Just so we’re very clear up front: despite a lot of bullshit to the contrary, the Trump administration is completely dismantling whatever’s left of U.S. consumer protection and corporate oversight. That’s not hyperbole; between recent Supreme Court rulings, Trump executive orders, and the actions of radical agency bosses like Brendan Carr, they’re not being at all subtle about the goal.
They’re utterly disinterested in protecting consumers or smaller competitors from the harms created by shitty giant telecom monopolies. Gone is even the pretense of concern about the impacts of unchecked corporate power. Gone is any effort to protect consumers and healthy markets.
In their place is a weird fusion of rank corruption and radical zealotry, with Carr spending most of his time abusing FCC authority to threaten companies and journalists that refuse to kiss Trump’s ass, or launching fake “investigations” into telecom companies for not being racist enough.
Now Carr is looking to apply the final, killing blow to the FCC’s role as any sort of consumer watchdog, something it already didn’t do all that consistently, or well. In a public notice issued last week, Carr proclaimed he’s taking public comment on his plan to follow through on Trump’s executive order and basically completely defang the agency.
The goal is to make the FCC largely decorative on consumer protection, much to the pleasure of shitty regional telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast. Of course, Carr and friends phrase it somewhat differently:
“Specifically, we are seeking public input on identifying FCC rules for the purpose of alleviating unnecessary regulatory burdens. We seek comment on deregulatory initiatives that would facilitate and encourage American firms’ investment in modernizing their networks, developing infrastructure, and offering innovative and advanced capabilities.”
This is all dressed up as very serious adult policy thinking in some policy circles and in our feckless media. But it’s just overly verbose corruption in a shitty hat.
For 50 years, an underlying right wing (and “free market libertarian”) lie has been that basically all oversight of shitty giant telecom monopolies constitutes an “unnecessary regulatory burden.” And if you just strip away oversight of a giant shitty company like Comcast, innovative magic happens.
That magic, of course, never materializes; monopolized broadband access continues to be spotty, expensive, and unreliable due to regulatory capture and limited competition. Travel to nearly every town or city in America and behold the pretty widespread broadband industry market failure that’s resulted from this sort of coddling of consolidated corporate power.
It’s because if you strip away regulatory oversight of consolidated regional monopolies, they just double down on the shitty behavior. With neither competition nor regulatory oversight in place to constrain their worse impulses, they just perpetually exploit captive customers in increasingly “creative” ways. It’s why U.S. broadband remains more expensive and shittier than a long list of developed nations.
Still, the lie that large telecom giants face uniquely terrible, burdensome oversight in the U.S. remains a useful fiction for captured lackeys like Carr. But this mindless deregulation and defanged oversight of corporate power has very real, very obvious harms that go beyond high prices and shitty broadband. As we saw recently with the biggest Chinese hack of U.S. telecom infrastructure in recorded history.
These “mindless deregulation” folks have dressed up greed as some elaborate ethos, and like to pretend that competent regulatory oversight is radical extremism. It’s all in service to the singular goal of improved quarterly returns at absolutely any cost. There is zero interest in the real world harm of such a narrow ideology. They simply ignore the harms when they arise.
Except in this instance U.S. companies like AT&T and Comcast have finally bitten off more than they can chew. They signed up for Trump 2.0 thinking they’d just get more of what was common during the first Trump turn: tax cuts, rubber stamped merger approvals, and mindless deregulation.
But with Trumpism unconstrained by the courts or needs of re-election, they’re instead getting a heaping dose of authoritarianism: weird radical zealots who can ruin your businesses on a whim if you’re not suitably deferent to the mad child king; massive societal destabilization and chaos; weird, pointless tariff wars; recessions that ensure the public can’t pay for your already-overpriced broadband access. Enjoy.
The FCC runs an $8 billion federal subsidy program to help bring phone and broadband services to lower income homes and schools called the Universal Service Fund. The program was historically a bipartisan thing, until the extremist Trump administration came to town.
Driven by a fake right wing consumer group called “Consumers’ Research,” the Trumplican-stacked Fifth Circuit court of appeals recently took the radical step of ruling the entire program unconstitutional. The ruling, which ignored past Fifth Circuit and Supreme Court precedent, effectively declared the USF an unconstitutional, illegal tax, something seven court dissenters said was a preposterous leap.
