In the wake of the Sprint T-Mobile merger, wireless carriers immediately stopped trying to compete on price (exactly what deal critics had warned would happen when you reduce sector competition). T-Mobile, which once tried to differentiate itself as the consumer-friendly “uncarrier,” almost immediately began behaving just like AT&T and Verizon, starting with firing 9,000+ people.
It’s how mindless and harmful consolidation always works. We know this, there’s endless evidence of this, and somehow it never seems to matter in a country too corrupt to function.
In the last few years, T-Mobile’s been facing lawsuits and consumer blowback because it’s constantly jacking up the price for customers who believed they were under a “price lock” guarantee thanks to a 7-year-old promotion promising that their price would never change.
More recently, T-Mobile announced it would be kicking roughly 8 million subscribers off of their traditional (and often cheaper plans), and onto more expensive and shittier new T-Mobile plans. These new price hikes have joined a bunch of other price hikes to make everybody’s bills significantly more expensive and all of their connections less feature rich and useful:
T-Mobile frames the current migration as an average $4-per-line adjustment, according to CNET. That sounds modest until you stack it on the $5-per-line hike that already hit many legacy smartphone plans back in April 2025. PhoneArena reports some customers on older grandfathered plans face total increases approaching 60% compared to their original rates. Meanwhile, administrative fees for voice lines climbed from $3.99 to $4.49 per month — raised twice within a single year, according to tmo.report — with mobile internet line fees moving from $1.60 to $2.10.
This must be more of that deregulatory, consolidative innovation my Libertarian friends at “non profit” “free market” “think tanks” have spent years telling me about.
This was, of course, something merger critics warned about, very vocally, for a long time. I wrote repeatedly, at multiple outlets, about how this deal’s pre-merger promises were utterly worthless. It didn’t matter, because the federal government is too corrupt to function in the public interest, antitrust reform no longer exists, and the electorate very clearly has a head full of cottage cheese.
Meanwhile all the folks responsible — whether corrupt politicians, shitty Libertarian free market think tanks, or cocky executives — have long-since moved on to other terrible ideas and memory holed the entire thing, while consumers and labor — as always — are forced to eat all of the real-world costs.
Last month, SpaceX began making lobbying filings in support of phone unlocking rules making it easier to switch your phone between wireless providers. You might recall that the Biden FCC was on the cusp of installing such rules before the Trump administration, hand in hand with giant telecoms, dismantled them (Trump’s FCC will have to decide whether they love Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile or Elon Musk more).
“The company’s president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, told investors during a recent IPO roadshow that the group was considering launching a Starlink retail product and could build its own terrestrial US mobile network, according to four people familiar with the matter.”
To be clear, I think a lot of this is simply more bullshit to justify the insane SpaceX IPO valuation. But the fact SpaceX has lobbied for phone unlocking rules suggests there is at least some kernel of real curiosity about an actual plan.
One major problem for SpaceX and Starlink is that Starlink is already too congested to handle the traffic they currently deal with. They’re already struggling under the load of 10 million low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite users; the idea, as proposed in their IPO prospectus, that they’ll very quickly surge to more than 300 million subscribers was already the stuff of fantasy.
But when it comes to building out a cellular network to reach that goal, they simply don’t have the spectrum for this kind of thing:
“New Street Research estimates that the three US mobile network operators have a total of about 1,020MHz of spectrum, while SpaceX has just 65MHz.”
Building out telecom networks is a massive, costly, and expensive chore. Even when you own a government. Directly threatening AT&T and Verizon — some of the most politically powerful companies in the country — wouldn’t be a cake walk, even for Musk. And while Musk clearly has influence at the FCC (remember that time he got Brendan Carr to launch a fake investigation to acquire more spectrum?), turning Starlink into a full wireless/cellular/satellite carrier would be very slow and very expensive.
So if you were a logic-driven investor you’d likely and correctly view this as a costly money pit with no returns anywhere on the horizon. The only real way to make it work would be to acquire somebody like T-Mobile, which would cost billions, take years to integrate, and face all sorts of operational and political challenges — especially if the economy is going to break (further) or control of Congress shifts.
