Trump Admin Blocking Billions In Already Awarded Broadband Grants To States That Enforce Net Neutrality Or Engage In Telecom Oversight

Broadband

from the so-much-for-states'-rights dept

The Trump administration is promising to block billions in already-awarded infrastructure bill broadband grants to any states that enforce net neutrality or try to impose any sort of meaningful oversight on the country’s unpopular, predatory broadband monopolies.

That was the promise of Commerce Department official Arielle Roth, a former Ted Cruz staffer now in charge of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). Roth made the comments about the Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment grants (BEAD) at a recent speech at the Hudson Institute, a far right wing think tank:

“Specifically, any state receiving BEAD funds must exempt BEAD providers throughout their state footprint from broadband-specific economic regulations, such as price regulation and net neutrality.”

The infrastructure bill set aside $42.5 billion in BEAD broadband grants to be doled out and managed by individual states. It took several years to get this money rolling out, in part, because state and federal governments had to remap the entirety of broadband access in the United States in a bid to avoid repeating past subsidy scandals and make sure the money was spent semi-wisely.

Again, this money was already awarded, and states were just about to start deploying broadband using this money when Republicans began retooling the whole program earlier this year. By both stripping out requirements that the resulting taxpayer-funded broadband be affordable, and redirecting as much of the money as possible to billionaire Elon Musk for expensive satellite broadband he already planned to deploy.

This introduced all manner of new delays to the program, ironically after Republicans (with Ezra Klein’s help) spent much of last election season whining very loudly about the fact this BEAD program was taking too long to deliver broadband.

Again, this money had already been awarded after years of expensive planning. States have already been forced to spend even more money to revamp plans to make Trump officials happy. Yet the Trump administration keeps fiddling with the rules and weakening core definitions (for stuff like “broadband” and “unserved,”) ensuring that fewer and fewer locations qualify for assistance and states are left constantly on their heels trying to please our mad king and his army of weird zealots.

Now, the Trump administration is also trying to leverage the funding to bully states away from engaging in even basic oversight of companies like Comcast, AT&T, Charter, or Verizon.

If you recall, the Trump administration destroyed net neutrality (some modest rules trying to keep telecom monopolies from abusing their market power to harm competitors and consumers). And they’re destroying whatever was left of FCC oversight of telecom monopolies. With federal oversight gutted, now they’re taking aim at the handful of states that have tried to fill the consumer protection void.

The original Trump net neutrality repeal also tried to ban states from imposing net neutrality rules. But even our broken-ass courts repeatedly found that to be patently illegal (the federal government can’t abdicate its responsibility on consumer protection, then tell states what to do). You know, the very sort of “state rights” Republicans and Libertarian “free market” think tankers used to pretend to support.

But while a handful of states do have net neutrality rules, nobody has bothered to enforce them. In part because states — already facing a cavalcade of legal battles in the Trump era — aren’t keen to pick yet another major fight with big corporations they might lose. And they’re even less likely to do so now, with billions in potential infrastructure funding on the line.

But the key point I’ve always made is that this goes well beyond net neutrality. ISPs don’t want to just kill “net neutrality,” they want zero oversight whatsoever. So they can rip off U.S. consumers with impunity and face absolutely zero meaningful federal or state repercussion. And it’s a fight the telecom lobby is most certainly winning. Trump 2.0 is delivering the killing blow.

The United States is, it cannot be overstated, literally too corrupt to do the absolute bare minimum on corporate oversight, consumer protection, antitrust reform, or health market protection. This fact gets buried by a lot of bluster and bullshit about how fabulously innovative we are.

And because there’s so much other terrible shit going on, and because the press and public generally find infrastructure boring, this sort of rank corruption and regulatory capture is allowed to fly under the radar. But the long term impact, like most Trump policies, will be decidedly ugly.

Filed Under: arielle roth, bead, broadband, donald trump, elon musk, grants, high speed internet, infrastructure bill, net neutrality, ntia, telecom

Net Neutrality Advocates Won’t Appeal Trump Destruction, Say U.S. Courts Are Broken

Broadband

from the nothing-functions dept

A fusion of authoritarianism and corporatism is destroying what’s left of already soggy U.S. federal consumer protection and corporate oversight. You might not know this because the U.S. press and many policymakers genuinely don’t appear to care, but it’s happening all the same.

Whether by dodgy Supreme Court ruling, executive order, or captured regulators, the U.S. authoritarians, often in lockstep with consolidated corporate power, are making massive, historic, and likely irreversible inroads in destroying federal corporate oversight, labor protections, public safety provisions, environmental standards, and regulatory autonomy.

And generally the corporate press doesn’t seem to care because most corporate media ownership likes the tax cuts, mindless deregulation, and rubber stamped mergers and consolidation.

While dismissed as a niche issue, the right wing’s decade-long attack on net neutrality rules clearly predicted this was all coming. This extremely popular effort by our communications regulators to hold shitty regional telecom monopolies accountable was summarily executed: first by a Trump-loaded 6th Circuit, then inevitably by Trump’s hand-picked earlobe nibbler at the FCC, Brendan Carr.

Recently, consumer groups announced they weren’t going to appeal the 6th Circuit’s ruling because they know the Supreme Court will never let the rules live. And even if by some chance they did, the broken, captured Trump FCC would simply disintegrate the rules again:

“Federal rules safeguarding internet openness, reliability and affordability are just as vital today as always, despite what cable lobbyists and their paid pundits claim. Yet Trump’s election flipped the FCC majority back to ideologues who’ve always taken the broadband industry’s side on this crucial issue. And the justices making up the current Supreme Court majority have shown hostility toward sound legal reasoning on this precise question and a host of other topics too.”

This is, in case you’re new to this sort of thing, the opposite of democracy and a functional court system. Corporate power and authoritarians have taken control of the courts and ensured that it’s technically impossible to protect U.S. consumers. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about net neutrality, environmental protections, consumer privacy, or public safety rules.

