Big Telecom Asks The Corrupt Supreme Court To Declare All State And Federal Broadband Consumer Protection Illegal. They Might Get Their Wish.

Broadband

from the our-solution-is-to-simply-break-everything dept

As we recently noted, telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast are having some very good luck using a corrupt, MAGA-heavy court to not only kill popular net neutrality rules — but to effectively lobotomize the FCC’s ability to protect broadband consumers at all.

Leveraging the recent Supreme Court Lopper rulings, telecom lawyers are trying to argue that pretty much any effort to protect consumers from telecom monopolies is outside of the scope of the 1996 Telecom Act, whether or not precedent (whatever that’s worth now) or logic agrees. It’s the same story you’ll soon see played out across every industry that touches your lives post Chevron.

But in their so-far successful effort to kill the federal regulatory state, Comcast, AT&T, and friends have created a new quandary. Courts have repeatedly ruled that if the federal government abdicates its authority to protect broadband consumers from monopoly harm, states are fully within their legal right to step in and fill the void.

For every state whose legislature telecoms have completely captured (Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee), there’s several that have, often imperfectly, tried to protect broadband consumers, either in the form of state level net neutrality laws (California, Oregon, Washington, Maine), crackdowns on lies about speeds or prices (Arizona, Indiana, Michigan), or requiring affordable low income broadband (New York).

In 2021 at the peak of COVID problems, New York passed a law mandating that heavily taxpayer subsidized telecoms provide a relatively slow (25 Mbps), $15 broadband tier only for low-income families that qualified. ISPs have sued (unsuccessfully so far) to kill the law, which was upheld last April by the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, reversing a 2021 District Court ruling. 

New York’s efforts to provide broadband to poor people was predicated on the Trump administration’s unpopular decision to repeal net neutrality and strip away the FCC’s Title II authority over telecoms. If big telecom blocks the restoration of this authority (and it’s looking likely so far based on hints from the sixth circuit), states are bolstered, as noted above, to step in and fill the void.

Telecoms like AT&T are frightened of states doing their jobs to protect consumers and market competition from their bad behavior. So a group of telecom trade groups this week petitioned the Supreme Court with a very specific ask. They want the court to first destroy FCC broadband consumer protection oversight and net neutrality, then kill New York’s effort, in that precise order, in two different cases.

Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast argue that if they are successful at killing FCC oversight of broadband consumer issues, states will follow NY’s lead and (gasp) try to offer poor people inexpensive broadband. Something they falsely claim will stifle their ability to expand broadband access:

“Other States are likely to copy New York once the Attorney General begins enforcing the ABA [Affordable Broadband Act] and New York consumers can buy broadband at below-market rates. As petitioners’ members have shown, New York’s price cap will require them to sell broadband at a loss and deter them from investing in expanding their broadband networks. As rate regulation proliferates, those harms will as well, stifling critical investment in bringing broadband to unserved and underserved areas.”

Big Telecom lawyers trot this claim out any time the government attempts to hold them accountable for anything (they falsely claimed the same about net neutrality and numerous merger approvals). But as local monopolies that see little real oversight or competition, they’re already disincentivized to actually care about shoring up broadband access, especially to poor, rural, minority markets.

In short, leveraging MAGA court corruption, telecoms want to make federal and state broadband consumer protection effectively illegal. The bullshit claim they feed a lazy press is that they’re rebalancing constitutional power and protecting the public from “renegade regulators.” If people want specific protection, they’ll insist, Congress should step in and pass a new, very clear, well-crafted law.

But telecoms spend an estimated $320,000 on lobbying Congress every day to ensure Congress never reforms much of anything. In reality, what these companies want is to protect their lucrative and harmful regional monopolies from federal/state government oversight and market competition. They want it all, they want no limits, and they don’t much care about the broader impact on real people.

And there’s a very real chance they’re going to get it.

Telecom consumer protection groups (which have been all but invisible in terms of modern strategic vision or social media public messaging as this shitshow unfolds) will almost certainly insist that something will protect the public from the worst possible outcome here. But post-Roe, rosy cheeked optimism as to what our corrupted courts will or won’t do just doesn’t carry the same weight.

You’d like to think that somewhere in the bowels of the sixth circuit exist adults who realize the madness and chaos caused by dismantling the federal government with no real additional backup plan. But I don’t think after the last few years that’s any sort of easy assumption.

Again, post-Chevron, some variation of this is going to be playing out in every industry that touches your lives. Logic or precedent be damned, corporate lawyers are going to argue that every consumer protection, public safety, environmental, or campaign finance regulator in the country can’t enforce or create new protections without the approval of FedSec judges or a corrupt Congress.

You’re getting an early sneak peak with telecom and net neutrality, but some variation of this will soon be playing out everywhere thanks to an easily-bribeable Supreme Court stocked with people who think utterly demolishing the girders of governance forges an amazing new utopia. For them.

For the rest of us, the result is going to be absolute legal chaos and an almost incalculable level of every day real-world harms, as any existing and future regulatory enforcement U.S. corporations don’t like grinds to a halt. Already feckless U.S. regulators will also be less incentivized than ever to push for reforms for fear of costly legal challenge.

Journalists, public policymakers, and activists have done an utterly abysmal job at making the full scope and impact of all of this clear to the public. But without immediate and massive Supreme Court and congressional campaign finance reforms (which, by any indication, aren’t coming anytime soon) the impact is going to be anything but subtle, and in many cases, deadly.

Filed Under: broadband, chevron, consumer protection, high speed internet, loper, new york, supreme court, telecom
Companies: at&t, comcast, verizon