So while a Starlink jump into wireless is certainly possible, I think it’s more likely that this is just putting a toe in the water in a way that might help them extract more favorable terms from their existing cellular partners (they currently offer an “out of range” option via T-Mobile). It’s also likely more IPO fluffing by people who know U.S. journalists and investors no longer truly inhabit operational reality.
Last week Elon Musk successfully conned America and U.S. regulators into signing off on his preposterous SpaceX IPO, which immediately generated Musk $75 billion by comically over-stating the value of SpaceX, xAI, and Starlink. Then bone-grafting the entire pile of bullshit to the U.S. economy and your retirement account under the pretense that space data centers and Mars colonization are just around the corner.
A handful of remaining useful journalists have repeatedly explained how xAI and Musk’s racist 5th place chatbot — which comprises the lion’s share of the ridiculous IPO valuation — is a gargantuan loser. Both SpaceX and xAI aren’t profitable and may never be, and the claims of Mars colonization and space data centers are unworkable bullshit designed to distract people with toddler-level critical thinking skills.
Anyway I’m sure it will go fine.
As a multi-decade telecom beat reporter I’d say I’m better positioned to talk about Starlink — the only actually profitable company in the SpaceX IPO prospectus (and that’s assuming Starlink is being honest about their financial numbers in a country too corrupt to have working financial regulators).
I’ve long noted how Starlink is great for people with no other options, but data has shown how it’s too congested to meaningfully scale. It’s also often too expensive for the sorts of Americans struggling with access. There’s also the problem with it ruining astronomical research and degrading the ozone layer. So Starlink is great for RVs or a guy with an extra cabin in the woods, but it’s not a miracle.
In terms of broadband policy, it’s supposed to be a niche solution. The kind of technology you use to fill in the gaps after you’ve pushed fiber, 5G, and fixed wireless out as far as you can into unserved areas.
But as I’ve mentioned previously, folks in the Trump administration and extended Rogan infotainment universe see Starlink as akin to magic. They think it’s just a sort of pixie dust you sprinkle over the entire of U.S. connectivity woes. There was a soggy Bulwark interview last week with Jason Calacanis that kind of reveals how deep the delusion goes in terms of what Starlink actually is:
The SpaceX IPO insists — and Calacanis dutifully believes — that it’s trivial for Starlink to jump from a niche satellite broadband solution with a little over 10 million subscribers to a massive economic powerhouse with 300-500 million subscribers. Calacanis waxes poetic about Starlink providing bandwidth to every phone in the world and surpassing even Netflix in terms of total subscribers.
But in a way that’s highly representative of modern Silicon Valley, Calacanis doesn’t actually care about how the tech works, or even if it works. Calacanis is interested in unchecked wealth accumulation, and propping up the unbridled profit-seeking of a personal friend.
The thing is: to meaningfully grow, Starlink will need to start seriously competing on price to counter competitors (like Amazon) coming into the space. But the cost of endlessly replacing LEO (low Earth orbit satellites) is immense (SpaceX says each satellite has a five year lifespan, but it’s arguably much lower). And ARPU is already dropping for Starlink as the company tries to drum up new subscribers.
Calacanis insists Starlink’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from being even bigger than Netflix. But for Starlink to even sniff those kinds of numbers, it would have to intensely compete with deeply-entrenched and politically-powerful telecom monopolies, and fiber optic broadband and 5G/6G networks less constrained by the rules of physics. They’ve also got to compete with a rising tide of community-owned fiber.
As Starlink grows its subscriber base, it’s not only going to see its ARPU drop faster, but data shows it’s going to run into new capacity constraints. That means more annoying network management practices that throttle video, limit services, and generally degrade performance. We’re already starting to see the impact of this with network slowdowns and “congestion fees” ranging upwards of $750 in some areas.
Anybody claiming that Starlink is the ticket to vast riches is either lying to you or doesn’t understand how the technology actually works. Even if it can maintain its success as a viable niche connectivity option useful in rural markets and global battlezones, the high cost of maintenance means this is never going to be a major money maker. Though they clearly hope it will prove to be a semi-useful backbone for a major pump and dump scheme.
