Taking a break from attacking the First Amendment, FCC boss Brendan Carr this week engaged in a strange bit of performance art: his FCC announced that they’d be effectively adding all foreign-made routers to the agency’s “covered list,” in a bid to ban their sale in the United States.

That is unless manufacturers obtain “conditional approval” (including all appropriate application fees and favors, of course) from the Trump administration via the Department of Defense or Department of Homeland Security. In other words, the Trump administration is attempting to shake down manufacturers of all routers manufactured outside the United States (which again, is nearly all of them) under the pretense of cybersecurity.

You can probably see how this might result in some looming legal action. And who knows what other “favors” to the Trump administration might be required to get conditional approval, like the inclusion of backdoors accessible by our current authoritarian government.

A fact sheet insists this was all necessary because many foreign routers have been exploited by foreign actors:

“Recently, malicious state and non-state sponsored cyber attackers have increasingly leveraged the vulnerabilities in small and home office routers produced abroad to carry out direct attacks against American civilians in their homes.”

But the biggest recent cybersecurity incident in recent U.S. memory, the Chinese Salt Typhoon hack (which involved Chinese state-sanctioned hackers massively compromising U.S. telecom networks to spy on important people for years) largely involved the broadly deregulated U.S. telecom sector failing to do basic things like change default admin passwords. And then trying to hide additional evidence of intrusion for liability reasons. A very domestic failure.

We’ve discussed at length that while Brendan Carr loves to pretend he’s doing important things on cybersecurity, most of his policies have made the U.S. less secure. Like his mindless deregulation of the privacy and security standards of domestic telecoms and hardware makers. Or his destruction of smart home testing programs just because they had some operations in China.

Most of the Trump administration “cybersecurity” solutions have been indistinguishable from a foreign attack. They’ve gutted numerous government cybersecurity programs (including a board investigating Salt Typhoon), and dismantled the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) (responsible for investigating significant cybersecurity incidents). The administration claims to be worried about cybersecurity, but then goes out of its way to ensure domestic telecoms see no meaningful oversight whatsoever.

I’d argue Trump administration destruction of corporate oversight of domestic telecom privacy/security standards is a much bigger threat to national security and consumer safety than 90% of foreign routers, but good luck finding any news outlet that brings that up in their coverage of the FCC’s latest move.

In reality, the biggest current threat to U.S. national security is the Trump administration’s rampant, historic corruption. Absolutely any time you see the Trump administration taking steps to “improve national security,” or “address cybersecurity” you can just easily assume there’s some ulterior motive of personal benefit to the president, as we saw when the great hyperventilation over TikTok was “fixed” by offloading the app to Trump’s dodgy billionaire friends.

All modern major U.S. media mergers follow the same trajectory. Executives pump out a bunch of pre-merger lies about job creation and innovation that are parroted by a lazy access press, followed by the rubber stamping by corrupt regulators, followed by oodles of price hikes, layoffs, and quality erosion caused by panicked efforts to pay down preposterous merger debt.

Rinse, wash, and repeat.

After promising this for a while, CBS last week announced it was laying off around six percent of its workforce, or around 60 employees after the company was acquired by right wing billionaire Larry Ellison last year. The company also announced it would be destroying the 100 year old CBS News Radio (there was no indication of what, if anything, they planned to do with archival history).

CBS News boss Bari Weiss offered this statement in the wake of the layoffs:

“Today we are reducing the size of our workforce, and employees who are affected will be notified by the end of the day. We recognize that this is a difficult time for those who will be leaving CBS News.  Because these aren’t just names on a list.  They are talented, committed colleagues who have been critical to our success.  We’ll treat them all with care and respect.

It’s no secret that the news business is changing radically, and that we need to change along with it.  New audiences are burgeoning in new places, and we are pressing forward with ambitious plans to grow and invest so that we can be there for them.  That means some parts of our newsroom must get smaller to make room for the things we must build to remain competitive.

But these are very hard choices and today is a difficult day. This is a tough message to receive at any time, and especially in the middle of an exceptionally intense news cycle.  This organization is working its heart out to deliver for our audience.  We’re so grateful to all of you, and we thank you for handling this difficult news with compassion.”