Legal precedent means nothing. Authoritarian and corporate power desires now predict most legal outcomes. It’s still dressed up as competent law in polite conversation, but it’s the legal policy equivalent of a dilapidated Hollywood wild west set lousy with termites.

After the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright ruling, it’s effectively impossible to get any reforms — no matter how democratically supported — past our corrupt court system. Regulators are now effectively forbidden from crafting new rules or enforcing most existing ones. Case after case, you’re going to see the Trump courts cripple regulatory autonomy on every issue that impacts your family’s lives, declaring, over and over again, that regulators have “exceeded their regulatory authority,” no matter how modest — or popular — or essential — the effort.

This is going to cause mass death and disability at scale, but, again, the press (and even a lot of policy people) don’t appear to have figured this out yet, or don’t care because they like tax cuts and “deregulation.” For some, normalization bias has blinded them to what’s coming.

The attack on net neutrality didn’t just kill “net neutrality.” It eviscerated the FCC’s authority to protect broadband consumers from giant, shitty telecom monopolies. A smattering of states tried to fill the void with their own state net neutrality laws, but generally haven’t bothered to enforce them. Terrible, shitty corporate giants like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon increasingly see zero accountability… for anything.

This is the future of consumer protection across industries. Feds abdicate their responsibility to protect workers and consumers, regulatory agencies are steadily hollowed out like pumpkins, and a rotating suite of states (with varying degrees of competence) try to fill the void. The companies that lobbied to dismantle stable federal oversight then complain about the “discordant nature of fractured state law.”

With authoritarians taking the dismantling of federal consumer protection to an entirely new level, you’re going to see more and more states trying to fill the void with their own consumer protection laws. But as the fusion of corporatism and authoritarianism finishes irreversibly defanging federal governance, it’s going to increasingly set its sights on state autotomy.

States, facing unprecedented legal assault on everything from immigration law to healthcare, aren’t going to have the time, resources, or staff to meaningfully pick up the feds’ dropped ball on consumer protection and corporate accountability (see: popular right to repair reforms). That’s going to result in untold millions of Americans getting ripped off, neglected, or, in many instances, killed.

When these deadly real world impacts come, the right wingers, “free market Libertarians,” and corporate lobbyists who spent decades paving this path will either mysteriously be silent or busy pointing the finger elsewhere. And our consolidated corporate press will, as has been tradition, have its head so squarely lodged up its own ass they’ll never connect the dots for a befuddled, brutalized, and broadly propagandized electorate.

Filed Under: appeals courts, broadband, consumer protection, corruption, net neutrality, regulators, supreme court, telecom

U.S. Media Once Again Fails To Cover The Corrupt Net Neutrality Ruling With Any Clarity

Broadband

from the nothing-to-see-here dept

Last week a corrupt court system bought and paid for by corporations effectively made it illegal for the federal government to protect broadband consumers from widely despised regional telecom monopolies.

That, as we wrote at the time, is at the heart of the death of the several decade net neutrality fight.

But if you read most U.S. press coverage of the ruling, you’d be hard pressed to walk away with that knowledge. Most of the nap-inducing articles can’t even be bothered to mention that U.S. broadband is a failed market dominated by hugely unpopular regional monopolies, coddled and protected by significant state and federal corruption (kind of an important part of the story).

This NPR story, for example, can’t be bothered to mention that U.S. broadband is some of the most expensive in developed nations thanks to monopoly power. Or that American consumers continue to pay an arm and a leg for patchy, slow, substandard access due to corruption. The underlying fact that U.S. broadband is broken due to monopolization doesn’t seem of interest to the press.

And when NPR talks about “net neutrality,” they discuss it through the “view from nowhere” “both sides” media framing suggesting it was a purely partisan issue exclusively harmful to Democrats and Joe Biden:

“It’s a largely partisan issue that has found Democrats on the side of so-called net neutrality in an effort to hold ISPs more accountable for providing fast, safe and reliable internet for all. The decision deals a blow to the Biden Administration, which prioritized implementing net neutrality rules.”

But net neutrality had broad, bipartisan support. One 2022 survey found that 72% of Americans supported reinstating net neutrality, including 82% of Democrats, 65% of Republicans, and 68% of Independents. At the same time, letting a corrupt court system defang federal consumer protection hurts everybody, it’s not going to selectively hurt just Democrats. The framing here is bullshit.

This Reuters article suffers from the same problems. If you don’t fall asleep halfway though the story, you’re unlikely to walk away with any understanding that there’s an actual problem here (monopoly power coddled by congressional corruption) that needs fixing, or that the ruling was anything more than the dullest of ambiguous, procedural fisticuffs.

Reuters also takes the “both sides” approach to journalism, with perfectly symmetrical quotes by partisan operatives offered up for the sake of balance, and the journalists never really thinking that it might be their fucking job to establish for the reader where the truth actually resides.

The truth is that the U.S. is too corrupt to protect its residents from unchecked corporate power. The truth is that companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast spend an estimated $320,000 every single day lobbying the federal government to ensure consumer rights are an afterthought and the market is as uncompetitive as possible. They spend even more bribing state officials.

Net neutrality wasn’t perfect, but it was at least some sort of stopgap efforts to protect consumers and markets from consolidated monopoly power. And again for those in the back, the Trumplican repeal doesn’t just hurt net neutrality — it curtails the FCC’s already shaky ability to protect consumers and markets from fraud, abuse, predatory behavior, privacy and security scandals, 911 unreliability, and more.

Again: a corrupt court, bought and paid for by corporate power, is defanging the federal government’s consumer protection authority, which will result in widespread harm that extends well beyond net neutrality (this same fate is awaiting most consumer protection under Trump 2.0).