The ace Elon Musk is holding is corruption and cronyism leading to regulatory favors and massive new subsidies, but it’s not clear even that’s going to be enough.
Cecilia Kang at the New York Times has an interesting article about how the Trump FCC has been doing cartwheels trying to prop up the Musk IPO — especially as it pertains to Starlink. That has included not just abandoning any meaningful regulatory oversight of “space junk” and orbital safety, but launching dodgy investigations into companies that hold spectrum Musk wants for himself.
Elon Musk bought himself a Presidency, and it continues to pay off handsomely:
“Carr has taken multiple actions for which Musk was the prime beneficiary,” said Blair Levin, an adviser to New Street Research, an investment research firm, and a former chief of staff at the F.C.C. He added that Starlink “has gotten a huge amount from the Trump administration and Carr.”
Carr has tried to justify his favoritism of Musk by saying he’s also rubber stamped the LEO satellite policy interests of Jeff Bezos and Amazon. But as we’ve consistently established around here, nothing Carr does is driven by any sort of good faith concern about the public interest.
The funny part is that the New York Times doesn’t even mention that the Trump administration has also hijacked the 2021 infrastructure bill to redirect potentially billions of dollars to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos (I should have an upcoming feature on this over at The Verge). This is money being directed away from affordable fiber and toward two billionaires — for networks they already planned to build.
More specifically, the Trump NTIA under former Ted Cruz staffer Arielle Roth changed the language of the $42.5 billion Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program so that Musk and Bezos would be the prime beneficiaries. They also stripped out any language requiring that internet access built with taxpayer money had to be affordable or equitably deployed with an eye on fairness.
Musk and Calacanis types try to brush functional oversight for taxpayer spending as unnecessary “wokeness.” But the ongoing BEAD saga involves an historic hijacking of Congressionally-mandated funds by bad faith actors; so it’s curious the New York Times didn’t think it was worth mentioning in a story about how unethically cozy the Trump administration and Musk are.
Like most of the SpaceX IPO this will all be proven out over time. Long after people have had their retirements account raided, or small towns have had their infrastructure hopes hijacked. Consumers, taxpayers, and labor will, as is usually the case, be left holding the bag. And the folks that made it possible will already be off to the next big thing leaving people of conscience to clean up the mess.
As we’ve noted the $111 billion megadeal is a historically harmful mess. Backed by billions in Saudi and Chinese cash (raising all sorts of foreign media influence concerns), the giant deal will saddle the company with so much debt that mass layoffs, consumer price hikes, and quality erosion from corner cutting are guaranteed. This happens with every major media merger, but especially when Warner Bros is involved.
Regardless, you’ll be comforted to know that the Trump Justice Department looked at the deal closely and found that not only does it not hurt competition, it’s going to improve competition:
“The evidence reviewed and carefully analyzed by the Division indicates that, post-merger, competition in SVOD is not likely to be harmed. To the contrary, the combined firm is likely to increase competition by offering consumers a more robust competitive alternative to the larger SVOD offerings.”
That is, again, not how any of this works.
The massive debt created by these deals always results in mass layoffs, higher consumer prices, and lower quality product due to corner cutting. It’s not debatable. Arguing against this is like trying to have a fist fight with a running river. You just have to look back at, well, every single major media consolidation effort in the last fifty years. Which the DOJ didn’t because, well, they didn’t care.
You’ll still have major competitors to Paramount like Netflix, Comcast/NBC, Apple, and Disney, but in a country obsessed with consolidation that no longer has functional regulators, there’s really nothing stopping any limit of predatory behaviors — and additional consolidation — moving forward. There’s ongoing pretense that our consumer and labor protections still function. They don’t.