You’re to ignore, of course, that Bari Weiss appears to have absolutely no idea what she’s doing, outside of a generalized and obvious sense that she’d like to make the network even more friendly to right wing autocrats like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Weiss’ inaugural “town hall” with opportunistic right wing grifter Erika Kirk was a ratings dud, Weiss’ new nightly news broadcast has been an error-prone hot mess, and her delay of a 60 Minutes story about Trump concentration camps continues to plague the network and cause a continued revolt among remaining journalists, who are tripping over themselves in a rush to the exits.

There’s likely to be even greater layoffs as the Ellisons’ pursue their even more problematic acquisition of Warner Brothers (and CBS and NBC), adding significantly even more debt to the company at a very precarious time for traditional television and Hollywood. It’s something the network’s unionized employees are well aware of:

Again, the solution to this is to have a genuine antitrust renaissance in the U.S, and block all and every instance of pointless “growth for growth’s sake” consolidation.

These deals do nothing but generate short-term stock bumps (sometimes), tax breaks, and delusion among the brunchlord extraction class that they’re “savvy dealmakers” as they engage in financial acrobatics to create the illusion of perpetual growth.

These fictions are all aided by a lazy press damaged from the very same pointless consolidation. This particular merger is complicated by the fact that the Trump-loyal Ellisons very clearly see Victor Orban’s autocratic-friendly media in Hungary as a model worth emulating. The only bright spot is that nobody, just like Warner Bros last few suitors, appears to have any idea what they’re actually doing.

The problem is, even if the Ellisons and autocrats fail completely and CBS collapses, they’ve “succeeded” in destroying another journalistic outlet on their way to what they hope will be total U.S. ideological domination.

Back in early 2024, Amazon announced that Prime Video customers (who already pay $140 per year) would be charged $3 extra every month just to avoid ads that didn’t previously exist. It was just the latest example of “enshittification” in a streaming sector all out of original ideas, desperate to provide Wall Street with impossible skyward quarterly growth — regardless of consumer annoyance or brand harm.

And it just got worse.

Just recently, Amazon informed subscribers that the $3 extra fee to avoid ads would now be $5 a month. Again, on top of the $140 people are already paying. Worse, Amazon appears to be eliminating 4K support for its ad-based offerings to funnel users toward paying more if they want to enjoy the now fairly basic standard:

“On April 10, 2026, Prime Video’s ad-free subscription will become Prime Video Ultra in the U.S., priced at $4.99 per month. The new Ultra subscription includes other perks: Subscribers will have up to five concurrent streams (previously three), up to 100 downloads for offline viewing (previously 25) and exclusive access to 4K/UHD streaming.”

Variety parrots the claim these are “perks,” but they’re really just arbitrary old and new restrictions being shuffled around to drive users to more expensive options if they want much of the same experience they had before when they were paying less money.

This sort of “funneling” was pioneered by the traditional cable, broadband, and wireless sector, which creatively found new ways to abuse market power to extract more and more money from captured subscribers. There was a whole multi-year tech policy war about it (net neutrality) which U.S. consumers decidedly lost. Streaming’s a bit different because users still have options and agency. For now.

As new growth in streaming customers has slowed down, giant media companies have returned to these ancient ways to give Wall Street their sweet, sweet, improved quarterly returns and illusions of bottomless growth. That means not just price hikes, but layoffs, pointless mergers, less money spent on content and residuals (meaning they’re too cheap to keep popular programs online), and crackdowns on things that used to be consumer benefits, like password sharing.

The short term stock boosts and tax gains from this kind of gamesmanship and consolidation disincentivizes execs from learning anything useful from the experience. By the time consumers begin a backlash and the longer-term health of the service begins to tank, the executives who led the charge are already off working at a different company on the basis of their “savvy deal-making prowess.”

When consumers inevitably flee to cheaper or free alternatives (YouTube, Twitch, piracy, whatever), the execs that remain then blame literally everything and everyone (generational entitlement!, VPNs!, avocado toast!) for their own greed and bad decisions. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

When he’s not busy trampling free speech, crushing the First Amendment, and destroying media consolidation and consumer protection standards, Brendan Carr has other hobbies. Like helping the telecom industry patriotically sell a brutal coming wave of new layoffs caused by the kind of industry consolidation he regularly rubber stamps.

Carr recently began circulating plans for something he claims will restrict U.S. telecom companies’ ‌use of foreign call centers and require foreign-based customer service workers to be proficient in American Standard English. The plan is vague, but Reuters unskeptically frames it as a good faith effort to protect U.S. consumer privacy, improve customer service, and protect Americans from the scourge of foreign accents:

“Carr noted that nearly 70% of U.S. businesses outsource at least one ‌department, ⁠including customer service and call center operations, to overseas locations.