Now the Supreme Court has stated they’ll hear the case, which will ultimately determine whether federal efforts to expand broadband access to poor, rural neglected communities is effectively illegal or not.
Not too surprisingly, 15 MAGA loyal Attorneys General, apparently with nothing better to do, have thrown their support behind the effort to effectively make helping poor people afford broadband illegal:
“A coalition of Republican attorneys general from 15 states urged the Supreme Court Tuesday to find an $8 billion-per-year broadband subsidy unconstitutional. They argued the court should make it harder for Congress to delegate broad power to regulatory agencies.”
This is, of course, part of the broader radical Trump administration’s attempt to dismantle any sort of coherent federal governance, regardless of any sort of real world harm. This is, as we’ve noted previously, about eliminating all oversight of billionaires and corporations. But it’s routinely dressed up as some sort of noble constitutional battle by serious, good faith individuals.
“Yes, the Universal Service Fund serves some important purposes. But those purposes cannot trump constitutional precepts,” the attorney generals wrote in their amicus brief.
But nobody actually supports this outside of a handful of extremist far-right wingers. Even traditional GOP telecom allies and former Trump FCC boss Ajit Pai think this is a bad idea. And again, this case only exists due to a lawsuit by a fake consumer group named Consumers’ Research, whose website encourages people to report “woke” companies for making bare-bone efforts at empathy and inclusivity.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on March 26. It’s hard to say whether this is too extreme for even our extreme, Trump-loyal Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court declares the USF illegal, this could be leveraged to justify congressional “reform” of the program. But because Congress is broken and corrupt, it won’t be real reform. It will be corruption-fueled bullshit.
At the same time, the Trump administration and its loyal courts are dismantling the entirety of federal consumer protection at agencies like the FTC and FCC, ensuring regional telecom giants like Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and Charter can rip you off with zero real repercussions. What could possibly go wrong?
The first Trump FCC tried to give Musk nearly a billion dollars to deliver expensive Starlink access to some traffic medians and airport parking lots. The Biden FCC clawed back most of those subsidies, (correctly) arguing that the service couldn’t deliver consistent speeds, and if we’re going to spend taxpayer money on broadband, more future-proof and less capacity constrained options like fiber and 5G should probably be prioritized.
Not surprisingly, Trump 2.0 is going to massively over-compensate for this fake scandal, and slather their favorite fake engineer billionaire manbaby with cash at every conceivable opportunity.
That apparently starts with giving Musk and Starlink a lucrative new FAA contract as Musk and his 4chan tween DOGE minions set about pretending to fix government by throwing it into chaos. Musk appears to be trying to elbow out Verizon, which has an existing 15 year, $2 billion contract with the agency to upgrade its infrastructure that was obtained through traditional transparent bidding processes.
The length and price tag of Starlink’s new FAA contract were, unsurprisingly, not publicly disclosed. Which is weird for a DOGE figurehead that professes to care so much about transparency:
“The contract comes while Musk is leading efforts to make deep cuts in federal government spending, including staffing cuts at the FAA, and some critics are raising questions about conflicts of interest over his role overseeing government agencies that are supposed to be regulating his businesses.”
Bloomberg had a little more leaked inside detail, noting the partnership would “eventually” include 4,000 Starlink terminals and be deployed over the next 12 to 18 months. Follow up reporting from the Washington Post suggests there’s some consternation about Musk’s giant handout among FAA officials.
In a post to his right wing propaganda platform, Musk stated, without any sort of evidence, that the “Verizon system is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk.” Basically falsely claiming that Verizon might be killing U.S. air travelers:
I’d just like to pause for a moment to acknowledge that as somebody who has probably written more about Verizon than anybody alive, it takes a very specific type of shitty villain to have me backing Verizon.
Verizon signed up for Trump 2.0 eager to get a giant tax cut for doing nothing. And relentless attacks on organized labor. And the total evisceration of corporate oversight of whatever’s left of FCC consumer protection authority. And they’re keen to get their giant $20 billion merger with Frontier rubber stamped.
That’s a lot of potential money at stake, so I’m not sure Verizon will show any backbone and file suit here. But if they don’t, shareholders will certainly have the opportunity to sue. Knowing Verizon’s greasy lobbying and legal practices pretty intimately, it’s all a very leopards-eating-faces sort of affair.