The “funny” part is the Trump DOJ even acknowledges that the history of Warner Brothers has been pockmarked by all manner of terrible competition-eroding consolidation. They just pinky swear that this time will somehow be different. Based on… nothing:
“Warner Bros. has been a repeated acquisition target in the media and entertainment industry. It is thus familiar to the Division from prior investigations and enforcement actions, including AOL/TimeWarner (2001), AT&T/TimeWarner (2018), and WarnerBros./Discovery (2022). The legacy of these transactions illustrates the challenges that arise when the commercial rationale for a deal lacks clear alignment with competitive incentives of the acquiring firm or the competitive evolution of the marketplace. In technology-driven industries, the disruptors of the recent past may quickly become the entrenched monopolists of the present day. It is with this historical experience and present enforcement sensitivity to the contestability of dynamic markets that the Division conducted a thorough investigation of the proposed transaction to assess whether the proposed transaction presented any harm to competition. The extensive investigatory record reviewed by the Division suggests that the impact of the transaction will be to increase competition across the media and entertainment ecosystem, with benefits for American consumers and workers.”
Fun fact: Paramount’s top lawyer is Makan Delrahim, Trump’s “DOJ enforcer” from the first administration. Delrahim personally worked to make sure Sprint could merge with T-Mobile during the first term. They promised that deal would result in untold synergies and new competition. Instead, 8,000+ people lost their jobs and U.S. wireless carriers immediately stopped competing on price. It’s been memory holed.
As far as the inevitable layoffs that always result from these deals (recall that AT&T’s merger with Warner Brothers and DirecTV resulted in 50,000 lost jobs), the DOJ simply declares that won’t be happening this time. Why? Because Larry and David Ellison said they’ll keep pumping out brick-and-mortar movies at the same or greater pace (they won’t):
“While taking seriously the potential impact of the proposed transaction on the creative community and domestic labor groups, the substantial evidence does not suggest a likelihood of reduction in output. That is because the demand for creative workers and labor is correlated with the Parties’ incentives to maintain or expand output. Thus, the expressed labor concerns do not raise actionable antitrust concerns.”
In three years, after the resulting company has fired 10,000+ employees, consumers have been price gouged to reduce debt, and the resulting flailing mess is acquired for half (or less) of the price, all the folks involved with this will have moved on to hyping other terrible ventures. Nobody will own any of this or engage in a single moment of meaningful reflection. That’s how this always works.
Granted DOJ approval of a terrible merger isn’t the final word. State AGs have hinted repeatedly at a looming collaborative antitrust lawsuit that, at a minimum, is likely to drag any integration out considerably. If that lines up with a potential AI bubble pop and economic reverberations, that massive debt load from gobbling up CBS/Paramount and Warner Bros will be an even larger albatross.
“We’re gonna be aggressive here because Michigan jobs are on the line, but also so is national security. So close our border to Chinese vehicles and Chinese technology in the vehicles, even for day trips. That’s how aggressive we believe we need to be right now,” Stevens said while speaking at a policy conference.
Her partner in the legislation went much further. “They can certainly come across the border, drive up to Selfridge Air Force base, take some video with the car. The car is a traveling surveillance package. And all of that data that the car is collecting is being sent straight back to Beijing,” Slotkin said.”
So, a few things. One, it’s curious how normally very vocal “free market” Libertarian groups always mysteriously get quiet when this sort of obvious anti-competitive pandering to large corporate campaign donors pops up. Two, it’s adorable how Slotkin and Stevens want you to believe that simply banning Chinese cars somehow solves the major privacy issues inherent with modern, connected cars.
For one, U.S. and most of the overseas vehicles sold in the U.S. basically have nonexistent security standards. Carmakers collect an ocean of biometric, location and phone data, and then sell that data to a parade of largely unregulated data brokers, who in turn sell access to that data to any random asshole with money to spend — including domestic and foreign intelligence.
They then lie about it when asked. And if they do openly acknowledge it, they insist it’s okay because the resulting data has been “anonymized” (a term that means absolutely nothing).
Which is to say the Chinese, if they really want access to detailed U.S. street information and public movement data, don’t need to sell their cars in the U.S. to obtain it. Because Congress has been too corrupt to pass a meaningful internet-era privacy law any time in the last quarter century. In part because we’re greedy, but also in part because the U.S. government also buys this data to avoid getting warrants.
As a result of this country’s grotesque corruption, we’ve been awash in major privacy and national security scandals for 25 years, including the recent revelation that sensitive U.S. location data obtained by telecoms, apps, and every other device we use (whether it’s made in China or not) is being bought from data brokers by other countries and then utilized to track, target, and kill U.S. troops.