“As a result, too many Americans have struggled to resolve an issue with a representative due to cultural and language barriers,” Carr said, adding foreign customer ​service centers “also raise ​concerns about ⁠protecting consumers’ personal information.”

What is Carr really up to here? I suspect he’s working closely with U.S. telecoms to craft pseudo-patriotic/nationalistic cover for another brutal round of layoffs. Some of which will be caused by AI, but a huge amount of which will have been caused by Carr’s love of rubber stamping harmful telecom industry consolidation.

For one, there’s no real evidence that overseas customer service centers create serious cybersecurity issues. As he did with his recent effort to remove phone unlocking rules, Carr likes to use cybersecurity as a bogeyman when convenient to something unpopular he’s trying to help industry sell.

Then, with his other hand, Carr is busy making U.S. consumers less safe and secure by gutting functional oversight of giant telecoms (despite the recent massive Salt Typhoon hack by China).

It’s also not really clear the FCC even has this authority. Especially in the Trump era, which has involved the Trump courts taking an absolutely brutal hatchet to regulatory independence. This sudden micromanagement of telcom support runs contrary to Carr’s “light regulatory touch” rhetoric. It’s also worth noting that a lot of telecoms, like Charter, already have mostly U.S. support agents.

But here’s the more important thing. I’ve covered Brendan Carr probably longer and more extensively than pretty much anybody alive. And I can tell you, with 100% certainty, that Carr doesn’t do anything that’s just inherently in the public interest. That’s simply not who he is.

He’s always working an angle for industry or large companies, usually media and telecom giants. There’s just no evidence that he’s a good faith operator in any of the arenas Reuters gives him unearned credibility for, and his ethics and principles, as we’ve seen repeatedly, are not consistent.

So I really doubt this has anything to actually do with improving customer service, or holding telecoms accountable for shoddy overseas support. I suspect he’s cooking up a stage play.

We’ve long noted how these consolidated regional telecom monopolies have some of the worst customer service ratings of any industry in America (which is truly saying something). Maybe AI will improve some aspects of that, but as we’ve seen in other arenas where AI is layered on top of very broken sectors (journalism, health insurance) by unethical executives, the end result isn’t particularly great.

If you don’t fix the underlying monopolization, you can’t fix the symptoms of monopolization, which generally are high prices, spotty service, slow speeds, and abysmal customer service. Layer AI on top of a broken industry, and you usually get a badly automated broken industry.

It will be worth keeping an eye on Carr’s final proposed plan. But I suspect it mostly involves him working closely with telecom giants to put a nationalistic, racist veneer on looming plans to dramatically accelerate layoffs in a telecom sector that’s already seen massive workforce reductions, largely due to the mindless consolidation Carr regularly rubber stamps.

Brunchlords can only fail upward. It’s physics.

Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslav is poised to get as much as $550 million in compensation and tax reimbursement as the company prepares to be acquired by Larry Ellison’s CBS/Paramount:

“Zaslav, president and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, is set to receive $34.2 million in cash severance; $517.2 million in equity in the combined company; and $44,195 in continued health coverage reimbursement benefits, per a WBD filing with the SEC.”

The Wall Street Journal suggests his payout could top $800 million, though I think they’re double counting potential tax reimbursement.

Zaslav oversaw years of dysfunction during the last wave of pointless Warner Brothers mergers, which included thousands of brutal layoffs, consistent creative infighting, endlessly higher prices, cancelled programming, and a steady wave of overall dysfunction. And that’s before we even get to this latest merger with Paramount, which is expected to see more layoffs and chaos than ever.

Variety, as is generally the tendency for Hollywood trade mags, can’t be bothered to mention literally any of the real world consumer and labor costs of pointless consolidation. That’s just not of interest to editors there. They can’t even muster the interest to suggest Zaslav’s reign was controversial or that his payout might not be commensurate with any sort of actual real world competency.

If you visit the comment section of this story however, you can tell the public has… thoughts. You can find the same lack of interest in real world labor and consumer harms (and the public’s seething, palpable anger) at outlets like Deadline.

