And when shitty, surveillance-happy governments try to block or degrade the use of VPNs, bad things can happen. As Russia found out recently when a ham-fisted effort to block VPN users from accessing Telegram resulted in a massive outage for online banking across the entire country.
Last February Russia tried to delete WhatsApp and Telegram from its version of the internet in the hopes of driving Russians to Max, the country’s approved “everything app.” Max has no encryption or privacy protections, making it easier for Vladimir Putin’s government to engage in mass surveillance of the public’s online activities.
VPN use makes that harder. An estimated 50 million Russians still use VPNs to access Telegram, according to CEO Pavel Durov (happily posting away over at Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website):
“But amid its effort to weaken VPNs on Friday, according to Bloomberg, accounts from “The Bell and other Russian media” banking apps were disrupted. This disruption might have been, “caused by an overload in the filtering systems run by Russia’s communications watchdog, according to the reports,” Bloomberg explained, “with experts warning that major restrictions risk undermining network stability.”
Something similar happened in 2018. Whoops. Apparently the Russian government was so eager to ban VPNs, they erroneously targeted IP addresses tied to banking infrastructure owned by Sberbank, VTB, and T-Bank, demonstrating the fragile nature of centralized financial infrastructure. The outage briefly made mobile payment apps unusable, making cash the only viable transaction option for part of a day.
Given that shitty autocratic governments (like our own) are incapable of learning anything useful from experience, you can expect the problem to repeat itself.
Right wing broadcasters are having a very good time under Brendan Carr, who has looked to destroy all remaining media consolidation limits to let them merge. Such companies, like Sinclair, Nexstar, and Tegna, don’t do journalism so much as they do soggy, right wing propaganda and infotainment, usually with endless fear mongering about drugs, homelessness, and crime rates.
They’re just one part of the right wing’s effort to remake the entirety of media into a massive safe space for dim autocrats.
Carr’s latest effort: he rubber stamped Nexstar Media Group’s $6.2 billion purchase of Tegna behind closed doors. Carr let the merged companies ignore our remaining media consolidation limits, which prevent one company from being the primary broadcast news voice for more than 39 percent of households (the new combined company reaches 54.5 percent).
Nexstar (a very Republican friendly company that also owns The Hill), not that long ago fired a journalist whose reporting angered Trump. Combined with Tegna, the two companies will own 221 Big Four broadcast stations, or more than half of the U.S. stations affiliated with FOX, NBC, ABC, or CBS.
Carr’s been on a campaign to ensure these right-wing loyal companies have more power in their dealings with their national counterparts (remember how they helped Carr censor Jimmy Kimmel?). The efforts come as local Americans increasingly live in “local news deserts” where quality local journalism simply no longer exists.
Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat left at the FCC (Republicans refuse to fill the other seat), didn’t have nice things to say about Carr’s decision to ignore the public interest protections without a transparent, public vote (indicating Carr very clearly knew this would be very unpopular):
NEWS: The FCC has approved the unlawful Nexstar-TEGNA merger behind closed doors.The consequences of this rubber stamp approval will be felt in living rooms and newsrooms across the country, resulting in fewer voices, less competition, and higher costs for consumers.
As always, Carr’s order approving the merger leverages all manner of pseudo-legalistic sounding bullshit to justify ignoring Congress and the law. And he parrots a bunch of completely empty promises by Nexstar that they’ll ramp up the production of more “local news”:
“We note that Nexstar has made significant commitments in the agency’s record as well, further ensuring that this transaction promotes the public interest. To further serve its local communities, Nexstar commits to expanding its investment in local news and programming, including increasing the amount of local news it provides in acquired markets.”
Except again, by “news” we mean right wing propaganda. And Brendan Carr never meaningfully holds corporate power accountable for anything, unless it involves a comedian making fun of the president or companies not being suitably racist enough for the president’s liking.