So maybe Stevens and Slotkin actually care about this stuff, but generally privacy is used as a lazy talking point by politicians who have other motivations; in this case making giant U.S. carmakers who don’t want to face meaningful price competition happy ahead of the midterms to ensure the campaign financing funding keeps flowing.
Slotkin was one of numerous Dems who supported the “banning of TikTok,” which really just involved offloading most of the app and its profits to Trump’s billionaire friends, who are as bad, if not worse, on issues like privacy and propaganda than ByteDance ever was. Now Slotkin is going around calling cheaper Chinese EVs “TikTok on wheels,” as if the whole Dem TikTok face plant never happened.
Pretending you’re being extra tough on privacy by going so far as to even ban cars with Chinese tags from visiting from Canada (as if Canadians want to visit the U.S. right now anyway) is particularly weird, performative, and ignores the real problem.
U.S. politicians need to pass a meaningful internet-era privacy law and tightly regulate data brokers, or shut up about how much they care about consumer privacy and national security.
Like most of the U.S., Western Massachusetts towns and cities have spent decades dealing with expensive, spotty, and slow broadband from private telecom monopolies like Comcast and Verizon. As a result, a lot of these towns and cities have explored building their own community owned fiber networks.
Community broadband has been increasingly popular since COVID, with many networks offering locals symmetrical gigabit for as low as $60 a month. Data shows these networks offer faster, cheaper, better service overall. These efforts can take many forms, from public/private partnerships, to city-owned utilities, to joint municipal collaborations like Communications Union Districts (CUDs).
Community broadband isn’t some magic panacea. The quality of a city’s plan and local leaders matters. Being able to financially handle the project is important. But equally important is it’s an organic, popular, grass roots response to decades of telecom market failure. Created by regulatory capture, corruption, unchecked consolidation, and monopoly power.
Recently, Longmeadow, Massachusetts residents voted down an effort by city leaders to build a community-owned broadband fiber network providing affordable fiber access to every last city resident. More specifically, the city was exploring whether to take out an $8.6 million loan for the initial phase of the $27 million fiber project, paid for by a property tax increase of $97 per year, and run by a city utility.
While Longmeadow locals clearly didn’t like idea of higher taxes, it was revealed that local telecoms (most likely Comcast) had also been covertly funding a dark money group named “Mass Priorities” that had been misleading locals about the proposed project via texts, calls, mailers, and door to door visits:
“But while building a municipal fiber network in the region’s more rural towns has faced little opposition, as private internet service providers have little intention of building infrastructure for small customer bases, a shadowy, difficult-to-trace group calling itself Mass Priorities has run apparently well-funded campaigns against municipal broadband in communities like West Springfield and Southwick.”
Such groups generally like to lie and insist that all community broadband networks are always doomed to failure. Or that there’s no real problem that needs fixing. Often they’ll take on the guise of local citizen activists, simply concerned about the taxpayer (but only when applicable to community broadband; monopolies getting slathered with subsidies for half completed networks is never criticized).
“In a feeble attempt to appear Massachusetts-based, the Domestic Policy Caucus calls itself ‘Mass Priorities,’ but the Caucus is based in Minnesota. The organization, which for years has targeted multiple communities across the country that have built, or have considered building, their own broadband networks, has consistently refused to disclose its donors. That lack of transparency matters.”
It’s impossible to state clearly that Mass Priorities swung the vote. Getting a two-thirds majority vote for a project like this is tough to accomplish. And again, many simply have a violent allergy to higher taxes.
But it matters that the group refuses to clearly disclose who is funding its operations. Such groups have no limitations on how much they can spend to influence voters, whereas the Longmeadow, Massachusetts utility can’t legally lobby the public with its own messaging. That puts these dodgy groups, which the telecom lobby has a long history of funding, on superior footing.
If the U.S. telecom market was functioning properly, you wouldn’t see countless towns and cities pursuing the option. It’s generally far cheaper for a monopoly to throw a $10-20k at one of these “astroturfing” groups than it is for them to lower prices or improve availability. So, as is often the case in America, we get market failure, captured regulators, and expensive second-tier service instead.
