If you’ve been around a while, you might remember that Verizon used to be completely obnoxious when it came to forcing you to use their phones and their shitty apps. At one point, Verizon wouldn’t even let you use a competing GPS mapping app, locking you to Verizon’s substandard VCAST apps. The company also adored locking you into long-term contracts and expensive phone payment plans, making it expensive, annoying, or impossible to switch carriers.
Two things changed all that. One, back in 2008 when the company acquired spectrum that came with requirements that users be allowed to use the devices of their choice. And two, as part of merger conditions affixed to its 2021 acquisition of Tracfone. Thanks to those two events Verizon was dragged, kicking and screaming, into a new era of openness that was of huge benefit to the public.
Under current rules, Verizon is supposed to unlock handsets 60 days after they are activated on its network. This includes both Verizon’s main brand, and its sub-brands like Straight Talk. But (correctly) confident the Trump administration won’t hold them accountable, Verizon has been refusing to unlock its phones, as Kansas resident Patrick Roach recently found out.
Roach bought a discounted iPhone 16e from Verizon’s Straight Talk earlier this year as a gift to his wife. He planned to pay a month of service, cancel, and then switch the phone to the US Mobile service they normally use. Under the rules, that was supposed to be possible. But Verizon blocked the attempt. So he sued them in small claims court, and won. From the October ruling:
“Under the KCPA [Kansas Consumer Protection Act], a consumer is not required to prove intent to defraud. The fact that after plaintiff purchased the phone, the defendant changed the requirements for unlocking it so that plaintiff could go to a different network essentially altered the nature of the device purchased.”
Before winning in court, Roach turned down a Verizon settlement offer for $600 because it would have restricted him from talking about his case openly:
“It’s just kind of slimy of them, so I feel like it deserves a spotlight,” he said. “I’m not sure with the current state of the FCC that anything would happen, but the rule of law should be respected.”
Not all heroes wear capes. Again, Verizon is currently lobbying the Trump FCC to eliminate these unlocking guidelines entirely; and, like everything else the telecom industry asks of Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr, they’re very likely to get it, shifting the wireless industry back to the shittier days of old where switching carriers was annoying and expensive. You know, to make America great again.
Brendan Carr was dragged before Congress last week for some light questioning about all the terrible, illegal bullshit he’s been up to. While the hearing mostly focused on FCC independence and Carr’s failed bid to try and censor Jimmy Kimmel, it didn’t touch on the other extremist nonsense Carr’s been up to, including his assault on public media and destruction of consumer protection.
While his higher profile targets have gotten all the attention, the Associated Press has a very good story you should read about Carr’s efforts to bully a Bay Area radio station (KCBS) after it accurately informed locals about the goonish behavior of masked ICE agents.
As our already struggling, highly consolidated, and under-funded media outlets tend to do, KCBS immediately folded under federal existential threat, just as Carr hoped:
“KCBS demoted a well-liked anchor and dialed back on political programming, people said. For months, reporters were dissuaded from pursuing political or controversial topics and instead encouraged to focus on human interest stories, according to the current and former staffers.”
When staffers did try to cover more political fare, they say the tone was heavily scrutinized and the content was watered down to a bland gruel to avoid upsetting Republicans:
“Doug Sovern, a veteran political journalist at the station, said he was sidelined after Carr announced his investigation.
“‘Chilling effect’ does not begin to describe the neutering of our political coverage,” said Sovern, who retired in April. He said his retirement was not related to the controversy.”
As Carr was distracted by his other extremist projects, like failing to censor Kimmel, some of the scrutiny eased and the station regained the confidence to at least report on things like the No Kings protest. But the bullying appears to have had its intended effect. At one point, a KCBS reporter says he was denied the opportunity to interview Katie Porter because management felt it would upset Donald Trump:
“In the weeks after the immigration story, Seelig asked Sovern to cancel an interview he had set up with California gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter out of fear she would say something negative about Trump, he said.”
For its part, feckless station management is trying to pretend that nothing happened:
“There has been no change in policy or editorial direction at KCBS,” the station added. “We remain committed to providing our Bay Area listeners with trusted news, including our political coverage, that is balanced and objective.”