But again, Musk stealing Verizon’s FAA contract is just one of countless conflicts of interest that arise with having an unelected bureaucrat illegally declaring how government should or shouldn’t function and illegally bypassing bidding processes. Not to mention the numerous privacy and national intelligence issues.
The FAA contract is certainly just the opening salvo for Musk favoritism. The U.S. government has already threatened to pull Ukraine’s access to Starlink unless they sign off on a mineral deal that would be beneficial to Tesla. You probably also missed that USAID officials were investigating Starlink‘s use in Ukraine right before Trump and Musk engaged in a rapid unscheduled disassembly of the agency.
It’s clear the Trump NTIA is also hoping to redirect some of the $42.5 billion in BEAD broadband infrastructure subsidies away from existing projects and toward Musk’s Starlink whenever possible. That’s not just bad due to corruption, but because it’s going to wind up redirecting a lot of taxpayer money away from small local businesses and popular community-owned broadband networks.
Starlink is a good option if you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing else. But “I didn’t do the reading” guys like Joe Rogan tend to think Starlink is akin to some kind of magic pixie dust you can just sprinkle around to fix everything.
Rank corruption aside, the GOP is genuinely convinced that Musk is an engineering super-genius who can fix government with a wave of his hand. They genuinely have no idea that this persona was a press-enabled mythology providing cover for a rank opportunist who takes credit for other peoples’ ideas, something the tech press only belatedly discovered during his bungled takeover of Twitter.
So they’re keen on throwing all of their eggs in the Elon Musk basket, fairly oblivious to the fact they’ve given absolute power to a conspiratorial oligarch who genuinely has no Earthly idea what he’s actually doing. So yeah, a lot of this is just corrupt cronyism pretty typical in an authoritarian kakistocracy. But a lot of it genuinely is being driven by rank delusion into Musk’s actual intellect and expertise, which is going to end extremely, extremely badly for absolutely everybody involved.
Updated: make sure you read the update at the end of this story.
Here’s a fun thing about corruption investigations: Usually when prosecutors uncover one quid pro quo, they don’t resolve it by offering an even bigger quid pro quo. And yet, that appears to be exactly what’s happening with NYC Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted last fall for allegedly trading favors with Turkish officials, and is now watching those charges evaporate in exchange for helping the Trump administration with its immigration agenda.
The twist — and there’s always a twist — is that the people most effectively pointing out this corruption aren’t the usual suspects. Instead, it’s coming from a bunch of dyed-in-the-wool conservative prosecutors at SDNY who are resigning en masse rather than participate in what they see as a perversion of justice. When the Federalist Society crowd starts quitting over corruption, you know something interesting is happening.
The apparent corruption here isn’t just brazen — it’s documented in black and white. The Justice Department’s order to drop the case doesn’t even pretend to assess the merits of the charges. Instead, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove explicitly tied the dismissal to Adams’ willingness to assist with federal deportation efforts — a textbook example of weaponizing prosecutorial discretion for political ends.
Even more disturbing is the mechanism: the dismissal is “without prejudice,” meaning charges could be refiled at any time. This isn’t just prosecutorial discretion — it’s prosecutorial extortion. The Trump administration has effectively created a sword of Damocles to hang over Adams’ head, ensuring his continued compliance with their immigration agenda. The message is clear: step out of line, and those charges might suddenly become relevant again. It’s the kind of institutional corruption that would make a banana republic blush.
It means that Adams’ personal freedom now outweighs the best interests of the people of New York City.
The system’s response to this corruption has been revealing. For several days after the initial order, an unusual silence descended over the Southern District office — a silence that spoke volumes about the internal struggle taking place. Then came something remarkable: a scathing letter from Acting US Attorney Danielle Sassoon to Attorney General Pam Bondi. Sassoon — a Federalist Society stalwart and former Scalia clerk who’s about as far from a “progressive prosecutor” as you can get — laid bare the rot at the core of this decision in a document that reads like a conservative legal scholar’s manifesto against institutional corruption.
Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations. As Justice Robert Jackson explained, “the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.” The Federal Prosecutor, 24 J. Am. Jud. Soc’y 18 (“This authority has been granted by people who really wanted the right thing done—wanted crime eliminated— but also wanted the best in our American traditions preserved. “). I understand my duty as a prosecutor to mean enforcing the law impartially, and that includes prosecuting a validly returned indictment regardless whether its dismissal would be politically advantageous, to the defendant or to those who appointed me. A federal prosecutor “is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all.” Berger v. United States, 295 U.S. 78, 88 (1935).