All propped up by a bunch of proxy organizations that refuse to disclose their funding. Speaking on behalf of broadly disliked companies like Comcast and Verizon, that know they can’t honestly engage on this (or any other) subject in public settings without being laughed out of the room.
Last month FCC boss Brendan Carr illegally ignored remaining U.S. media consolidation laws to rubber stamp Nexstar’s $6.2 billion purchase of Tegna. It’s part of the generational Republican quest to steadily consolidate media, then replace whatever journalism remains with a soggy mish mash of lazy infotainment and right wing propaganda (see: Sinclair Broadcasting).
But there’s trouble in paradise: a judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the merger from proceeding. For now.
“Defendants must immediately cease all ongoing actions relating to integration and consolidation of Nexstar and Tegna,” wrote Troy Nunley, the chief judge in US District Court for the Eastern District of California.
The savior in this case is curiously DirecTV, not-long-ago spun off from its own disastrous union with AT&T. DirecTV filed suit saying that the consolidation in local broadcast TV will erode what’s left of competition in the local broadcast TV sector, harming product quality, opinion diversity, and labor, while resulting in higher overall prices (for everyone) in exchange for even worse product.
From the restraining order:
“Nexstar admits the merger will greatly increase its already huge “scale” and its “leverage,” i.e., the ability to force its TV distribution customers, including Plaintiff, to pay even higher fees for local news, live sports, and other content they distribute to their subscribers. Plaintiff alleges Nexstar will also shut down local newsrooms in dozens of markets, reducing the amount, variety, and quality of local broadcast news that Americans rely on for trusted information about their communities. Plaintiff asserts those harms from reduced competition are precisely what antitrust laws are designed to prevent.”
Nexstar was so certain the merger was a done deal, it had begun changing the physical signs and logos on many of the acquired stations it had begun integrating, something it’s since been forced to reverse. The company has also tried to insist it can’t comply with some of the Judge’s demands because some aspects of the early integration “can’t be undone.”
The deal would combine Nexstar’s stable of more than local 200 stations with Tegna’s 65 outlets in major markets nationwide, blowing past restrictions that no company can control more than 39 percent of households (the new combined company reaches 54.5 percent). In addition to the NexStar lawsuit, the companies are also being sued by a coalition of eight attorneys general and consumer groups.
Since Rupert Murdoch convinced Ronald Reagan to eliminate laws preventing one mogul from owning a paper and TV station in one market, Republican policies (and corporations) have pushed relentlessly to pursue the goal of a monolithic, highly consolidated media in exclusive service to the extraction class and corporate power. The result has been anything but subtle.
Media scholars have been warning about the perils of this for decades, but only recently, under the ham-fisted efforts of Trumpism, have people truly begun seeing the full outline of the threat. The media sector (like most U.S. sectors) desperately needs an antitrust renaissance; and if the federal government is no longer willing to engage in adult supervision, other parties will have to fill the void.
Earlier this year we noted how the Trump FCC, at the direct request of wireless phone giants, destroyed popular phone unlocking rules making it easier and cheaper to switch wireless carriers. The rules, applied via spectrum acquisition and merger conditions after years of activism, required that Verizon unlock your phone within 60 days after purchase so you could easily switch to competitors.
Verizon, as we’ve long established, hates competition, and early last year immediately got to work lobbying the Trump administration to destroy the rules (falsely) claiming, without evidence, that the modest phone unlocking requirements were a boon to criminals and scammers.
The pay-to-play Trump administration quickly agreed, killed the rules, and shortly thereafter Verizon started telling wireless customers on its many prepaid phone brands (including Tracfone) they had to wait a year before switching phones after purchasing one from Verizon:
“While a locked phone is tied to the network of one carrier, an unlocked phone can be switched to another carrier if the device is compatible with the other carrier’s network. But the new TracFone unlocking policy is stringent, requiring customers to pay for a full year of service before they can get a phone unlocked.”