Carr first targeted KCBS with a letter of inquiry, which prompted the station’s corporate owner, Audacy, to immediately shift into CYA mode, reviewing the political statements and social media posts of reporters for any hint of “political bias” (by which they of course mean criticism of right wing ideology and policy).
It’s another example of how journalism doesn’t really align particularly well with the goals of consolidated corporate power, which in turn weakens it to exploitation by bad actors (like, oh, authoritarians). That’s a major reason why the U.S. desperately needs independent media, worker-owned media, and publicly-owned media, the latter of which Carr is also trying to destroy through sham investigations.
Again, it’s important to step back and view this all as an incredible, generational, and extremely successful right wing and corporate joint project to dismantle real journalism, accountability, and informed electoral consensus. This isn’t something that just popped up with Trump, though it did help enable Trumpism.
None of it has been remotely subtle, and the campaign results in a U.S. press that’s utterly and comically incapable of being honest with itself (or its audience) about what’s actually happening. This is, to be clear, the exact trajectory seen in countries like Russia or Hungary that stumbled face-first into permanent autocratic rule.
But most of the day got hung up on a very simple question: is the FCC an independent agency, or is it dutifully bound to obediently do whatever the president wants without question? If you’re new to this, the answer is supposed to be the former, but Carr, ever the dutiful Donald Trump earlobe nibbler, really struggled with this line of questioning all day long:
LUHAN: Is the FCC an independent agency?CARR: I think th—L: Yes or noC: There's a test for this in the la—L: It's yes or no, Brendan! On your website, it simply says, man, 'the FCC is independent.' This isn't a trick questionC: The FCC is notL: So is your website lying?C: Possibly
This was apparently such a sensitive line of questioning for Carr and the Trump FCC that it actively changed its website during Carr’s testimony to falsely state the agency was no longer independent:
Just so people understand: Carr has always been shameless liar and opportunist, whose underpinning legal and “intellectual” logic for what he’s doing will just randomly change, at whim, to justify his actions. Republicans, and a lot of our press, will then work tirelessly to normalize this as serious adult policymaking.
Something important to note that highlights Carr’s hypocrisy: back during the net neutrality wars in 2014, Barack Obama publicly stated that he supported imposing some basic rules, which was perfectly normal and legal. At the time, Republicans positively freaked out, insisting that the president’s vocal support was among the greatest indignities ever conceived and violated FCC independence.
“President Obama’s one minute and 57 second video was the culmination of an unprecedented and coordinated effort by the Executive Branch to pressure an independent agency into grabbing power that the Legislative Branch never said it had delegated.”
That FCC independence had been somehow destroyed because Obama legally vocally supported net neutrality has been a central talking point for Republicans for years now. It was the centerpiece of phony Republican congressional inquiries and reports for the better part of a decade.
Yet here you have a Republican president openly ordering the FCC to censor critics, journalists, and entertainers. And Carr, shamelessly trying to now claim the FCC serves entirely at the whim of the president:
KIM: I want to read you a quote & see if you agree with it. 'Congress long ago determined that the FCC is an independent expert agency.' Is that correct? CARR: Senator, there has been a sea change in the law & approach since I wrote that sentenceKIM: Yes you did. You said it in front of Congress
This is who Carr is (and who modern Republicans are). For decades they’ve wanted to have their cake and eat it too. When it’s time to implement even modest oversight of predatory telecom monopolies or media giants, folks like Carr will insist the FCC is just a helpless puppy with no authority. When it comes time to offload TikTok to Trump’s billionaire friends, censor journalists critical of their mad king, or bully comedians, suddenly the FCC has all the authority in the world.
There’s absolutely zero legal coherence to any of it. It’s kakistocracy. It’s authoritarianism at the hands of the dimmest, least ethical people imaginable. It’s frequently illegal. And it’s embarrassing.
One downside of the day’s focus on FCC independence is that Congress didn’t really pressure Carr on any of the other ethically problematic and illegal things he’s been doing, whether it’s a fake “investigation” into public media, his abuses of the merger approval process to require that companies be more sexist and racist, or his complete decimation of FCC consumer protection and media consolidation limits.
Hoping to repay corporate America’s feckless support of authoritarianism, the Trump administration is once again attempting to illegally ban all state and federal oversight of corporate power. Both via executive order, and by withholding already awarded grants from states that refuse to play along.