I’ve written a lot about the AOL–>AT&T–>Time Warner–>Discovery mergers simply because I think they perfectly encapsulate the pointless, destructive incompetence at the heart of modern media consolidation, and the cannibalistic nature of Wall Street’s obsession with illusory quarterly growth propped up by smoke, mirrors, and complex accounting.

Ever since the original AOL Time Warner merger back in 2001, pointless consolidation has promised no limit of innovative “synergies,” but instead resulted in more than 50,000 layoffs, shittier product, higher prices, the death of a ton of well-loved brands and IPs, decades of chaos, a decline in quality journalism at places like CNN, and a bottomless well of shit.

It’s the extraction class abusing the rules of the game to pretend to be good at business. They’re not actually building anything useful, nor are they remotely interested in the longevity of the company, its customers, the talent that powers it, or the people who work there. They’re playing with funny numbers to try and perpetually generate the illusion of impossible permanent growth at incredible scale, then cashing out when the check finally comes due for their complicated shell games.

Now, we’re poised to see what could be the grand master of dysfunction with the Ellison family’s whopping $110 billion acquisition, backed heavily by Saudi cash. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to predict this latest deal could make all the past chaos and dysfunction look positively adorable. And at some point, the entire shell game will come crashing to the ground, with guys like Zaslav nowhere to be found.

We’ve noted repeatedly how the U.S. authoritarian right is buying up all of our new and old media companies because they’re trying to mimic what Viktor Orban created in Hungary. Namely, a media where all the major outlets are owned by rich autocratic allies, who spew propaganda 24/7 while the government strangles real, independent journalism just out of frame.

Of course, you’re supposed to try and have some subtlety in this so the public isn’t fully aware of the con. But the Trump administration doesn’t do subtlety.

Last week Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth apparently got upset by the fact Trump’s war in Iran isn’t going very well. Poor Donald clearly didn’t understand the evolving nature of modern and inexpensive drone warfare (despite all the brutal evidence in Ukraine), and has gotten the country bogged down in precisely the sort of clusterfuck the fake populist pretended he opposed last election season.

Even our soggy corporate press has occasionally been making this clear to the public, something that upsets Pete Hegseth very much. Hegseth apparently got particularly upset with CNN recently insisting that the Iran War had “intensified.” It made him so upset that he openly pined for the moment when Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby son) control CNN, so they can cheerlead for war:

One of the funniest parts about this is that claims the war had “intensified” was made by his own agency in a press release!

It’s very clear that the U.S. right wing won’t be satisfied until the entirety of U.S. media is owned by a handful of rich right wingers like Larry Ellison and Elon Musk, allowing them to create a North Korea bullhorn of daily, uniform propaganda that does nothing but lavish praise upon them. To build something like that here in the States requires a level of subtlety they’re simply not capable of:

Democrats historically suck on media policy and reform (even the progressive wing of the party is fairly incompetent on the subject), so you can’t expect much help there.

But there are several things working in our favor, including America’s sheer size (it’s very difficult to maintain the kind of control they’re looking for), our diversity, the decentralized nature of the modern internet, and the fact that most of the nepobabies (David Ellison) and brunchlords (Bari Weiss) integral to their plans appear to have absolutely no Earthly idea what they’re actually doing.

For example, all the debt Ellison has adopted from the purchase of CBS and Warner Brothers is going to force them to engage in massive, unprecedented cost cuttings and layoffs, making it hard to maintain informational control and build an effective, ratings-grabbing propaganda operation (even if Bari Weiss knew what she was doing, which she assuredly does not).

And the public still has agency. Larry Ellison can buy TikTok and Elon Musk can buy Twitter, but they can’t control the flow of the public as they flee to other, less white supremacist, right wing friendly alternatives. It’s sheer hubris to think they can maintain information control in a country this massive and diverse, and there will be some useful entertainment value in watching them set money on fire trying.

Brendan Carr is once again doing Brendan Carr stuff.

Carr has threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of broadcasters that tell the truth about Trump’s disastrous war in Iran. In a post over at Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website, Carr insists that news outlets that are “running hoaxes and news distortions” (read: telling the truth) about the war will face potential headaches when their licenses come up for renewal:

If you can’t read that, it says:

Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions – also known as the fake news – have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up.

The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.

And frankly, changing course is in their own business interests since trust in legacy media has now fallen to an all time low of just 9% and are ratings disasters.

The American people have subsidized broadcasters to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation’s airwaves.

It is very important to bring trust back into media, which has earned itself the label of fake news.