There’s plenty of eyeball-grabbing but truthful headline potential here, and I shouldn’t fall fucking asleep halfway through your description of what’s happening.

Filed Under: broadband, consumers, corruption, fcc, high speed internet, loper bright, net neutrality, privacy, security, telecom

Trumplican 6th Circuit Just Killed Net Neutrality (And Whatever Was Left Of Pathetic U.S. Broadband Consumer Protection)

Broadband

from the not-with-a-bang,-but-with-a-whimper dept

The telecom industry (with the help of the recent Trump Supreme Court), has been drooling for months at the prospect that the Trump-stocked courts would soon finally deliver the killing blow to FCC net neutrality protections (read: popular FCC rules designed to prevent telecom monopolies from abusing their market power to screw over customers and competitors).

As predicted, this week the Trumplican heavy Sixth Circuit delivered, in a ruling that blocks the Biden FCC’s plan to restore net neutrality rules. The entire ruling reads like it could have been directly ripped from a telecom lobbyist’s playbook, with lots of false claims about how these very basic regulations somehow threatened the open web and constitute a “heavy-handed regulatory regime”:

“Today we consider the latest FCC order, issued in 2024, which resurrected the FCC’s heavy-handed regulatory regime.”

To be clear, the FCC’s net neutrality rules were actually very modest by international standards. They had ample loopholes for ISPs to stumble through. They were never actually enforced with any consistency by a broadly feckless and captured FCC. And they saw massive popularity across a bipartisan majority of Americans. Right out of the gate calling the rules “heavy-handed” is telling.

As a refresher, the “net neutrality debate” is about more than just “net neutrality.” It’s about whether we want our consumer protection officials to protect broadband consumers from a monopolized and broken industry filled with extremely unpopular, predatory corporations that routinely raise the bar on shitty service, price gouging, and bad behavior.

The more specific legal debate here was whether ISPs should be classified as “information services” under Title II of the Communications Act, which would reduce the FCC’s authority over telecoms. Or as “telecommunications services,” which would broaden the FCC’s role in protecting consumers from fraud, improving 911 reliability, fighting consolidation, and shoring up cybersecurity standards.

But contrary to their public and press pretense, the telecom industry policy position on this has never been consistent; giants like AT&T and Verizon have waffled on whether or not they support one classification or the other depending on whether they’re trying to dodge FTC fines for lying to customers or trying to gobble up billions in taxpayer subsidies. Let’s repeat that, because it’s important. The very same telcos were perfectly happy to have broadband classified as telecommunications services when it meant they got extra subsidies.

The Real Goal Is No U.S. Corporate Consumer Protection Oversight Whatsoever

It routinely gets lost in the weeds of press and policy coverage, but “net neutrality” is a bit of a distraction.

Telecoms (and the various think tanks, lawyers, lobbyists, and consultants paid to love them) have opposed not just net neutrality, but absolutely any federal broadband consumer protection. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about basic pricing transparency requirements or accurate broadband maps; the telecom industry desperately wants to rip you off without pesky federal intervention.

They’re poised to get what they want, and more. As expected, the Sixth Circuit dismantling of net neutrality (and FCC authority more generally) leans heavily on the recent Trump Supreme Court Loper Bright ruling, which has taken a hatchet to the last vestiges of regulatory independence:

“Today we consider the latest FCC order, issued in 2024, which resurrected the FCC’s heavy-handed regulatory regime. Under the present Safeguarding and Securing the Open Internet Order, Broadband Internet Service Providers are again deemed to offer a “telecommunications service” under Title II and therefore must abide by net-neutrality principles. But unlike past challenges that the D.C. Circuit considered under Chevron, we no longer afford deference to the FCC’s reading of the statute. Loper Bright. Instead, our task is to determine “the best reading of the statute” in the first instance.”

Corporations claim they wanted to kill Chevron Deference (which provided regulators with subject matter expertise some leeway to craft and interpret rules within the confines of Congressional law) because “regulators had run amok.” But the idea that the FCC (which struggles to stand up to AT&T and Comcast on a good day) has “run amok” has always been misinformation.

The reality is, with Congress in their back pocket and incapable of reform, corporations wanted to deliver a final killing blow to regulators that might get any bright ideas about trying to rein in their power or punish them for fraud. This has been dressed up in the press as some sort of noble, good faith institutional rebalancing (I recommend Law Professor Blake Reid’s dissection of this kerfuffle).

The court didn’t go quite as far as it could have in leveraging the recent Loper Bright ruling to dismantle the entirety of FCC authority over every last aspect of telecom, but the goal here certainly isn’t subtle: federal consumer protection of your broadband line is largely dead.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time dissecting the finer legalese here, because this is all bad faith bullshit. The ruling parrots the positions of AT&T and Comcast lawyers, keen to ignore logic, precedent, and history, and it’s not subtle about it. Arguing the finer, nuanced legal merits of this debate at this point is like trying to have a meaningful conversation with a damp walnut.

They want reporters and the public to treat this pseudo-legal, pseudo-logical circus with deference and seriousness. I won’t. It’s corruption with a lazy coat of paint.

Lose Lose

If the Sixth Circuit hadn’t ruled in favor of big telecom, incoming FCC boss Brendan Carr (R, AT&T) was poised to dismantle the rules anyway. You might remember Brendan from the first Trump FCC’s dismantling of net neutrality, which involved making up a DDOS attack to dismiss public outrage, and turning a blind eye to the industry’s use of dead and fake people to stuff the FCC comment section.

Brendan thinks consumer protection is diabolical government overreach, but bullying media and tech companies isn’t. There’s no real logic here. People and reporters shouldn’t get lost in the weeds: this is corporate power leveraging its influence over corrupt U.S. courts and captured regulators to undermine all corporate consumer protection authority, not just some piddly net neutrality rules.