The Trump administration has tried several times this year to push an unsuccessful blanket ban on “regulating AI.” They like keeping the press attention on “regulating AI,” to push the narrative that they’re protecting American innovation from the mean old government. As opposed to trying to impose a corrupt, blanket ban on all state or federal oversight of unchecked corporate power.
Case in point: earlier this year, Senator Ted Cruz came up with the idea of withholding billions in already awarded infrastructure broadband grants from any state that “regulated AI.” But Cruz’s effort also attempted to punish any state that attempted to enforce their own net neutrality laws, or even make sure that taxpayer-subsidized broadband was affordable.
“Trump’s draft order apparently would apply to about half of the funding available from the $42 billion program, which was created to deploy broadband to homes and businesses without modern access.”
By “regulate AI” it’s again important to understand the Trump administration means “do absolutely anything that upsets corporate America.” While the Supreme Court and circuit courts have done an impressive job destroying federal oversight of corporate America, state autonomy still remains a bit of a wild card in the Project 2025 and corporate quest for total immunity from literally all public accountability.
This isn’t about “protecting innovation from burdensome regulation.” It’s about completely destroying the state and federal government’s ability to protect labor, consumers, markets, or the environment from unchecked corporate power. I feel compelled to annoyingly repeat myself on this point because it’s so often buried in press coverage that tries to normalize corrupt anti-democratic extremism.
The poster child for this effort has been the $42.5 billion BEAD (Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment) broadband grant program created by the 2021 infrastructure bill. Republicans repeatedly demonized and voted against this bill, but love taking credit for its improvements.
Republicans also stripped away any and all language requiring that taxpayer-funded broadband is actually affordable to the public. And they redefined core definitions to make the program generally less useful. Hijacking already awarded funds doled out by Congress is not, you may be surprised to learn, legal. But that’s generally not reflected in press coverage of the program’s sabotage.
As Ars Technica notes, Trump’s latest Executive Order also tries to magically imbue FCC boss Brendan Carr with the regulatory authority to punish states that try and regulate AI:
“The draft order would also require the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission to take action against state AI laws. The FCC chairman would be directed to “initiate a proceeding to determine whether to adopt a Federal reporting and disclosure standard for AI models that preempts conflicting State laws.”
Again, that’s… not how any of this works.
With one hand, the Trump administration likes to insist that regulators have zero power to tell corporations what to do. They’ve made very clear progress in defanging all regulatory autonomy when it comes to protecting consumers, labor, or markets.
But with their other hand, the Trump administration likes to pretend they have all manner of vast regulatory authority to tell companies or states what they can or cannot do.
But U.S. courts (so far) have generally found that when the federal government abdicates its authority over federal consumer protection, it can’t then just turn around and tell states what they can or can’t do. This was most notable on the net neutrality front, when the FCC was repeatedly told by courts it couldn’t ignore consumer protection, then ban states from enforcing state net neutrality laws.
The corporate press buries the lede (because most affluent media owners really like this war on the regulatory state), but the goal here is a complete ban of government oversight of billionaires and corporate power.
The nation’s richest certainly don’t want states like Tennessee trying to prevent Elon Musk from engaging in rampant data center pollution of minority neighborhoods, they also don’t want states enforcing labor protections, policing consumer fraud, enforcing “right to repair” laws, punishing predatory telecom monopolies, or anything else.
The Trump election season lie that he’d be a Lina Khan populist antitrust enforcer was pushed by MAGA and assorted useful idiots. Instead we’ve seen a generational assault on state and federal corporate oversight. This has been broadly dressed up as sane policy by the corporate press, “free market” Libertarians and authoritarian zealots, but it’s really just anti-democratic corporatist extremism that’s going to leave a generation of suffering, chaos, and carnage in its wake.
Donald Trump’s FCC boss Brendan Carr is opening a fake new “investigation” into PBS, NPR, and BBC in the hopes of suppressing journalistic criticism of the country’s increasingly unmoored and unpopular President. Carr first leaked word of the fake investigation to right wing propaganda website Breitbart.