Eight states have already filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the decision. The lawsuits understandably focus heavily on the competition impacts, and the likely higher cable TV prices that will result for most of you:
“By consolidating with a major competitor, Nexstar would likely acquire the power to charge MVPDs higher retransmission consent fees for Big 4 station content. In turn, those MVPDs would likely pass on the increased retransmission consent fees, in large measure, to their subscribers in the form of substantially higher cable and satellite bills.”
California regulators attempted to slow the process down by proposing a standard timing agreement with Nexstar, where the company would suspend its acquisition of Tegna until the state completed its investigation.
But something of particular note: on pages 16-17 of the states’ amended complaint, it becomes clear that Nexstar completely ignored the State AGs for 8 days, then ignored their lawsuit for another 18 hours, and then told the state AGs “The relief sought in your Complaint is no longer available.”
In other words, what passes for some of the only real antitrust enforcement we have (a scattered coalition of states) have to fight both consolidated corporate power and the authoritarian, corrupt government simultaneously to make any inroads in the public interest.
“This is completely unprecedented,” Free Press (the consumer group, not the Bari Weiss troll farm) Research Director S. Derek Turner told me via email. “Nexstar and the Trump DOJ and FCC seem to have acted in concert to deprive the citizens of of these 8 states their rights to have our AG enforce the antitrust laws on our behalf.”
If Carr succeeds here, I suspect it won’t be long before you see Sinclair and this new combined company merge. Carr is also fielding requests by the big four national broadcasters to eliminate restrictions preventing them from merging as well (one of many reasons they’ve been so feckless). After that, you’ll likely see more consolidation across telecom, tech, and media.
It is, just in case we’ve forgotten, the complete opposite of the “antitrust reform populism” Trump, and a long line of useful idiots, promised last election season.
While this is certainly an act of some desperation (less than 20% of all U.S. TV viewing is now broadcast), claiming this doesn’t matter because this is “just local broadcasting” and the “future is the internet” (something I see often) is a violent misread of the dire stakes of the situation. This aggressive, Trump-loyal consolidation hasn’t, and isn’t, just being confined to broadcast television (see: Twitter, TikTok).
This is, to be clear, a coordinated and illegal authoritarian/corporatist effort to ignore the public interest and the law to expand right wing propaganda’s power over an already clearly befuddled and broadly misinformed electorate. Right wingers will continue to engage in this quest to dominate the entirety of U.S. media (following in the steps of Victor Orban in Hungary) until they run into something other than the political and policy equivalent of soft pudding.
Netflix has retreated from its protracted bidding war with Larry Ellison for control of Warner Brothers, giving the Trump ally likely control of Warner, CNN, and HBO. In a statement, Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said that Paramount’s latest offer made the acquisition financially irresponsible:
“The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder value with a clear path to regulatory approval. However, we’ve always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid.”
The merger was made possible, in part, by the Trump administration’s efforts to help Ellison and Paramount elbow out Netflix. That included a disinformation campaign across right wing media falsely portraying Netflix as a “woke” leftist company, as well as a fake DOJ antitrust investigation into Netflix (that will now mysteriously disappear now that Larry Ellison has likely gotten his prize).
I’d like you to take a peek at the news coverage of this whole mess and notice how few outlets even acknowledge that Trump administration corruption played a role, much less acknowledge that the goal here is autocratic-friendly propaganda.
The massive debt load from massively overpaying for Warner Brothers is also likely to cause major operational headaches that could result in this being a short-lived adventure much like the several-decades worth of pointless Warner media mergers (including AT&T) that preceded it.
That’s a lot of money for the Ellisons (and the Saudis) to dump into a company that has, again, seen nothing but a two-decade history of disastrous overvalued mergers resulting in a progressively shittier and less creative company, broadly despised by creatives after a parade of brutal layoffs (much more of which are certainly coming to pay off debt).