That’s not to say net neutrality isn’t important. Big ISPs have long shown they’re willing to abuse market power. Ideally you’d have Congress pass a net neutrality law to end the regulatory ping pong at the FCC, but given Congress is too corrupt to function, that’s always been a non starter. There’s a lot of folks who like to make this point in the press (including AT&T) who know it’s a non-starter.

The Sixth Circuit ruling comes ironically (?) on the heels of the revelation that the telecom industry just suffered one of the worst hacking intrusions in American history, thanks (in part) to broad and mindless deregulation and our corrupt refusal to hold telecoms accountable for lax security standards. Or pass even the most basic of modern privacy or cybersecurity safeguards.

The underlying argument by telecoms, “free market” Libertarians, and many Republicans has long been that if you eliminate federal oversight of shitty U.S. telecoms, magic and innovation spills forth from the streets. That’s of course never been the case. Mindlessly eliminate federal corporate oversight of a regional monopoly like Comcast and AT&T and those entities just double down on their worst behaviors.

Usually because the same kind of folks pushing for mindless deregulation are also backing AT&T and Comcast’s efforts to ensure there’s no meaningful broadband competition.

As a result big telecom doesn’t innovate or compete. They’re regional monopolies who’ve effectively purchased their comfortable positions from corrupt state and federal bureaucrats, who work tirelessly to ensure that neither competition nor serious government oversight befouls their doorstep. One hopes the end of the net neutrality fight redirects attention toward the real problem: consolidated monopoly power.

The Sixth Circuit ruling is not all good news for big ISPs like Comcast and AT&T. The courts and legal precedent (whatever that’s worth anymore) have stated repeatedly that if the federal government is going to abdicate its federal consumer protection authorities, states are well within their legal right to pass their own net neutrality rules.

That said, while numerous states have net neutrality rules (like California, Washington, Maine, and Oregon), many more don’t. And among those that do, I highly suspect that enforcing net neutrality isn’t going to be a top priority given all the bottomless immigration, environmental, labor, and life and death legal fights that are headed in cash-strapped states’ direction during Trump 2.0.

It’s important to understand this is about much more than “net neutrality.” This is about corporate power leveraging corruption to take an axe to coherent federal consumer protection completely—under the pretense the folks doing it are operating in good faith with a serious eye on the confines of law.

And of course it’s about far more than telecom; post Loper Bright every industry across America is busy making similar arguments about every labor, consumer, public safety, and environmental ruling they don’t like, having massive impact on every industry and policy that touches every last part of your life. Corporations have achieved (another) generational victory in the dismantling of consumer protection.

The net neutrality fight may have been nuanced and wonky, but if if you think the broader existential, legal, and operational chaos coming as a result of this Trump 2.0 assault on federal governance is being overstated or will be in any way good for you (assuming you’re not an extremely racist and ignorant billionaire indifferent to mass suffering), you’re violently misreading the situation.

Filed Under: 6th circuit, broadband, consumer protection, consumers, corruption, fcc, high speed internet, net neutrality, telecom, title ii
Companies: at&t, comcast, verizon

Net Neutrality Is Dead As A Doornail Under Trump 2.0

Policy

from the I-hope-you-like-being-ripped-off-by-Comcast dept

While the concept has been endlessly demonized by right wing media (working hand in moist hand with shitty companies like AT&T and Comcast), net neutrality was always well intentioned. It was, in essence, some inconsistent, rarely enforced rules to try and prevent regional broadband monopolies from abusing their regional broadband monopolies to rip off consumers and harm competition.

The idea was portrayed as some sort of diabolical, extremist bogeyman by your shitty local cable company and Republicans. It wasn’t as good as a “fix” for broken U.S. broadband markets as taking direct aim at telecom monopoly power with serious antitrust reform, but in a country where Congress is literally too corrupt to pass the most basic of meaningful reforms, it was one of the only options on the table.

But the focus on net neutrality specifically has proven to be a bit of a distraction from the real fight: whether or not you think the government has a responsibility to protect the public and markets from massive, predatory telecom monopolies bone-grafted to our intelligence gathering systems.

Time and time again, Republicans (and some Democrats), working hand in hand with telecom industry lobbyists, decided that the best approach is to let a company like Comcast or AT&T not only do whatever it wants, but dictate the entire contours of federal and state telecom policy. That means banning community broadband. That means ripping off the poor. That means no coherent consumer protection. No real merger review. Lots of tax cuts and subsidies in exchange for doing nothing.

You know, for freedom. And innovation. And “free markets.”

The result has historically been U.S. consumers paying some of the highest prices in the developed world for patchy, slow broadband with some of the worst customer service of any industry in America (quite a feat). And when the government tries to do absolutely anything differently, Republicans, some centrist Democrats, the courts, and a corporate press treat it as an act of radical overreach.

Your Dead Aunt Opposed Net Neutrality

You might recall that the FCC’s 2015 net neutrality rules were stripped away in 2017 during Trump’s first term, when his agency, led by Ajit Pai and Brendan Carr, turned a blind eye as telecom giants used fake and dead people to pretend eliminating the rules had public support (it didn’t, net neutrality protections actually have very broad, bipartisan support across a majority of the electorate).

The rules were restored again this year by the Biden FCC, only to be immediately put on ice by the Trumplican-stocked 5th Circuit, 6th Circuit, and Supreme Court — which are trying to declare (quite successfully) that all consumer protection is basically now illegal (I wish I was being hyperbolic).

Even if the courts don’t crush the FCC’s attempted restoration of the rules, Trump’s appointment of Brendan Carr to the FCC is all but certain to deliver a killing blow to federal net neutrality protections. And not just net neutrality: Carr’s guaranteed to put an end to all consumer protection, whether it involves policing usage caps, stopping racism in fiber deployment, keeping your cable company from ripping you off, or holding your wireless provider semi-accountable for spying on your every movement.