For the reasons explained above, I do not believe there are reasonable arguments in support of a Rule 48(a) motion to dismiss a case that is well supported by the evidence and the law. I understand that Mr. Bove disagrees, and I am mindful of your recent order reiterating prosecutors’ duty to make good-faith arguments in support of the Executive Branch’s positions. See Feb. 5, 2025 Mem. “General Policy Regarding Zealous Advocacy on Behalf of the United States.” But because I do not see any good-faith basis for the proposed position, I cannot make such arguments consistent with my duty of candor. N.Y.R.P.C.3.3; id. cmt. 2 (“A lawyer acting as an advocate in an adjudicative proceeding has an obligation to present the client’s case with persuasive force. Performance of that duty while maintaining confidences of the client, however, is qualified by the advocate’s duty of candor to the tribunal. ” ).
In particular, the rationale given by Mr. Bove—an exchange between a criminal defendant and the Department of Justice akin to the Bout exchange with Russia— is, as explained above, a bargain that a prosecutor should not make. Moreover, dismissing without prejudice and with the express option of again indicting Adams in the future creates obvious ethical problems, by implicitly threatening future prosecution if Adams’s cooperation with enforcing the immigration laws proves unsatisfactory to the Department. See In re Christoff, 690 N.E.2d 1135 (Ind. 1997) (disciplining prosecutor for threatening to renew a dormant criminal investigation against a potential candidate for public office in order to dissuade the candidate from running); Bruce A. Green & Rebecca Roiphe, Who Should Police Politicization of the DOJ?, 35 Notre Dame J.L. Ethics & Pub. Pol’y 671, 681 (2021) (noting that the Arizona Supreme Court disbarred the elected chief prosecutor of Maricopa County, Arizona, and his deputy, in part, for misusing their power to advance the chief prosecutor’s partisan political interests) . Finally, given the highly generalized accusations of weaponization, weighed against the strength of the evidence against Adams, a court will likely question whether that basis is pretextual. See, e.g. , United States v. Greater Blouse, Skirt & Neckwear Contractors, 228 F. Supp. 483, 487 (S.D.N.Y. 1964)(courts “ should be satisfied that the reasons advanced for the proposed dismissal are substantial and the real grounds upon which the application is based”)
I remain baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seeming collaboration with Adams’s counsel and without my direct input on the ultimate stated rationales for dismissal. Mr. Bove admonished me to be mindful of my obligation to zealously defend the interests of the United States and to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the Administration. I hope you share my view that soliciting and considering the concerns of the U.S. Attorney overseeing the case serves rather than hinders that goal, and that we can find time to meet.
But wait, it gets better! There’s a footnote in Sassoon’s letter that tells you everything you need to know about how modern corruption works. The old-school way was to have your shady meetings in smoke-filled back rooms. The new way, apparently, is to have them in official conference rooms while actively preventing anyone from taking notes:
I attended a meeting on January 31, 2025, with Mr. Bove, Adams’s counsel, and members of my office. Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed. Mr. Bove admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting’s conclusion
Nothing quite says you know you’re engaging in some shady ass shit like demanding you collect the notes of anyone in attendance.
What makes this story particularly significant is who’s blowing the whistle. Sassoon isn’t some “woke prosecutor” that the MAGA world can easily dismiss. She’s a card-carrying member of the conservative legal establishment who, until this week, was seen as a rising star in those circles. Her willingness to sacrifice her standing in that world to uphold basic constitutional principles reveals just how far the corruption has spread — and perhaps offers a glimmer of hope that some institutional guardrails still hold.
Sassoon’s stand has triggered a cascade of resignations within SDNY, with seven prosecutors (and counting) choosing to walk away rather than participate in this corruption of justice. The latest resignation letter, a scorching indictment from lead prosecutor Hagan Scotten, is particularly noteworthy. Scotten — who clerked for both Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh and explicitly states his support for the Trump administration — makes it clear that this isn’t about politics; it’s about fundamental principles of justice being trampled for political gain.