Carr clearly doesn’t regulate UK media organizations. The PBS and NPR never even aired the documentary in question and had nothing do do with the BBC’s edits. So in his letter, Carr has to jump through a bunch of hoops to make his performative effort sound official and coherent:
Trump's censor in chief at the FCC, Brendan Carr, just sent a letter to the heads of BBC, NPR and PBS informing them he's launching a "news distortion" probe into the BBC's editing of a documentary on Trump's Jan. 6 activities.Here it is:
Tim Karr, Senior Director of consumer group Free Press, told Techdirt that he spoke to the BBC, who never received the supposed letter Carr leaked to Breitbart. It’s also not posted to the FCC website. And it takes a few minutes of research to find that PBS and NPR, again, never aired the documentary in question (“Panorama,” which never aired in the U.S. and wasn’t even all that critical of Trump).
This is a manufactured scandal. Carr is putting on a cute little show for Trump and right wing media so he can pretend he’s being “tough” on “unfair” “liberal” media outlets. While this is performative grandstanding by a strange, unserious man, it’s still very dangerous for a government official to be abusing FCC authority to try and suppress journalism and free speech.
We’ve covered the BBC fracas recently. The short version: a right wing tabloid created a scandal out of the fact that a year old BBC documentary edited together two parts of Trump’s January 6 speech encouraging violence at the Capitol. While the snippet does reflect Trump’s clear and obvious intent to incite violence at the Capitol, the edit stitched together two parts of the same speech 54 minutes apart.
Still, as we’ve seen with outlets like ABC and CBS, that effort’s been working well so far when it comes to major U.S. media companies, whose affluent, usually Conservative owners are more worried about tax cuts, deregulation, and merger approvals than they are about consistently serving the public interest. It’s far less likely to work on a media organization in another country that isn’t regulated by Brendan Carr.
Trump has claimed he’s going to file a $1-$5 billion lawsuit against the BBC for the edit, despite the fact the edits occurred more than a year ago (outside the limits of UK defamation law).
The BBC hasn’t helped itself by over-reacting to the fake right wing scandal; with numerous high level BBC employees resigning, and the BBC CEO tripping over himself to apologize. Still, they’ve promised to fight Trump’s lawsuit, and have a very good chance of winning it.
Since that lawsuit isn’t likely to go well, Trump had Carr once again abuse FCC authority to launch a fake investigation based on the FCC’s decades-old “news distortion” rule. That rule, created in 1949, was supposed to be used to police major scandals — like a company or politician bribing a news organization to suppress a story important to the public interest.
A bipartisan coalition of former FCC officials just last week wrote a letter to Carr, urging him to eliminate the dated rule and stop abusing FCC power to crush free speech and undermine journalism. Carr, a dutiful MAGA loyalist, unsurprisingly refused, continuing to pretend he’s “serving the public interest”:
Unfortunately when the cowed U.S. corporate media covers these obvious attacks on free speech, they tend to soft sell how monumentally full of shit Carr and Trump are on this subject. Which is, of course, the exact outcome Trump and Carr are looking for.
The U.S. right wing is openly buying up major social networks (X, TikTok), and what’s left of our broken mainstream media (CBS, CNN), then trying to bully or bribe any stragglers into being pathetic stewards of major online information spaces (Meta), or feckless echoes of serious journalism (ABC).
However silly and performative Brendan Carr may be, his party’s mission to own, bully, or destroy all the cornerstones of major media is extremely dangerous. It’s the same gambit authoritarians in countries like Hungary and Russia successfully implemented to successfully cement permanent rule. And while it may improve as Trump’s health and influence fails, most of the U.S. responses to date have been pathetic.
With any luck, their hubris and incompetence will be their downfall. But it’s going to necessitate a broader awareness — especially among the Democrat party gerontocracy easily befuddled by the modern information environment — of what’s actually happening and what they’re trying to accomplish.
Carr’s roping in of NPR and PBS comes as the U.S. right wing also tries to destroy whatever was left of U.S. public media. They’re well aware that, untethered from the distorted financial incentives of ad-based corporate media, public media is more likely to be honest about the dangers of idiot authoritarianism (Jon Oliver recently had a good segment on public media that’s worth a watch).
It’s unlikely anything real comes of this inquiry itself. Again, the FCC doesn’t regulate the BBC and NPR and PBS literally had nothing to do with the BBC’s decision. Carr is putting on a cute (but dangerous) show for his mad king and right wing media, wasting taxpayer resources, and trying to scare media organizations away from telling the public the truth about an unpopular, embarrassing administration.