Recently, Verizon implemented a whole bunch of additional restrictions made possible by the Trump administration. More specifically, they imposed a new 35-day waiting period when a customer pays off their device installment plan online or in the Verizon app and wants to take their device to another carrier:
“Payments made over the phone also trigger a 35-day waiting period, as do payments made at Verizon Authorized Retailers. Getting an immediate unlock apparently requires paying off the device plan at a Verizon corporate store.”
So first, they implemented the most draconian restrictions on its prepaid customers, who tend to be lower income and the most impacted from high prices. Now they’re starting to push restrictions onto their more lucrative postpaid (month to month) customers.
Verizon insists (falsely) that these restrictions are necessary to “prevent fraud,” but the real goal is to increase friction when it comes to switching to a competitor. They don’t want the press to outright acknowledge this is anti-competitive in coverage, so they’re engaging in the slow-boiling frog approach that just steadily makes porting your phone out steadily more difficult and annoying.
These unlocking conditions were broadly popular, served the public interest, and took decades of activism and reform advocacy to pass. They ensured that it was easier for consumers to switch between our ever-consolidating, anti-competitive wireless phone giants (consolidation directly made possible by the Trump administration’s past rubber stamping of shitty telecom mergers).
Verizon lobbied the FCC by repeatedly lying, without evidence, that these conditions resulted in a wave of black market phone thefts. FCC boss Brendan Carr, ever the industry lackey, parroted the lies in his subsequent industry-friendly rulings. You know, to make America great again via “populism” or whatever.
Verizon (and Carr) know that there’s a lot going on and the mundanity of a subject like phone unlocking won’t get much attention in the press. Given that the Trump administration has largely lobotomized regulatory independence (at Verizon’s request), there’s very little chance Verizon will see any future accountability, but it’s positively adorable that they’re proceeding cautiously just in case.
We’ve noted repeatedly how Trump wants to scuttle Netflix’s proposed merger with Warner Brothers because his friend and key donor, billionaire Larry Ellison wants to buy Warner Brothers (and CNN) instead. In fact the two have already purportedly met to discuss which CNN anchors they’d like to fire once Larry (who just bought CBS and part of TikTok) gains control.
“Rice said, “If these corporations think that the Democrats, when they come back in power, are going to, you know, play by the old rules, and, you know, say, ‘Oh, never mind. We’ll forgive you for all the people you fired, all the policies and principles you’ve violated, all, you know, the laws you’ve skirted.’ I think they’ve got another thing coming.”
That Democrats will hold corporations meaningfully accountable for crimes and misbehaviors during Trump’s tenure certainly isn’t any sort of guaranteed mathematics. Centrist Democrats like to dabble in regulatory performance, but meaningfully, consistently, and effectively standing up to corporate power has never been what you’d call a strong suit for party leadership.
What triggered Donald’s latest toddler moment? Apparently a post by right wing extremist Laura Loomer on Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website:
“In his Truth Social post, Trump linked to an X post from far-right activist Laura Loomer, who wrote that Rice is “threatening half of the country with weaponized government political retribution.” She also forecast that if Netflix is allowed to acquire Warner Bros., “positive messaging of the Democrats’ upcoming witch hunts against Trump from Barack Hussein Obama and his anti-White racist wife Michelle would likely be blasted across all streaming services.”
This ties in to the broader campaign to lie and claim that Netflix (an opportunistic company that airs whatever makes money regardless of ideology) is somehow left wing, to better bolster the argument that Larry Ellison and U.S. autocratic allies should control the entirety of U.S. media instead.
Trump and Trump Republicans have zero credibility whatsoever on antitrust or competition issues. The Trump DOJ gambit is being conducted entirely in bad faith. But as our corporate media consolidates, you may notice they’re utterly incapable of communicating that to readership. Which is to say our shitty press is going to help sell the Trump and Ellison con here:
As always there’s a lot of projection going on. Ellison really does want to gobble up the lion’s share of U.S. media and shovel his right wing ideology down the public’s throat (See: CBS). It’s very clear he and other members of MAGA aspire to the kind of autocratic-media model seen in Orban’s Hungary, where most outlets are owned by the autocrats’ closest allies and pepper the public with agitprop 24 hours a day.