There is a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake. Some will view the mistake you are committing here in the light of their generally negative views of the new Administration. I do not share those views. I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal. But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way.If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.
Scotten’s prediction proved grimly prophetic. As reported just hours ago, Bove and Bondi found their willing executioner — though the circumstances reveal yet another layer of institutional corruption:
The prosecutor acquiesced to file the motion in an attempt to spare other career staff from potentially being fired by Emil Bove, the acting US deputy attorney general and former personal lawyer to Trump, sources briefed on the matter told Reuters. The news agency named the lawyer as Ed Sullivan, a veteran career prosecutor, who agreed to alleviate pressure on his colleagues in the department’s public integrity section of 30 attorneys, two sources said, after his team was given an hour by Bove to decide between them who would file the motion.
“This is not a capitulation – this is a coercion,” one of the people briefed on the meeting later told Reuters. “That person, in my mind, is a hero.” The whole section had reportedly discussed resigning en masse.
The cruel irony of forcing the Public Integrity Section to compromise its own integrity isn’t lost on anyone. This is how institutions die — not with a bang, but with an ultimatum.
There’s a special kind of institutional poetry here: The Public Integrity Section was given an hour to decide who would compromise their integrity. And someone did, not out of cowardice or foolishness, but to protect their colleagues. “A hero,” his colleague called him, and maybe that’s right. But it’s the kind of heroism that only exists in broken systems.
The NY Times has revealed even more disturbing details about the behind-the-scenes machinations. In what reads like a playbook for corrupting justice, Bove apparently coached Adams’ legal team (including Alex Spiro, better known as Elon Musk’s go-to counsel) in a wink-wink-nudge-nudge fashion on exactly what political commitments would make the charges disappear.
During the meeting, Mr. Bove signaled that the decision about whether to dismiss the case had nothing to do with its legal merits.
Instead, Mr. Bove said he was interested in whether the case was hindering Mr. Adams’s leadership, particularly with regard to the city’s ability to cooperate with the federal government on Mr. Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
Mr. Bove also said he was interested in whether the case, brought by the former U.S. attorney, Damian Williams, was a politically motivated prosecution meant to hurt Mr. Adams’s re-election prospects.
In her letter to Ms. Bondi, Ms. Sassoon said that she was “baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seeming collaboration with Adams’s counsel and without my direct input on the ultimate stated rationales for dismissal.”
There’s something almost elegant about it, in a horrifying sort of way. The Justice Department has managed to transform a corruption prosecution into what amounts to a compliance manual for corruption. It’s like they’ve created a template: “Here’s how to trade criminal charges for political favors while maintaining plausible deniability.” And the really wild part? This is all happening after years of the MAGA world screaming about supposed “lawfare” against conservatives. Turns out they weren’t complaining about weaponized justice — they were planning how to do it themselves.
History rhymes: While mass resignations of principled lawyers helped topple Nixon’s presidency, in Trump’s second term they’ve become just another item in the daily digest of institutional erosion. The difference this time? It’s not the usual suspects sounding the alarm. Instead, it’s career conservatives — products of the Federalist Society pipeline — who are putting their careers on the line to preserve what’s left of prosecutorial independence.
As we’ve previously discussed, any path through this constitutional crisis requires principled conservatives to find their voice. The fact that it’s taking career prosecutors to do what elected Republicans won’t speaks volumes about where the real courage in conservative circles resides.
The question now isn’t just whether our institutions can survive this assault, but whether these acts of principled resistance can inspire others before the machinery of justice is fully converted into a tool of political control. The American experiment has survived previous challenges through the courage of individuals willing to place principle above party. We’re about to find out if enough of those individuals still exist.
Update: Incredibly, that report that a prosecutor had agreed to file the dismissal turned out to not be accurate. Many hours later, after no such filing was actually made a few very bizarre things happened. First, Emil Bove filed a notice of appearance in the case. That is… not normal.
Finally, the “nolle prosequi” (a notice saying “we no longer want to prosecute”) was filed. But even the way it was filed is weird and somewhat unprecedented. Two lawyers, including Ed Sullivan (who was mentioned above as effectively agreeing to be the fool to protect his coworkers) signed most of the document, but they did not sign the final statement. Instead, there was a further “order” from the DOJ, signed by Bove alone, telling the Court to effectively dismiss the case:
Even the language here is bizarre. The prosecutors don’t get to “direct” the Court to do anything. That’s likely why Bacon and Sullivan signed the part about “respectfully requests” that the Court issue an order. But Bove leaps in, acting like he gets to order around the judge, and separately signs that part.