Donald Trump and his earlobe nibbler (FCC boss Brendan Carr) are threatening to try and censor some more comedians after their efforts to cancel Jimmy Kimmel went so well (read: not well at all).
Over at the right wing white propaganda website formerly known as Twitter, Brendan Carr retweeted some whining from Donald Trump calling for the termination of late night comedian, Seth Meyers. In the tweet, Trump calls for NBC (which is hoping to gain Trump regulatory approval for an acquisition of Warner Brothers) to fire Meyers immediately for the criminal offense of… jokes:
That’s Carr posting a screenshot of Donald Trump posting to Truth Social:
NBC’s Seth Meyers is suffering from an incurable case of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). He was viewed last night in an uncontrollable rage, likely due to the fact that his “show” is a Ratings DISASTER. Aside from everything else, Meyers has no talent, and NBC should fire him, IMMEDIATELY!
Also, the weird thing is that Trump posted on November 15th that he viewed Meyers “last night,” which is impressive since Meyers’ didn’t even have a new show airing on the 14th.
So it’s certainly possible that NBC executives could fire Seth Meyers in order to gain regulatory approval of Warner Brothers, but they, of course, won’t admit there would be any connection between the two. But even then, it would be quite a gambit with Trump’s popularity cratering.
So if they’re keen on making Seth Meyers more popular than ever, they should definitely proceed.
The great irony is it’s not like the comedians that most rile the president are even particularly edgy or boundary pushing in literally any way. Most of the stuff that deeply riles our toddler king is pretty basic observational late night comedy. Which makes you wonder how Trump would respond to modern U.S. comedy if it actually had some George Carlin, Richard Pryor, or Lenny Bruce style teeth.
Outside of a smattering of light criticism of hackish “anti-woke” comedians by the likes of Anthony Jeselnik, Marc Maron, and the Elephant Graveyard guy, U.S. comedy — much like U.S. media more broadly — has been a feckless mess when it comes to challenging authoritarianism. Which is unfortunate given how even the lightest mainstream jokes about their competency clearly gets under their very thin skin.
A coalition of former FCC officials are pushing for the elimination of a longstanding FCC rule the Trump administration abused to “bully” ABC and CBS into kissing the president’s ass (I’ll use the term bully loosely since both companies seemed very eager to roll over for the far right wing).
Last October, Trump sued CBS claiming (falsely) that a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris had been “deceitfully edited” to her benefit (they simply shortened some of her answers for brevity, as news outlets often do). As Mike explored at the time, the lawsuit was utterly baseless, and trampled the First Amendment, editorial discretion, and common sense.
CBS/Paramount was looking for regulatory approval for its $8 billion merger with Skydance (run by Larry Ellison’s kid David). Trump and his FCC boss Brendan Carr quickly zeroed on on this, and began using merger approval as leverage to bully CBS into even more feckless coverage of the administration.
One of the FCC rules they abused during this whole process was the FCC’s “Broadcast News Distortion” policy. The policy, created in 1949, gives the agency the power to punish media companies for ethical violations featuring a clear distortion of “a significant event and not merely a minor or incidental aspect of the news report.”
Ideally, this would be something like a media company taking a bribe from a company or public official to kill a story. The FCC has only actually used the rule eight times between 1969 and 2019, and few of those actions actually resulted in serious, substantive punishment.
Carr’s already grossly abused the rule twice; one to bully CBS into weakening its journalism, and once to try and bully ABC/Disney into pulling Jimmy Kimmel off the air for making fun of Republicans. Both times, Carr leveraged the rule to launch fake “investigations” into the companies to create the illusion he’s a very big boy doing very serious things.
In response to recent abuse of the rule by Trumpism, a coalition of former FCC officials are pushing for its elimination entirely. A bipartisan coalition of seven former FCC chairs and commissioners, including five Republicans, have filed a petition with the FCC urging for the elimination of the rule, saying it’s a threat to free speech and functional journalism:
“The News Distortion Policy gives any administration a tool to target outlets that provide unfavorable coverage. Chairman Carr’s recent threats against ABC and Disney demonstrate exactly this risk.
