok To Lie About His Agency’s Plan To Combat Racism In Broadband Deployment

Overhype

from the hysterical-and-useless dept

GOP FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr can routinely be found hyperventilating about TikTok, a company he doesn’t actually regulate. At the same time, Carr routinely turns a blind eye to the endless sleazy behavior in the sector he actually regulates: telecom. He doesn’t much care about predatory pricing, privacy violations, or the way companies like AT&T rip off federal subsidy programs.

In fact, when his fellow commissioners try to do absolutely anything about the broken and uncompetitive broadband market, Carr is first in line to protect AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and Charter from criticism or reform. Usually in the most misleading way possible; such as when he and his Trump BFFs tried to frame killing popular net neutrality rules as “restoring internet freedom.”

He’s back at it again. We’ve discussed how Congress demanded that the FCC try to do something about well-documented discrimination in broadband deployment as part of the infrastructure bill. Data clearly shows that telecom giants consistently refuse to upgrade poor and minority neighborhoods to fiber, despite untold billions in state and federal subsidies. It’s taken decades to admit it’s even a problem.

The FCC and Congress understandably want to address this before $42 billion in infrastructure subsidies heads to states. (Please note: this is an historic amount of broadband subsidies that the GOP voted against, yet simultaneously takes credit for among local constituents.)

Enter Carr, who has published an incoherent missive to the FCC website trying to claim that the FCC’s efforts are some kind of secret cabal to take over the internet. Again, what the FCC is doing is the bare minimum and mandated by Congress, but Carr lies repeatedly in a bid to frame it as some extreme, rogue action by Biden personally:

“President Biden’s plan hands the Administrative State effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the country. Never before, in the roughly 40-year history of the public Internet, has the FCC (or any federal agency for that matter) claimed this degree of control over it.”

This is, of course, fucking gibberish. The FCC’s plan to try and combat racism in broadband deployment is fairly basic. It doesn’t even call out big ISPs with a history of “redlining” (like AT&T) by name. This is an agency that can barely even acknowledge that regional monopolies cause harm, much less implement any kind of meaningful reform. The FCC is about as radical as Mr. Rogers in his prime.

And yet it’s GOP mantra to treat absolutely any effort to hold the telecom industry accountable as extreme and somehow unhinged. Similarly, it’s GOP mantra to pretend that the broken and heavily monopolized U.S. telecom industry is somehow the pinnacle of free market innovation, when even the dimmest among us know that’s simply not true. Here’s Carr:

“…the Biden Administration is going hard left. It is now blaming the private sector and free market capitalism itself for the Administration’s own policy shortfalls. The problem, the
Administration has apparently concluded, is that the FCC has never gone full command and control when it comes to regulating the Internet.”

Keep in mind, this is the same guy who wants to use the FCC to badger social media companies for (badly and barely) moderating hate speech and political propaganda, despite having absolutely no authority in this arena. Like so many people in Trumpland, Carr has no honest intellectual center. Everything is performance designed to agitate an increasingly uninformed and misinformed party base.

To be clear: the GOP operates in absolute political lockstep with a long line of shitty telecom monopolies to ensure nothing ever changes. Absolutely any effort to try and hold these companies accountable is framed in the most unhinged terms possible by the GOP. It’s facts-optional chum for party loyalists who’ve been conditioned to root against their best self interests for generations.

At the same time, Democrats talk a lot about broadband and the “digital divide,” but lack the backbone and integrity to actually stand up to industry. The Democratic power structure doesn’t like actual telecom reformers either, as documented by their abject failure to support popular FCC nominee Gigi Sohn as she faced down a relentless and homophobic industry smear campaign, alone.

But you can say one thing for Democrats, at least they occasionally try to do right by U.S. consumers. At least they operate in a wheelhouse tangentially related to factual reality where telecom policy is concerned. Carr is off in absolute fucking fantasyland, spinning entire yarns based on fluff and nonsense with an eye on further befuddling rubes.

Here’s the kind of stuff the Biden FCC is actually trying to do: it’s trying to raise the standard definition of broadband so we don’t waste subsidies on slow broadband. It’s trying to mandate that ISPs are clear with consumers about the cost of the connections. And of course it wants to restore the hugely popular net neutrality rules Carr and friends stripped away during the fraud-riddled Trump repeal of the rules.

To be clear: I’m not sure this Biden FCC will do any of these things particularly well. This is an agency that’s terrified of offending large corporations. The vast majority of these efforts likely won’t be enforced in any consistent way. This is an agency that can’t even consistently acknowledge that regional telecom monopolies exist and cause harm in public facing statements, much less field productive solutions.

Still, what Democratic FCC commissioners are attempting is at least tangentially rooted in reality and some fleeting desire for good faith reform.

Gentlemen like Carr, in contrast, exist as a sort of regulatory simulacrum; he’s there to give the illusion of regulatory oversight, but like so much of the GOP his only real function is obstructionism. The goal is to protect telecom monopoly power at any cost, while framing any effort to do anything differently as somehow dystopian. Often, with the help of a lazy and uncritical press.

It’s equal parts pathetic and stunning that the GOP has convinced huge swaths of the U.S. public to root against their own best interests and in favor of letting shitty companies like Comcast run politically amok, but here we are.

Filed Under: brendan carr, broadband, digital discrimination, digital divide, fcc, high speed internet, redlining, telecom