Kinda shocking.
What will be interesting now, is to see what Judge Dale Ho does.
There have been legitimate debates about whether the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act — which makes it a criminal act for US entities to bribe foreign government officials — sometimes creates gray areas in international business. For example, over a decade ago, the Walmart Mexico case highlighted how Walmart payments to “speed up” permitting to build stores in Mexico blurred the line between standard expedited licensing and outright bribery.
But the law has been crucial in establishing clear standards for international business conduct. If nothing else, it made it so that American businesses could stand up to demands for bribes by pointing to the law, and saying they can’t because of the law.
Donald Trump, for whatever reason, has long been a critic of the law, though ironically, his own Justice Department in his first administration would go on to become its most aggressive enforcer.
This time around, when he seems to be trying to usurp Congress’ authority at every opportunity (and Congress is letting him do so), he has just instructed the Attorney General to ignore the law and let companies bribe foreign officials. Even leaving aside that the President is not supposed to instruct the Attorney General what laws to enforce, and which not to enforce, and that the Attorney General is supposed to be independent of the President, this seems bad.
It’s a move that perfectly encapsulates the Trump doctrine: when the law becomes inconvenient for your friends, just pretend it doesn’t exist.
“It sounds good, but it hurts the country,” Trump said of theForeign Corrupt Practices Act, as he signed the order at the White House.
“Many, many deals are unable to be made because nobody wants to do business, because they don’t want to feel like every time they pick up the phone, they’re going to jail,” Trump said, referring to U.S. anti-corruption efforts.
Of course, Trump’s complaints about FCPA enforcement creating a chilling effect on business are directly contradicted by his own administration’s record. Not only was Trump’s Justice Department by far the most aggressive enforcer of the FCPA in its history, but American companies somehow managed to continue doing international business throughout this period of heightened enforcement.
In comparison, the Biden admin seemed to barely use it at all.
If Trump is claiming that deals are unable to be made because “they don’t want to feel like every time they pick up the phone, they’re going to jail,” then surely he can point us to some US businesses that claim the FCPA chilled their ability to “pick up the phone.” Spoiler alert: he can’t, because that’s not how this works.
On top of that, now, Trump announcing this fucks over tons of American businesses who will now be shaken down for bribes, and can no longer point to the FCPA to protect them (even as the law remains on the books, because Trump doesn’t have the Congressional votes to remove it). The end result is terrible for American businesses who will now be threatened and pushed to bribe foreign officials in all sorts of situations.
But, hey, if you want to look through what kinds of poor, poor executives are being caught under this law, Stanford has a nice page that has all the details you could need — at least until the admin forces it down.
This isn’t about making American business more competitive or solving any real economic problems. It’s about creating a permission structure for a specific kind of corruption that benefits a specific class of people. And if you’re wondering how enabling international bribery will help address any of America’s actual challenges — from the price of eggs to healthcare access — well, that’s probably because you’re thinking about this all wrong. The point was never to solve those problems in the first place.
In what looks increasingly like a protection racket, Meta has agreed to pay Donald Trump $25 million to settle a lawsuit that multiple courts had already indicated was completely meritless. The settlement, which directs $22 million toward Trump’s presidential library, comes after a dinner at Mar-a-Lago where Trump reportedly told Zuckerberg this needed to be resolved before the Meta CEO could be “brought into the tent.”
And this was all being negotiated at the same time Zuckerberg made a public appearance on Joe Rogan to complain about how unfair it was that Joe Biden was mean to him. At the very same time that Trump was literally demanding money from him.
The story behind this shakedown begins four years ago, when major internet platforms banned Trump following January 6th, citing clear violations of their policies against inciting violence. Most platforms eventually reinstated him, with Meta bringing him back in 2023 as his GOP nomination became inevitable.
Rather than accept that private companies have every right to moderate their platforms, Trump responded in 2021 with what can only be described as legal performance art: suing Meta (and Mark Zuckerberg), Twitter (and Jack Dorsey), and Google (and Sundar Pichai), claiming that their moderation decisions violated the First Amendment. As we pointed out at the time, everything about the case was backwards. The First Amendment only restricts the government (which at the time of the supposed violation was run by Trump himself), not private companies.