When a political candidate is able to win a landslide election victory after in the face of hoaxes and distortions, there is something very wrong. It means the public has lost faith and confidence in the media. And we can’t allow that to happen.

Time for change!

That’s certainly a lot of tough-talking bullshit.

Carr’s only authority comes over broadcast affiliates (not national media companies or cable TV outlets), most of which are already owned by Republicans and already kiss Trump’s ass (because they want to merge). The FCC hasn’t denied a license renewal in decades, and any attempt to do so would result in a massive, protracted First Amendment legal mess that the FCC would be extremely likely to lose.

Carr’s actual goal for this kind of stuff is three fold.

One, he’s putting on a show for our mad, idiot king that Carr is being a good boy. Two, he’s trolling the press so they’ll hyperventilate about his behaviors; those stories then advertise to the MAGA base the false impression that Carr is doing useful and bold culture war stuff (so he can potentially run for higher office). They’ll assume it all must be useful and important because he’s upsetting people of intellect, importance, and conscience, which they enjoy.

But most importantly it sends a message to media companies that they should get in line with the Trump administration or face costly and expensive (no matter how pointless) legal annoyances. Of course those threats haven’t really been needed, because most U.S. media companies (and big corporations) have been happy to bribe the president or kiss his ass anyway.

That sort of feckless journalistic failure in the face of power is why so much of the public has lost faith in U.S. news, not because they’ve historically been too critical of war or too tough on wealth and power.

While these sorts of threats certainly are dangerous, Carr is a monumental clown who is putting on a big show to try and pretend he’s a person of substance and power doing important things.

Meanwhile Trump is upset that some news outlets have been making it clear he was too stupid to understand the evolving nature of low cost, modern drone warfare (despite all the evidence in Ukraine). In his own post at his own right wing propaganda website, Trump went off on a local rambling tirade about Iran somehow misleading the entirety of U.S. media:

That one says:

Iran has long been known as a Master of Media Manipulation and Public Relations. They are Militarily ineffective and weak, but are really good at “feeding” the very appreciative Fake News Media false information. Now, A.I. has become another Disinformation weapon that Iran uses, quite well, considering they are being annihilated by the day. They showed phony “Kamikaze Boats,” shooting at various Ships at Sea, which looks wonderful, powerful, and vicious, but these Boats don’t exist — It’s all false information to show how “tough” their already defeated Military is! The five U.S. Refueling Planes that were supposedly struck down and badly damaged, according to The Wall Street Journal’s false reporting, and others, are all in service, with the exception of one, which will soon be flying the skies. Buildings and Ships that are shown to be on fire are not — It’s FAKE NEWS, generated by A.I. For instance, Iran, working in close coordination with the Fake News Media, shows our great USS Abraham Lincoln Aircraft Carrier, one of the largest and most prestigious Ships in the World, burning uncontrollably in the Ocean. Not only was it not burning, it was not even shot at — Iran knows better than to do that! The story was knowingly FAKE and, in a certain way, you can say that those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information! The fact is, Iran is being decimated, and the only battles they “win” are those that they create through AI, and are distributed by Corrupt Media Outlets. The Radical Leftwing Press knows this full well, but continues to go forward with false stories and LIES. That’s why their Approval Rating is so low, and I can win a Presidential Election, IN A LANDSLIDE, getting only 5% positive Press — They have no credibility! I am so thrilled to see Brendan Carr, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), looking at the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic “News” Organizations. They get Billions of Dollars of FREE American Airwaves, and use it to perpetuate LIES, both in News and almost all of their Shows, including the Late Night Morons, who get gigantic Salaries for horrible Ratings, and never get, as I used to say in The Apprentice, “FIRED.” Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

These are not the behaviors of competent, confidence people who believe things are going well. They’re the sad gyrations of pathetic men who know Trump is on historic trajectory to be the worst and least popular President in U.S. history (with ample room to fall). No amount of posturing can hide it.

We’ve discussed at length how Trump’s “fix” for TikTok’s problems basically involved forcing the sale of the platform to his greedy billionaire buddies (with the help of pathetic Democrats). The deal fixed none of the real issues Trumpland pretended to be concerned about (national security, privacy, propaganda), and China still maintains a significant ownership stake.

It was one of the more embarrassing examples of U.S. cronyism and corruption in recent memory.

But wait, as they say, there’s more!