Again, the conversation gets fixated on “net neutrality,” but this is really a debate about whether the federal government plays a role in protecting markets and consumers from giant, lumbering monopolies dead set on using their size and leverage to rip you off and quash competition. The feds never did a particularly good job on this front, but at least there was, as with net neutrality, a fleeting effort.

Any Pretense Of Giving A Shit Is Dead Now

Not all is lost: Trump’s 2017 net neutrality repeal not only tried to block the FCC from broadband consumer protection, they tried to ban states from protecting consumers or passing their own state-level net neutrality rules. But courts have repeatedly ruled that if the federal government abdicates its responsibilities on consumer protection, they can’t step in and tell states what to do.

The problem: once the unholy alliance of authoritarianism and corporate power get done corrupting Congress and federal regulators (with the help of a Supreme Court and both houses of Congress), where exactly do you think they’re going to direct their vast resources and legal attention? State rights (so seemingly precious to Republican ideology once upon a time), of course.

With the planned Trumpist dismantling of federal governance, the fights over consumer protection, immigration, environmental law, public safety, etc., will be heading to the state level and clogging the courts in historic fashion. Anybody who thinks even well-resourced states like California and Washington will have the time and resources for wonky net neutrality policy battles are probably clowning themselves.

So for now, the battle over net neutrality — and any sort of consistent federal consumer protection standards — are dead as a doornail. Thanks to voters deluded and misinformed into believing they were voting for populist reform or getting an upgrade to the mean old status quo.

That’s not to say people shouldn’t stop fighting. Though they will need to pick the most efficient targets. The key one in telecom being consolidated telecom monopoly power. There’s a huge grass roots U.S. movement toward highly-localized, community owned and operated community owned broadband networks; and if you’re looking for a place where you can help, supporting them is a great start.

States may not pick net neutrality fights they can’t win, but they won’t give up on broadband and wireless consumer protection entirely. They’ll just be sporadic, be more hesitant than ever, and take longer than ever due to a court system flooded with well-funded challenges to any effort to hold corporations accountable across every industry that touches every last aspect of your daily life.

There are a lot of hard lessons coming (and not just for Trumpers) about the importance of a coherent, federal, regulatory state. Hopefully those lessons come in handy during the attempt to rebuild functioning federal governance, assuming this hot mess of an oligarchic kakistocracy makes it out the other side of this tunnel of violent idiocy intact.

Filed Under: authoritarian, broadband, consumers, corruption, fcc, supreme court, telecom

Net Neutrality Heads Back To Court; Corrupt Supreme Court Could Dismantle U.S. Broadband Consumer Protection

Broadband

from the the-authority-to-do-nothing dept

Recent Supreme Court rulings have thrown most U.S. regulatory enforcement into operational and legal chaos. The dismantling of Chevron, with the Loper Bright ruling in particular, now dictates that regulators can’t implement new rules or reforms without the explicit approval of Congress.

Two problems: one, regulators ideally have very specific subject expertise Congress doesn’t have (think about Ted Cruz trying to craft new rules managing wireless spectrum). Two, Congress has been lobbied into corrupt dysfunction, ensuring these theoretical, better, clearer laws and reforms never actually arrive.

Corporations (and the various policy tendrils employed to parrot them) have dressed Chevron up as some noble rebalancing of institutional power. In reality they’ve just taken a hatchet to what’s left of U.S. corporate oversight. Corporate lawyers know they’ve effectively lobotomized Congress. Now they want to dismantle what’s left of federal regulatory oversight. When that’s done, they’ll take aim at state power.

It gets dressed up as some sort of sophisticated ethos, but the goal for corporations has always been the absolute unchecked accumulation of unlimited wealth, free of any government intervention, regardless of the market, labor, or human cost. A lot of ink gets spilled pretending otherwise.

It’s with that backdrop that ISPs and the FCC have started squaring off in court in the latest skirmish over net neutrality. You’ll recall the Republican-stocked 6th circuit put the FCC’s restored net neutrality rules on ice last August. Last week, ISPs and the FCC started having their arguments probed by a three court panel comprised of one Trump appointee and two George W Bush appointees.

Historically, precedent has suggested that the FCC has the authority to classify/reclassify ISPs as common carriers or enact/repeal net neutrality provided they do so within the confines of the Telecom Act and use basic, supporting data. As the EFF notes, Post Loper Bright, that’s all out the window, and the goal for industry is to be able to abuse their regional telecom monopoly power without government opposition:

“These companies would love to use their oligopoly power to charge users and websites additional fees for “premium” internet access, which they can create by artificially throttling some connections and prioritizing others.”

As usual, the telecom industry is claiming that the FCC is abusing its authority to restore net neutrality. You’re to ignore that the telecom industry routinely argues that absolutely any effort by the FCC to do absolutely anything is an abuse of power. If the Sixth Court doesn’t accept the industry’s argument, it heads to the Trump-stocked Supreme Court, where they’ll likely get a sympathetic ear.

All the coverage and analysis I see focuses a bit too myopically on net neutrality. To be clear the FCC isn’t just fighting for net neutrality, it’s fighting for the right to be able to engage in consumer protection at all under current law, whether that’s the policing of unfair usage caps, trying to end racial discrimination in broadband deployment, or trying to stop your cable company from ripping you off with shoddy fees.

Post Loper Bright, telecoms are going to argue that any consumer protection effort by the FCC is an abuse of power well outside of any interpretation of the Telecom Act, and with a court system stocked with Trumpists with an active disdain for precedent, they’re likely to win their arguments more often than not. That’s going to create legal chaos, chill federal willingness to protect users, and punt most broadband consumer protection to an inconsistent platter of state consumer protection efforts.

So far the courts have repeatedly ruled that if the federal government abdicates its responsibility to protect broadband consumers, states have the legal authority to fill the void on net neutrality (or anything else). But we’ll see how long those efforts hold up once an industry (that spends $320,000 every day on lobbying) shifts the entirety of its attention to dismantling state authority.