In the lawsuit, Trump tried to blame the Biden administration (which did not exist at the time of the banning!) for stripping his rights, even though they were not the government and had nothing to do with the decisions of the private companies.
The lawsuits did not go well. After being transferred out of Florida (where Trump brought them) to California, the case against Twitter/Dorsey moved forward the fastest, where a judge absolutely trashed it as frivolous.
Plaintiffs’ main claim is that defendants have “censor[ed]” plaintiffs’ Twitter accounts in violation of their right to free speech under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution… Plaintiffs are not starting from a position of strength. Twitter is a private company, and “the First Amendment applies only to governmental abridgements of speech, and not to alleged abridgements by private companies.”
That case was appealed to the Ninth Circuit, which held oral arguments (which did not go well for Trump). But before the Ninth Circuit could rule, there was that flurry of internet content moderation cases that went to the Supreme Court last year (including Murthy and Moody), so the Ninth Circuit decided to wait until those cases were ruled on, and then asked the parties for additional briefing in light of those rulings.
As for the two other cases, against Google and Meta, those were put on hold while the Twitter appeal played out on the (reasonable) assumption that how the Ninth Circuit ruled would impact those cases.
Then came an interesting development that initially flew under the radar: just two weeks after the election, ExTwitter quietly filed a notice with the appeals court, suggesting they were about to reach a settlement.
We represent the appellants and appellees in the above-captioned appeal, in which the Court held argument on October 4, 2023. In accordance with Ninth Circuit rules, we write to advise the Court that the parties are actively discussing a potential settlement. See Ninth Cir. R. p. xix. In light of those discussions, we respectfully suggest that the Court withdraw submission and stay this appeal.
Because, of course, in the interim between the lawsuit being filed and November, Elon Musk had purchased Twitter, renamed it to X, then become a super fan of Donald Trump and his biggest political backer. So it must have been awkward that the two of them were literally suing each other (and Musk was obviously going to win if the Ninth were allowed to decide).
Now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that when Zuckerberg flew to Mar-A-Lago to have dinner with Trump right after the election, the President (who just months earlier had threatened to put Zuck in prison for life), apparently brought up the case unprompted during the dinner, and said that for Zuck to make amends and be “brought into the tent” he had to pay up:
Serious talks about the suit, which had seen little activity since the fall of 2023, began after Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg flew to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida to dine with him in November, according to the people familiar with the discussions. The dinner was one of several efforts by Zuckerberg and Meta to soften the relationship with Trump and the incoming administration. Meta also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. Last year, Trump warned that Zuckerberg could go to prison if he tried to rig the election against him.
Toward the end of the November dinner, Trump raised the matter of the lawsuit, the people said.The president signaled that the litigation had to be resolved before Zuckerberg could be “brought into the tent,”one of the people said.
Weeks later, in early January, Zuckerberg returned to Mar-a-Lago for a full day of mediation. Trump was present for part of the session, though he stepped out at one point to be sentenced—appearing virtually—for covering up hush money paid to a porn star, one of the people said. He also golfed, reappearing in golf clothes and talking about the round he had just played, the person said.
Let’s call this what it is: a protection racket that would make Tony Soprano proud. The playbook is classic: file a meritless lawsuit, make veiled threats (like suggesting prison time), then offer “protection” in exchange for payment. The only difference is that instead of a local restaurant owner paying to keep their windows intact, we’re watching a tech giant hand over $25 million to avoid future “problems.” The case was legally DOA – but that was never the point.
And Zuck is now using Meta’s money to fund what is effectively a $25 million gift to Trump.
President Trump has signed settlement papers that are expected to require Meta Platforms to pay roughly $25 million to resolve a 2021 lawsuit Trump brought after the company suspended his accounts following the attacks on the U.S. Capitol that year, according to people familiar with the agreement.
Of that, $22 million will go toward a fund for Trump’s presidential library, with the rest going to legal fees and the other plaintiffs who signed onto the case. Meta won’t admit wrongdoing, the people said. Trump signed the settlement agreement Wednesday in the Oval Office.