Ideally you’d block all additional media consolidation, as it almost always results in mass layoffs, higher prices, and lower quality product. That said, Trump’s fake-populist regulators aren’t going to do that, and combating fascism requires some strange bedfellows. So if the country’s choice is homogenized Netflix cack or autocrat-friendly state television, it’s not really much of a choice at all.
Copyright owners increasingly claim more draconian copyright law and policy will fight back against big tech companies. In reality, copyright gives the most powerful companies even more control over creators and competitors. Today’s copyright policy concentrates power among a handful of corporate gatekeepers—at everyone else’s expense. We need a system that supports grassroots innovation and emerging creators by lowering barriers to entry—ultimately offering all of us a wider variety of choices.
Pro-monopoly regulation through copyright won’t provide any meaningful economic support for vulnerable artists and creators. Because of the imbalance in bargaining power between creators and publishing gatekeepers, trying to help creators by giving them new rights under copyright law is like trying to help a bullied kid by giving them more lunch money for the bully to take.
Entertainment companies’ historical practices bear out this concern. For example, in the late-2000’s to mid-2010’s, music publishers and recording companies struck multimillion-dollar direct licensing deals with music streaming companies and video sharing platforms. Google reportedly paid more than $400 million to a single music label, and Spotify gave the major record labels a combined 18 percent ownership interest in its now- $100 billion company. Yet music labels and publishers frequently fail to share these payments with artists, and artists rarely benefit from these equity arrangements. There’s no reason to think that these same companies would treat their artists more fairly now.
AI Training
In the AI era, copyright may seem like a good way to prevent big tech from profiting from AI at individual creators’ expense—it’s not. In fact, the opposite is true. Developing a large language model requires developers to train the model on millions of works. Requiring developers to license enough AI training data to build a large language model would limit competition to all but the largest corporations—those that either have their own trove of training data or can afford to strike a deal with one that does. This would result in all the usual harms of limited competition, like higher costs, worse service, and heightened security risks. New, beneficial AI tools that allow people to express themselves or access information.
Legacy gatekeepers have already used copyright to stifle access to information and the creation of new tools for understanding it. Consider, for example, Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence, the first of many copyright lawsuits over the use of works train AI. ROSS Intelligence was a legal research startup that built an AI-based tool to compete with ubiquitous legal research platforms like Lexis and Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw. ROSS trained its tool using “West headnotes” that Thomson Reuters adds to the legal decisions it publishes, paraphrasing the individual legal conclusions (what lawyers call “holdings”) that the headnotes identified. The tool didn’t output any of the headnotes, but Thomson Reuters sued ROSS anyways. A federal appeals court is still considering the key copyright issues in the case—which EFF weighed in on last year. EFF hopes that the appeals court will reject this overbroad interpretation of copyright law. But in the meantime, the case has already forced the startup out of business, eliminating a would-be competitor that might have helped increase access to the law.
Requiring developers to license AI training materials benefits tech monopolists as well. For giant tech companies that can afford to pay, pricey licensing deals offer a way to lock in their dominant positions in the generative AI market by creating prohibitive barriers to entry. The cost of licensing enough works to train an LLM would be prohibitively expensive for most would-be competitors.
The DMCA’s “Anti-Circumvention” Provision
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “anti-circumvention” provision is another case in point. Congress ostensibly passed the DMCA to discourage would-be infringers from defeating Digital Rights Management (DRM) and other access controls and copy restrictions on creative works.
In practice, it’s done little to deter infringement—after all, large-scale infringement already invites massive legal penalties. Instead, Section 1201 has been used to block competition and innovation in everything from printer cartridges to garage door openers, videogame console accessories, and computer maintenance services. It’s been used to threaten hobbyists who wanted to make their devices and games work better. And the problem only gets worse as software shows up in more and more places, from phones to cars to refrigerators to farm equipment. If that software is locked up behind DRM, interoperating with it so you can offer add-on services may require circumvention. As a result, manufacturers get complete control over their products, long after they are purchased, and can even shut down secondary markets (as Lexmark did for printer ink, and Microsoft tried to do for Xbox memory cards.)
Giving rights holders a veto on new competition and innovation hurts consumers. Instead, we need balanced copyright policy that rewards consumers without impeding competition.