The story playing out with net neutrality isn’t restrained to telecom. Some variant of this is going to be playing out across every consumer protection effort across every industry and issue that touches your lives.

Because consumer protection is generally deemed as boring, and the “regulatory state” has been demonized as useless for a generation, I still don’t think the public, press, or policy folks have fully fleshed out what our new reality means for everything from labor rights to public safety.

But it’s going to be anything but boring when the real-world impact of Trump’s Supreme Court Loper Bright ruling starts having cascading and potentially fatal impacts across the country over the next few years, at which point a lot of people are going to suddenly be wondering how exactly we let it get to this point, and why people didn’t speak up earlier in a bid to stop it.

Filed Under: broadband, chevron deference, consumer protection, donald trump, fcc, high speed internet, loper bright, net neutrality, telecom

6th Circuit Temporarily Puts Net Neutrality On Ice As The Post-Chevron GOP Assault On The Regulatory State Accelerates

Broadband

from the who-needs-a-functioning-federal-government dept

We recently noted how the telecom industry, with the help of the recent Chevron ruling, was gearing up to deliver what it hoped would be the killing blow to popular net neutrality protections (read: broadly popular FCC rules designed to prevent telecom monopolies from abusing their market power to screw customers and competitors).

AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and friends certainly appear to be having some early success.

In June, the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals won the lottery to hear the industry’s net neutrality challenge; a boon for telecoms given the Republican-heavy makeup of the court (the GOP historically always sides with the policy interests of big telecom).

In mid-July, the Sixth Circuit temporarily paused restoration of the rules. Now the court has granted an extended stay, preventing the rules from being restored until the courts can hash out the legal debate between industry and government, which won’t happen until at least November. There’s a very real possibility that thanks to a corrupt Supreme Court, the rules won’t survive legal challenge.

The court’s stay makes it pretty clear they’re inclined to see things the way of the telecom industry: namely that the FCC lacks the authority to impose net neutrality rules without a more specific new net neutrality law crafted by Congress. It doesn’t appear to matter that previous courts confirmed the FCC has that right, or that Congress is clearly too corrupt to pass more tailored consumer protections.

Courts had previously ruled — several times now — that the Communications Act allows the FCC to impose net neutrality rules — or classify/declassify broadband providers as common carriers under Title II of the Act — provided they based their determinations on some kind of actual logic.

Post Chevron and the successful, corporate-funded attack on the “major questions doctrine,” that painful, multi-decade effort to establish precedent appears trashed, much to the thrill of telecom giants. Major questions doctrine declared that regulators with informed expertise had some leeway within the confines of what’s often vaguely or badly-worded law. Corporations like AT&T, knowing they had Congress under their lobbying thumb, didn’t much like that.

“The final rule implicates a major question, and the commission has failed to satisfy the high bar for imposing such regulations,” the court wrote. “Net neutrality is likely a major question requiring clear congressional authorization.”

There’s several instances in the ruling where Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton also seems to imply the court is viewing the entire fracas in a way that will be favorable to industry.

“The consistency query makes matters worse,” Sutton wrote. “The Commission’s ‘intention to reverse course for yet a fourth time’ suggests that its reasoning has more to do with changing presidential administrations than with arriving at the true and durable ‘meaning of the law.’”

In short Sutton is implying that the FCC’s constant ping-ponging back and forth between partisan administrations on the issue means we need a new, clearer net neutrality law. You’re to ignore that Congress, which sees an estimated $320,000 in telecom industry lobbying influence every single day, is too corrupt and incompetent to ever actually do that.

Which is to say if the courts shoot down net neutrality, it’s not happening. At least on the federal level. But blocking the FCC from declaring broadband ISPs as common carriers also the Telecom Act also greatly restricts its consumer protection enforcement ability more broadly, the entire reason AT&T, Comcast and friends are pursuing this avenue of attack in the first place.

States could still help fill the void on net neutrality. Precedent (for whatever that’s worth anymore) has repeatedly established that if the federal government abdicates its authority over broadband consumer protections and net neutrality, states have full authority to step in and craft their own laws. For now at least; with fed authority defanged, state authority will be the next target of corporate power.

Only a few media outlets seem to understand the gravity of our new, post-Chevron reality. Regardless of precedent, impact, or logic, GOP-appointed lawyers are keen to dismantle most federal oversight of corporate power. It’s the culmination of a fifty-year vision to ensure the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful can pursue largely unchecked wealth accumulation with a disregard for real-world harm.

Most regulatory effort, rule, or enforcement will be challenged anew, posing grave risks to public safety, corporate accountability, functional infrastructure, and environmental reforms across every agency in America. Despite what should be obvious stakes and impact, most journalists and policy experts are treating concerns about the defanging of the regulatory state as either hyperbole or a real snoozer.

But what you’re seeing play out in telecom (federal corporate oversight defanged, states rushing to fill the void) is going to play out across every industry and sector that impacts your life, flooding the court system with absolute chaos for the foreseeable future. The impact will be historically large, incredibly dire, and absolutely none of it is going to be remotely subtle.

Filed Under: 6th circuit, broadband, chevron, consumers, fcc, high speed internet, net neutrality, supreme court, telecom

Sixth Circuit Blocks Popular Net Neutrality Rules From Taking Effect

Broadband

from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept

We recently noted how the telecom industry, with the help of the recent Chevron ruling, was gearing up to deliver what it hopes will be the killing blow to popular net neutrality protections. Protections designed to prevent telecom monopolies from abusing their market power to screw customers and competitors.

They appear to be having some early success. Last month, the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals won the lottery to hear the industry’s net neutrality challenge; a boon for telecoms given the highly Republican makeup of the court (the GOP historically always sides with the policy interests of big telecom).