Some might draw parallels to ABC’s settlement in the Stephanopoulos case, but that comparison misses a key distinction: ABC faced at least plausible arguments about actual malice standards in defamation law. While it still does look like ABC caved to a blatant threat about a winnable case, it still would have been costly to litigate. Here, we’re talking about a case so devoid of legal merit that even Trump-appointed judges would have struggled to keep straight faces.
The cases against Meta, Twitter, and Google were losers from the start, and the courts seemed pretty clear on that. But both Meta and soon (if not already) ExTwitter will “settle” the cases funneling many millions of dollars directly to Trump.
It’s hard to see this as anything other than a pathway to corruption. Presidents can just sue media properties for not handling things the way they want, and then the companies all “settle” the cases, funneling millions of dollars to the President.
This settlement doesn’t just erode trust — it weaponizes distrust. By framing platform moderation as political favors rather than policy decisions, it undermines the very concept of content governance. The real free speech threat here isn’t the initial ban, but the creation of a system where access to digital public squares depends on paying political tribute.
The implications here are staggering. Even if you charitably view this as mere appearance of corruption rather than the real thing, we’re watching the creation of a dangerous new playbook: Presidents can now use frivolous lawsuits as leverage to extract millions from tech companies, while those companies can effectively purchase political protection through “settlements.” The next time you hear Silicon Valley leaders talk about defending democratic institutions, remember that Meta just showed exactly how much those principles are worth: $25 million, paid directly to a presidential library fund.
And for other tech companies watching this unfold? The message is clear: better start saving up for your own “settlement” fund. The protection racket is going digital.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I’ve covered telecom giants like AT&T for most of an adult life. And I can tell you with absolute certainty that the company all but owns most state legislatures, who are happy to pass no limit of terrible, anti-consumer, anti-competitive legislation in exchange for a nice vacation trip or campaign contribution.
AT&T lawyers and executives are usually smart enough to avoid leaving any sort of paper trail, bribing officials within the pathetic confines of our existing, really flimsy lobbying and campaign finance laws. But in 2022, AT&T was hit with a $22 million fine for just outright bribing former state Rep. Edward Acevedo and his colleague, Former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan.
AT&T was trying to secure legislation that would free the company from having to maintain or repair traditional copper-based (and heavily taxpayer subsidized) phone and DSL service, often still in active use by the poor and elderly. AT&T’s been going state to state, with mixed results, trying to convince state politicians that it shouldn’t have to maintain the copper-based networks taxpayers paid handsomely for and still, in many parts of the country, help connect folks to 911 services.
AT&T used a lobbying firm as an intermediary to pay Acevedo $22,500 over nine months. That resulted in the indictment of Former AT&T Illinois President Paul La Schiazza. But the attempted prosecution of La Schiazza was declared a mistrial last week in Illinois, after prosecutors failed to convince just one of twelve jurors hearing the case that bribery had occurred. La Schiazza’s attorneys were very happy about it:
“Defense attorney Tinos Diamantatos mocked the prosecutors’ case in his closing argument Tuesday, referring to the feds’ “dark and stormy night”interpretation of evidence and at one point calling his client “Mr. Unethical Bribester.” The reality, he said, is that there is no evidence that La Schiazza exchanged Acevedo’s money for AT&T’s legislative success.”
Prosecutors say they had ample email evidence bribery occurred (you can peruse the complaint and case details here). The complaint notes that Acevedo was paid “for supposed consulting services” but clearly “did no work in return for the payments.” The bribes are clearly bribes, but in email correspondence was often couched in the kind of rhetoric that leaves things open to interpretation. If you’re an imbecile.
If you recall, AT&T also was caught in a scandal paying Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen $600k to gain inside access to the former President.
In just the last decade or so AT&T has been fined $18.6 million for helping rip off programs for the hearing impaired; fined $10.4 million for ripping off a program for low-income families; fined $105 million for helping “crammers” rip off their customers; and fined $60 million for lying to customers about the definition of “unlimited” data. It’s also been accused of ripping off U.S. schools for decades, something I’ve yet to see properly investigated.
Usually AT&T cleverly skirts around the limits of our fairly weak lobbying laws, and when they are caught, routinely manages to reduce or avoid fines entirely. Here we have one of the most obvious bribery cases in years showcasing how AT&T literally purchases favorable state legislation, yet it’s still somehow a steep uphill climb toward anything even vaguely resembling accountability or justice.