After ABC aired Jimmy Kimmel’s commentary on Charlie Kirk’s murder, Carr threatened to revoke the network’s licenses for alleged news distortion. The message was clear: Criticize those in power and face government retaliation.
As petitioners warn: What a Republican FCC Chairman can do today, a Democratic FCC Chairman could do tomorrow. The only solution is to eliminate this dangerous tool entirely.”
Of course, FCC boss Brendan Carr refuses to give up any power so this is a non-starter for him. Carr has made a big stink about eliminating all manner of “burdensome FCC regulations” as an act of “government efficiency.” As we’ve noted, this mostly involves important consumer protections and media consolidation limits his friends in the media and telecom sector don’t like.
Carr’s still keen to maintain FCC authority he can abuse to stifle speech. He’s also keen, as we saw with TikTok, to just make up authority the FCC doesn’t have whenever it suits him.
So it’s little surprise that his response to this petition from a bunch of his predecessors was to mock it, rather than live up to his promise to eliminate “burdensome FCC regulations.” Apparently that doesn’t matter when he has the power to punish media companies for their First Amendment-protected speech:
That’s Brendan Carr tweeting the following in response to a story about this petition:
How about no
On my watch, the FCC will continue to hold broadcasters accountable to their public interest obligations.
And it is quite rich for the exact same people that pressured prior FCCS to censor conservatives through the news distortion policy to now object to the agency’s even-handed application of the law.
There’s another irony here; for generations, telecom and media giants routinely whined about the FCC “abusing its regulatory authority” and engaging in “radical extremism” any time it engaged in even the softest act of consumer protection. This was a cornerstone of “free market Libertarian” complaints. Remember the histrionics over some fairly basic, loophole-filled, net neutrality requirements?
Yet when the worst abuses of FCC authority finally did arrive, it came at the hands of far-right extremists.
That doesn’t mean we should abandon FCC oversight of corporate power (including media consolidation and diversity ownership rules) entirely, though I suspect that between good faith worries about abuse, and bad faith lobbying by corporate power, that’s the most likely outcome.
Under Trump 2.0, the company has not only seen the complete lobotomizing of agencies like the FCC thanks to revolving door regulators like Brendan Carr, but a Trump-stocked court that makes it genuinely impossible to hold big companies like AT&T accountable for literally anything (see the 5th Circuit’s recent decision to nullify a fine against AT&T for spying on its customers and selling their location data).
With federal regulatory oversight dead and most states too overwhelmed or feckless to fill the void, AT&T’s now taking aim at the last vestiges of any sort of functional oversight: flimsy “self regulation” groups like the BBB National Programs’ National Advertising Review Board (NARB) and its BBB National Programs’ National Advertising Division (NAD) enforcement arm.
NARB and NAD are supposed to act as a way for companies to resolve disputes about misleading advertisements in house to forestall the complaints migrating over to the FTC and FCC (which again, no longer function under Trump). The organization will often give adorable wrist slaps to telecom companies that engage in things like lying about their competitors or advertising misleading promos.
Some times the actions will result in companies pulling misleading ads, but it’s usually long after the ads have been airing for a while and have had their intended impact.
For example, AT&T was recently criticized by NARB for airing ads that falsely promised everybody a new iPhone, when the actual promotion (more than a year old at this point) had all sorts of limits. You know, the sort of thing that’s super common in a country too corrupt to have functional regulators:
“In reality, the offer was only for AT&T customers on certain plans, excluding customers with low-cost plans. “The panel recommended AT&T modify its advertising to avoid conveying the message that everyone is eligible for AT&T’s free cell phone offer, or to clearly and conspicuously disclose that subscribers to value plans are not eligible or otherwise make clear the extent of plan eligibility,” the NARB announcement said.”
Now to be clear, companies can basically ignore NARB and NAD without any real consequence. Because again, these organizations were was long-ago designed by companies for companies, to create the illusion that companies like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile are capable of regulating themselves without serious federal or state government oversight (spoiler: they can’t).
“AT&T also slammed the NAD for failing to rein in T-Mobile’s deceptive ads. The group’s slow process let T-Mobile air deceptive advertisements without meaningful consequences, and the “NAD has repeatedly failed to refer continued violations to the FTC,” AT&T said.”