Things could could be further complicated by a sudden subscriber exodus across the brands, or the Ellisons’ fortunes being further strained by a potential AI hype bubble collapse. All the lazy AI-generated Batman IP slop in the world will not be able to save this mess if the winds don’t blow favorably in the Ellisons’ direction over the next two years.
Still, an overt authoritarian oligarch is now very close to controlling an unprecedented segment of U.S. traditional and new media. If it follows the established autocratic playbook, this push will continue until it runs into something other than pudding-soft public, political, and policy opposition. There’s a window here for policymakers and consumers to ensure the gambit fails, but the hour is getting late.
Here we go again with the party of the “rule of law.” The rule of law doesn’t apply to the Trump Administration. It only applies to the victims of its vindictive policies.
But the least it could do is get some basic facts straight before talking out of its ass about whatever new fascist scheme it wants to deploy. And who better to display his ignorance of the law (which used to be no excuse) than the man who spent some time being Trump’s punching bag before convincing the Big Boss he could be a valuable bootlicker.
Anchor baby Rubio used to be nothing more than an opportunistic senator who hitched his wagon to Trump’s star. It took several years for that risky bet to pay off. When Trump returned to office for a belated victory lap in 2024, Rubio was elevated to the position of Secretary of State, a position he has absolutely no qualifications for. That certainly doesn’t make him unique in the Trump Administration, but perhaps explains why he’s so bad at everything he’s doing now, including (apparently) being able to remember basic facts about the US government.
On his way to claiming Trump has no masters, Rubio swept away an entire branch of government in his haste to defend the administration’s actions in its War on Brown People. Here’s how that went down in a recent Senate hearing, as reported by Hafiz Rashid for The New Republic.
After first insulting the senator who actually went to visit Kilmer Abrego Garcia — someone the Trump Administration has openly admitted it mistakenly sent to an El Salvadoran maximum security prison — by claiming (without facts in evidence) that Garcia is a “human trafficker” Senator Chris Van Hollen “had margaritas with” — Rubio went on to claim no one can take Trump down.
His reasoning for this claim? Well, it involves vanishing an entire branch of the US government before moving on to claim the courts don’t have the power to prevent the King from cooking.
“There is a division in our government between the federal branch and the judicial branch. No judge, and the judicial branch, cannot tell me or the president how to conduct foreign policy,” Rubio said. “No judge can tell how I have to outreach to a foreign partner or what I need to say to them. And if do reach to that foreign partner and talk to them, I am under no obligation to share that with the judiciary branch.”
Well, there are actually three branches. Rubio may have chosen to forget the legislative branch since he’s been elevated out of it. But even if he just meant to delineate the difference between these two branches, he’s still wrong. That’s why there are three branches: to ensure no single branch consolidates so much power it can’t be held back by the other two branches.
But that’s exactly what Rubio goes on to assert: the executive branch is at the top of the republic’s food chain. And when the King is hungry, he eats. In addition, everyone appointed to an executive position — despite their complete lack of qualifications or skills — is above the rest of the co-equal branches.
So, it’s all wrong. It’s all very disturbing. Rubio is saying all of this out loud, not caring what the legislative and judicial branches think of his proclamations. He truly believes the executive branch answers to no one. And even if he doesn’t truly believe this, he’s pushing this narrative on behalf of his benefactor (singular!).
It shouldn’t surprise anyone. This is what the administration has been claiming in court, albeit far more subtly. First, it’s alleging its power grabs are unable to be questioned by courts. Second, it’s refusing to comply with court orders. And, finally, it’s openly daring the rest of the government to do something — anything! — about it.
Everything Rubio said here is something Trump and his highest ranking officials truly believe: the President answers to no one. They’re wrong (in terms of the law) but so far they’ve been mostly right because the other branches are failing their duties to act as a check against the administration’s unprecedented power grabs. Rubio is still just a foot soldier who will be discarded as soon as Trump’s done with him. But he’s letting all of us know exactly what the administration thinks about being part of an operative democratic republic: it wants no part of this.