As the Wall Street Journal notes (paywalled), the “Trump administration” is set to receive a $10 billion fee from investors for facilitating the deal. The new owners, which include Trump’s friend Larry Ellison, private equity giant Silver Lake, and MGX (controlled by the UAE) are funneling the payments, which will total $10 billion, to the “Treasury Department”:

“They and other backers paid the Treasury Department about $2.5 billion when the deal closed in January and are set to make several additional payments until hitting the $10 billion total, the people said.”

We, of course, don’t actually know where that money is going and will actually be used for. You can confidently assume it will somehow eventually wind its way into Trump’s pocket somehow, since the entirety of U.S. democratic oversight has been wholly corrupted by these whiny zealots, who are busy stripping the country for parts and selling it for scrap off the back loading dock.

Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal goes to comical lengths to normalize this bribe, though they do at least try to express how “unprecedented” this sort of thing is by citing an unnamed, ambiguous historian:

“The $10 billion payment would be nearly unprecedented for a government helping arrange a transaction, historians have said. Vice President JD Vance previously said the new TikTok entity running the U.S. operations is valued at about $14 billion in the deal, which some tech analysts have said dramatically undervalues the company.”

The outlet goes on to note that the $10 billion fee absolutely towers over any remotely comparable historical precedent:

“Investment bankers advising on a typical deal receive fees of less than 1% of the transaction value, and the percentage generally gets smaller as the deal size increases. Bank of America is in line to make some $130 million for advising railroad operator Norfolk Southern on its $71.5 billion sale to Union Pacific, one of the largest fees on record for a single bank on a deal. 

Administration officials have said the fee is justified given Trump’s role in saving TikTok in the U.S. and navigating negotiations with China to get the deal done while addressing the security concerns of lawmakers. “

The Wall Street Journal can’t be bothered to note that the deal fixed absolutely none of the purported concerns raised about TikTok. China still has a major ownership stake, and the new owners seem every bit as hostile to democracy and free expression as the worst Chinese autocrat (they’re just not honest enough with themselves or you to admit it yet).

All of these owners are equally just as likely to engage in privacy and surveillance violations as the Chinese (which again, despite a lot of pretense, did not have full direct control over the app). In fact, you could even argue that the previous TikTok was likely to be better on all of these subjects because they were at least trying to adhere to ethical standards to remain operating in the country.

TikTok’s new American owners are very up front about their plans to demolish the entirety of regulatory autonomy, corporate oversight, and consumer protection, leaving them with absolute freedom to pursue whatever unethical bullshit they can dream up. I suspect they’ll try to leave things alone for a year (to avoid a mass exodus of young people) before their goals become… unsubtle.

Again, Trump, with Democratic help, managed to steal the world’s most popular short form video app and offload it to his radical billionaire friends under the pretense he was protecting national security and U.S. consumer privacy. Even before you get to this $10 billion bribe, it’s easily one of the ugliest examples of corruption and U.S. tech policy dysfunction we’ve ever seen.

I like to convince myself history will not be kind.

We’ve noted how Microsoft is a little sensitive about AI slop at the moment. Back in January, CEO Satya Nadella wrote a well-circulated blog post lamenting critics of “AI slop” and demanding the public simply move past such conversations. It was relatively innocuous, but wasn’t received well for some valid reasons.

One problem is that Nadella put the onus on the consumer for ignoring a lot of Microsoft’s terrible choices as it relates to AI, whether it’s the ample lazy AI slop that fills the company’s zombified MSN portal, the rushed integration of AI into software in a way that poses major new security risks, their undercooked AI copyright bots, the company’s efforts to shovel Copilot down the throats of people (whether they want it or not), or some of the really dodgy privacy practices they’ve been engaged with via Windows 11 AI “snapshot” features.

Last week found Microsoft under fire yet again, this time for defensively locking down a Discord server after people wouldn’t stop calling the company “Microslop.” More specifically, Microsoft Streisanded themselves after they tried to ban the term on its Copilot discord server. When people found creative ways to get around the ban, Microsoft decided to lock down the entire server.

When called out for that by frustrated users, Microsoft tried to blame the entire incident on “spammers” who were trying to post “harmful content”:

“The Copilot Discord channel has recently been targeted by spammers attempting to disrupt and overwhelm the space with harmful content not related to Copilot,” a Microsoft spokesperson told us, adding that the “blocking of terms like ‘Microslop’ and some others associated with this spam campaign were temporary while the company worked to implement better safeguards.”