Again that’s… ironic, given that companies like AT&T specifically built NAD and NARB to give the illusion that federal oversight isn’t necessary. It’s basically the flimsiest veneer of functional oversight specifically built to pre-empt real government oversight, and even that’s a bridge too far for the fine folks at AT&T.
You might recall that right wing propaganda broadcaster Sinclair Broadcasting recently tripped over its own ass after working with the Trump administration to try and censor Jimmy Kimmel for criticizing the President. The flood of outrage at the Disney/FCC/ABC collaborative effort ultimately forced the company to retreat and put Kimmel back on the air.
Even after ABC retreated, Sinclair tried to push its luck and extend the “pre-emption,” but ultimately buckled and got absolutely none of what it asked for (including an apology from Kimmel for doing nothing wrong). Now Sinclair Broadcasting’s latest earnings reports indicate that things aren’t going well for the company, which posted a 16 percent quarterly loss.
“It’s not clear the extent to which the Kimmel boycott affected Sinclair’s financial results for the quarter; the company did not provide any discussion of the blackout in its earnings press release and the topic did not come up on the call with analysts.”
Most companies carefully screen what kind of journalists are allowed on earnings conference calls, and then screen questions ahead of time so executives don’t have to deal with uncomfortable realities like: “it’s not good business to be weird partisan zealots who engage in censorship of comedians because they made a mild joke about your mad, idiot king.”
“On the earnings call, Sinclair president and CEO Chris Ripley noted that Sinclair’s ABC stations are currently affected by the Disney-YouTube TV dispute, which has resulted in a blackout of ABC, as well as ESPN and other networks, on YouTube TV since last Friday. Sinclair has 38 ABC affiliates. He blasted both both Google and Disney for the situation, calling them “media giants,” and said local broadcasters are “caught in the middle” of such disputes — which he labeled an “antitrust issue.”
All out of fresh ideas on how to grow its business organically, Ripley is pushing hard for the Trump administration to destroy whatever is left of media consolidation limits so Sinclair can ultimately merge with Tegna and Nexstar and create one big, shitty, right wing company to dominate whatever is left of U.S. local broadcasting.
They want government handcuffed and completely out of their hair when it’s inconveniently preventing them from harming competition and consumers through consolidation and predatory behavior, but then to step in, competently, when it suits their interests. That generally doesn’t work out well for anybody.
Last year almost a dozen major U.S. ISPs were the victim of a massive, historic intrusion by Chinese hackers who managed to spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year. The “Salt Typhoon” hack was so severe, the intruders spent much of the last year rooting around the ISP networks even after discovery.
AT&T and Verizon, two of the compromised companies, apparently didn’t think it was worth informing subscribers any of this happened. Many of the attack vectors were based on simple things like telecom administrators failing to change default passwords on sensitive hardware entry points.
“The Federal Communications Commission will vote in November to repeal a ruling that requires telecom providers to secure their networks, acting on a request from the biggest lobby groups representing Internet providers.”
In a folksy Halloween blog post, Carr tries to pretend this somehow improves cybersecurity. According to Carr, ISPs pinky swore that everything is fine now, and frames obvious regulatory capture as the agency being more “agile”:
“Following extensive FCC engagement with carriers, the item announces the substantial steps that providers have taken to strengthen their cybersecurity defenses. In doing so, we will also reverse an eleventh hour CALEA declaratory ruling reached by the prior FCC—a decision that both exceeded the agency’s authority and did not present an effective or agile response to the relevant cybersecurity threats. So, we’re correcting course.”
Let me be clear about something: the Biden rules were the absolute baseline for oversight of telecom, basically requiring that ISPs do the absolute bare minimum when it comes to securing their networks, while being transparent with the public about when there’s been a major hack. This stuff was the bare minimum, and the U.S. is too corrupt to even do that.
This is part of Carr’s effort to destroy whatever was left of flimsy U.S. corporate oversight of regional telecom monopolies so he can ensure he has a cushy post-government job at a telecom-funded think tank or lobbying org. To that end, he’s been taking a hatchet to the very shaky FCC oversight standards that already helped result in the worst hack in U.S. telecom history.
It’s yet another example of how Trump policy is indistinguishable from a foreign attack. In many ways it’s worse, given that at least with Russia, Iran, and China, you’re spared the kind of phony piety and sanctimony coming from inside your own house.