Last Friday the industry got another win, when the appeals court temporarily put the FCC’s reinstatement of the rules on hold until August fifth as it considers legal challenges from the broadband industry. The rules were originally slated to take effect on July 22.

The Supreme Court’s recent Chevron ruling effectively strips away decades of legal precedent and eliminates the authority of regulators (who ideally have subject matter expertise Congress doesn’t have) to make any enforcement decisions or new rules not strictly outlined by Congress.

Lobbyists have enjoyed framing this as some noble rebalancing of power for the greater good of mankind and puppies, but it’s largely a way to ensure regulators become the legal and policy equivalent of decorative gourds. A company like AT&T knows they have already lobbied Congress into abject corrupt dysfunction; now they’re setting their sights on the last vestiges of regulatory independence.

The goal for a company like AT&T and Comcast is to claim not just that the FCC lacks the authority to implement and enforce net neutrality rules, but no authority to protect broadband consumers whatsoever. “If you want consumer protections,” they’ll say, “they must be very very very clearly written by Congress” (a Congress we all well know we’ve corrupted to the point of uselessness via decades of lobbying).

Post Chevron, some variation of this will be playing out across every regulatory and industry that touches your lives, the impact and scope of which the press has woefully failed to aptly communicate to the public.

In a recent filing, FCC lawyer Scott Noveck argued that Chevron wasn’t integral in the legal justifications underpinning their net neutrality rules:

“Loper Bright has no direct relevance here because the [Net Neutrality] order under review does not turn or rely on Chevron. Instead, the order consistently focuses on ascertaining the best reading of the Communications Act using the traditional tools of statutory construction – exactly as Loper Bright instructs.” 

The FCC could certainly still win the fight. But this isn’t an era known for strict adherence to logic or legal precedent, so it remains very much up in the air if the FCC will come out victorious.

One very real potential outcome is that the Republican courts will declare that Title II of the ‘34 Act simply does not apply to ISPs, ensuring the FCC can’t do much of anything on consumer protection; whether it’s net neutrality or simply demanding that big telecom be transparent about sneaky fees.

The one small bright spot here: courts have repeatedly and clearly ruled that if the federal government is going to abdicate its consumer protection oversight of widely disliked telecom monopolies, states are well within their right to fill the void and pass their own net neutrality rules. Though, even here, this creates a fractured landscape of inconsistent enforcement across each state border.

Again, this microcosm impacting net neutrality is going to apply to countless other efforts to hold corporations accountable across countless different industries and regulators, clogging the courts with a parade of legal challenges that will indisputably create (quite intentionally) a gridlocked mess for regulatory enforcement. I’ve found that, generally, people don’t quite understand what’s coming.

Filed Under: broadband, chevron doctrine, consumer protection, corruption, fcc, high speed internet, monopoly, net neutrality, telecom

Big Telecom Prepares For The Final Killing Blow Against Net Neutrality

Broadband

from the here-we-go-again dept

Back in April the Biden FCC once again voted along party lines to restore net neutrality rules stripped away by the Trump FCC in a flurry of sleazy industry behavior that included using fake and dead people to create the illusion of public support. The Trump FCC was also caught making up a DDOS attack to explain away public outrage (net neutrality historically actually has fairly broad bipartisan support). 

With the return of the rules, the telecom industry is once again taking the matter to court, filing a flurry of lawsuits in late May claiming the FCC lacks the authority not just to enforce net neutrality, but to protect broadband consumers at all. In June, the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals won the lottery to hear the industry’s net neutrality challenge; a boon for telecoms:

“In a good sign for the broadband providers, the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in early June won the lottery to hear the net neutrality challenge. The Ohio-based appeals court is generally seen to lean conservative, with 10 of its 16 judges appointed by Republican presidents. But much is yet to be settled.

The judicial timeline could also be instrumental — if Trump wins in November, FCC lawyers under the next GOP chair will likely abandon defense of some of these more progressive rules in court. It’s possible the fight could one day land at the Supreme Court, where net neutrality critics like Justice Brett Kavanaugh already sit.”

Big telecom has a big advantage this time around: the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that dismantled Chevron deference, regulatory independence, and decades of well-established legal precedent. Years of court battles had pretty clearly established that the FCC has the authority to create — and repeal — net neutrality rules under the Communications Act — provided they justify it with data and logic.

But eliminating Chevron deference upends all of that, and as Colorado Professor Blake Reid notes, it’s very likely that the courts declare, after several years’ worth of billable hours for lawyers, that the FCC effectively has almost no consumer protection authority over telecom under the law:

“The easy money is that the Court’s conservative majority (including then-Judge Kavanaugh, who wrote a blistering dissent against an earlier iteration of the rules in USTA v. FCC), will simply rule that Title II of the ‘34 Act does not apply to ISPs. This result would obliterate the Damoclean pendulum of rules that has more or less kept ISPs in check over the last two decades and make it clear that America’s oft-reviled ISPs have free rein to, um, dutifully serve their customers.”

The FCC’s oversight of telecom was already fairly feckless and unevenly enforced after decades of lobbying. But should the courts head this direction, the FCC’s already shaky consumer protection authority would be effectively lobotomized without extremely explicit new laws from Congress. A Congress AT&T and friends have lobbied over decades into absolute corrupt gridlock and dysfunction.

AT&T and friends have routinely tried to argue that America wants net neutrality rules, Congress should simply pass a net neutrality law. But getting any consumer protection reforms through one of the most corrupt and broken Congressional bodies in U.S. history is a non-starter, and they know it.

Obliterating all meaningful federal oversight of telecom is a particular problem given U.S. telecom (contrary to industry claims) isn’t a functional free market; it’s a bunch of largely unaccountable regional monopolies tethered to our domestic surveillance systems. Companies that have spent the better part of the last generation crushing competitors underfoot and rendering federal oversight toothless.