Microsoft executives don’t really seem to want to engage in any serious introspection into their rushed adoption of AI in ways customers don’t always appreciate. Most recently, their integration of Copilot into Notepad opened up a major cybersecurity vulnerability.

This whole incident will, of course, only result in users doubling down on their criticisms:

These companies have invested untold oceans of cash into a technology that may have utility for many, but hasn’t, to date, been all that profitable. Many AI companies have layered under-cooked automation on top of very broken systems (see: health insurance or journalism or war) in problematic ways, raising questions about company valuations and systemically poor judgement. All while AI’s immense energy consumption has caused companies to disregard already tepid climate goals.

Instead of engaging in real conversation about these issues you tend to get a lot of generalized defensiveness (“why can’t you simply praise us for our innovation?”), all of which has been made worse by the tech sector’s enthusiastic coddling of authoritarianism.

Last election season, you might recall how the Trump campaign lied to everyone repeatedly about how his second administration would “rein in big tech,” and be a natural extension of the Lina Khan antitrust movement. As we noted at the time, that was always an obvious fake populist lie, but it was propped up anyway by a lazy press and a long line of useful idiots (including some purported “antitrust experts“.)

This last year has truly revealed the con: Trump not only has demolished regulatory independence, media consolidation rules, and consumer protection standards, he’s rubber stamped every shitty merger his administration has come into contact with (provided companies promise to be more racist), and fired the few Republicans in his administration that even vaguely cared about antitrust.

Trump’s latest betrayal to the the MAGA antitrust movement (that never really existed outside the skulls of rubes) is his DOJ’s surprise blindsiding of states by striking a pathetic settlement with Ticketmaster that doesn’t really fix the actual problem: monopoly.

The Biden DOJ and most US states sued Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary back in 2024, alleging that Live Nation has a monopoly on “the delivery of nearly all live music in America today.”

But while a new Trump settlement with the company requires $280 million in civil penalties and a 15% cap on service fees for people who want to use their amphitheaters, it backs off any attempt to pursue a break up of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, the one move that would actually (more permanently) help protect consumers, artists, and the live music market from predatory behavior.

The Trump DOJ and pedophile protector Pam Bondi struck the deal behind closed doors and didn’t bother to tell any of the 27 states (including many Republican ones) currently fighting Ticketmaster in court. It’s another win for Bondi loyalists (whose function is to blindly serve our mad idiot king) and the final middle finger to Gail Slater and Mark Hamer types that at least sometimes cared about antitrust.

States are, you may be unsurprised to learn, pissed off and planning to continue the fight alone, though they say the Trump DOJ has caused potentially irreparable harm:

“The case went to trial, and testimony began last week in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. But the US and Live Nation informed the court of a proposed settlement on March 8, taking state attorneys general by surprise. The judge presiding over the case reportedly said in court today that the way the settlement was announced “is absolutely unacceptable.

States reserving the right to continue litigation filed a motion for mistrial, saying they need time to prepare for a new trial and evaluate the terms of the settlement between the US and Live Nation. The “sudden disappearance” of the US from the case will likely give the jury the incorrect impression that Live Nation’s “antitrust violations have been cured or resolved, or that Proceeding Plaintiff States’ claims lack merit,” the states said.”

This was always going to be the outcome. There were constant signs. Trump is an autocrat, fascist, and opportunist who believes in nothing beyond his own pursuit of power and wealth. The corruption and autocracy was always going to dominate any serious Republican interest in antitrust (which, let’s be honest, even among Gail Slater types was historically inconsistent at best).

The MAGA base belief in this line of bullshit was one thing, but Trump’s antitrust bona fides were also propped up by folks like purported progressive antitrust expert Matt Stoller, who praised guys like JD Vance and Josh Hawley for being serious anti-corporatists, when the entire thing was always a con designed to give phony populist credibility to autocrats who never had to actually earn it.

The U.S. press also played a giant role here. They spent years propping up Trump’s false claims he “wanted to rein in big tech,” when what the authoritarians really wanted was to abuse government power to scare (quite successfully as it turned out) tech companies away from doing even the most basic content moderation of right wing race-baiting propaganda online.

Now, unsurprisingly, here we are, staring down the barrel of democracy demolishing authoritarianism, with unchecked corporate power in full alignment with the effort.