In a recent filing, FCC lawyer Scott Noveck argues that Chevron wasn’t integral in the legal justifications underpinning their net neutrality rules:

“Loper Bright has no direct relevance here because the [Net Neutrality] order under review does not turn or rely on Chevron. Instead, the order consistently focuses on ascertaining the best reading of the Communications Act using the traditional tools of statutory construction – exactly as Loper Bright instructs.” 

But if the courts ignore all logic, precedent, and consumer welfare (kind of a recurring theme lately) and rule against the FCC, nearly all of its consumer protection efforts could be in jeopardy, whether we’re talking about net neutrality, recent efforts to stop racism in broadband deployment, or even basic efforts to mandate transparency in broadband billing.

Net neutrality rules are set to go into effect on July 22, though the telecom industry filed a request on July 10 that the Sixth circuit block that from happening. That this is all happening so late in Biden’s term is thanks to the belated FCC nomination of Gigi Sohn, and the subsequent telecom-industry backed homophobic smear campaign that successfully stopped her from being seated by Congress.

One downside for big telecom: courts have repeatedly and clearly ruled that if the federal government is going to abdicate its consumer protection oversight of telecoms, states are well within their right to fill the void and pass their own net neutrality rules. Though even here, this creates a fractured landscape of inconsistent enforcement across each state border.

Now that they have Congress lobbied into corrupt gridlock, corporations are taking aim at what little regulatory independence exists within the ever-narrowing confines of law. Once they’ve successfully lobotomized regulatory independence, they’ll reallocate their resources to take aim at the last vestiges of state consumer protection authority. It’s a generational project, and it’s succeeding.

The great irony is that despite decades of infighting, shitty press coverage, and misinformation, U.S. net neutrality rules aren’t particularly onerous, won’t meaningfully impact telecom industry finances (by the industry’s own admission), and have never even been consistently enforced.

The battle has really always been about whether you want government oversight of a very broken and highly monopolized broadband industry. What it looks like if AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Charter and friends see no coherent federal oversight whatsoever (something they’ve been gunning for for the better part of my life) is a very real possibility looming just over the horizon.

Contrary to the years of claims by telecom-industry funded think tankers and consultants, letting regional monopolies run amok isn’t going to have some near-mystical, Utopian outcome. It’s going to mean even higher prices, spottier access, slower speeds, less reliability, and all manner of new, obnoxious nickel-and-diming efforts. It will redefine market failure and regulatory capture, and it’s not going to be subtle.

Filed Under: chevron, high speed internet, net neutrality, supreme court, telecom

Big Telecom Again Takes Net Neutrality To Court, But Faces Long Odds

Broadband

from the here-we-go-again dept

Back in April the Biden FCC finally got around to restoring both net neutrality rules, and the agency’s Title II authority over telecom providers. The modest rules, as we’ve covered extensively, prevent big telecom giants from abusing their monopoly and gatekeeper power to harm competitors or consumers. They also require that ISPs be transparent about what kind of network management they use.

Contrary to a lot of industry and right wing bullshit, the rules don’t hurt broadband investment and they’re not some “radical government overreach.” They’re some very basic guidelines proposed by an agency that under both parties is generally too feckless to stand up to industry.

But big telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast have unsurprisingly challenged the rules once again in the Fifth Circuit, the Sixth Circuit, Eleventh Circuit, and the D.C. Circuit as they seek a lucky lottery draw. At the same time, they’ve filed a petition asking the FCC to pause the rules (set to take effect July 22), claiming (falsely, as it turns out) that the agency’s decision was illegal (all consumer protection efforts are illegal if you’re ignorant enough to ask an AT&T or Comcast lawyer’s opinion about it).

Big ISPs, as usual, insist that if net neutrality is to be addressed, it should be done by Congress:

“The good news is that the FCC’s action will be overturned in court. Congress has always been the appropriate forum to resolve these issues.”

Telecom lobbyists, which spend an estimated $320,000 every day lobbying Congress, enjoy making this claim hoping you’re too daft to realize that Congress has long been too corrupted by corporate influence to do this (or much of anything else on consumer protection or consumer privacy). They know they have Congress in their pockets, and they’re obviously working hard on the courts.

Unfortunately for big ISPs, legal history hasn’t been in their favor. This particular debate has wound through the legal system several times now, and each time the courts have ruled that the FCC has the legal right to reclassify broadband and impose net neutrality under the Telecom Act — provided they provide hard data supporting their decisions.

Big ISPs, like most corporations seeking an accountability-free policy environment, are hoping that the right wing Supreme Court’s looming attack on regulatory independence results in the rules being killed. But that’s no guarantee, given the FCC’s authority over telecoms has been more roundly tested via legal precedent than a lot of other regulatory disputes.

Even if telecom giants like AT&T land a corrupted judge willing to overlook all functional legal precedent and foundational reason (which happens a lot these days), they’re in a terrible position to try and stop states from stepping in to fill the void.

When the Trump FCC killed net neutrality in 2017, the tried to simultaneously ban states from stepping in to protect broadband consumers. But the courts have ruled repeatedly that the federal government can’t abdicate its authority over broadband consumer protection, then tell states what to do.

So if big telecom and the Trumplican courts once again kill FCC net neutrality protections, the groundwork is set for states (many of which already have passed laws) to once again fill the consumer protection void.

As the longstanding corporate and right wing legal assault on federal regulatory oversight culminates in Supreme Court “victory,” you’re going to see some variation of this play out across numerous fronts. Except unlike in telecom, a lot of the disputes will be of the life and death variety.

The goal is to effectively lobotomize all federal oversight of corporate America, bogging down absolutely any federal reform effort down in a perpetual legal quagmire. The stakes of that across labor, consumer protection, public safety, and the environment are profound and boundless, but for whatever reason, large segments of the press and public still haven’t quite figured out what’s coming.

Filed Under: chevron, consumer protection, net neutrality, regulators, telecom