What’s left of CBS News recently landed an interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s a bit of a doozy (transcript, video). There’s a part where Netanyahu tries to blame foreign social media bot farms for the rise in people disgusted by his government’s carpet bombing of children. There’s a part where he pretends to not actually want billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars.

And there’s this part where he likens himself to Churchill and makes some strange comments about Hitler:

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: They implant themselves among civilians, you know, so that they have civilian casualties and they can put it on the tube or in your cell phone. So, yes, I mean, I don’t know how to fight it. I mean, Churchill, without cell phones and without digital campaigns and farm bots was labeled a warmonger in the 1930s because he said, “You have to stand up to Hitler.”

MAJOR GARRETT: Hitler, right.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: And they accused him of being a warmonger. And Hitler didn’t even say “death to America, death to Britain,” you know. I– I think he might have planned it, but he didn’t say it. And still they accused him of that.

The interviewer, Major Garrett, spends absolutely no serious time pushing back against the claims Netanyahu makes. Or meaningfully addressing indisputable evidence that the Israeli government has engaged in widespread genocidal war crimes on the U.S. taxpayer dime. When Netanyahu tries to dismiss the massive civilian casualties in Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon as minor and innocent mistakes, Garrett has no response.

Garrett doesn’t normally work for 60 Minutes. He was brought on board from elsewhere within CBS because Netanyahu specifically asked for him. According to Oliver Darcy’s excellent media newsletter Status, 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl was trying to land the interview with Netanyahu when Weiss intervened and shuffled the interview over to Garrett, causing (more) internal anger:

“But behind the scenes, Status has learned that famed “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl had also been gunning for the interview but was upstaged by CBS News boss Bari Weiss, who booked Netanyahu herself and handed the interview to Garrett, who is notably not a “60 Minutes” correspondent. The move sparked hostility and amplified the already strained relationship between Weissand the reporting team at the iconic newsmagazine.”

Not so iconic anymore.

The New York Post (for what it’s worth) also indicates that Netanyahu got to select his interviewer as a condition of CBS landing the interview. Weiss, a self-described “Zionist fanatic,” was hired by right wing billionaire Larry Ellison specifically for this sort of softball treatment of global autocrats, and had already been under fire for censoring stories that displeased the Trump administration.

There’s been a mass exodus at CBS for months as actual journalists bristle at the obvious shift toward soggy corporatist agitprop under Weiss. While Weiss was hired on to modernize CBS and make autocratic billionaire ass kissing exciting, viral, and good for ratings; the whole experiment has been a monumental failure so far, with CBS News recently seeing its lowest ratings in a quarter century.

Weiss rose to prominence at her weird little troll blog Free Press, which obviously hasn’t translated well to running a television network. Case in point: Weiss’ preferred new CBS News anchor, Tony Dokoupil, is having to broadcast the network’s coverage on Trump’s China visit from Taiwan because Weiss and friends failed to secure his visa on time for the trip. This mirrors other similar competency issues like Weiss making last-minute unapproved changes to teleprompter text that screws up broadcasts.

Beyond the clownish nature of it all, it remains an open question who this sort of stuff is actually for (beyond the extremely rich people endlessly trying to control information flow). Despite having a massive fortune, Ellison seems incapable of creating propaganda people actually want to watch, and even their target audience — center-right bigots with impaired critical thinking faculties — aren’t tuning in because they have a universe of other terrible (but far more entertaining) choices.

Like Jeff Bezos’ sad and desperate effort to repurpose the Washington Post into what now feels like a satirical billionaire-coddling rag, all the money in the world can’t seem to produce class warfare agitprop actual human beings want to consume. Almost as if the behaviors of the global authoritarian extraction class are starting to reach a point where they’re simply too heinous and ham-handed to spin.

A new “Christian” mobile phone provider named Radiant Mobile is promising to offer a wireless service that censors all LGBTQ+ content. The MVNO (mobile virtual network operator), which runs on the T-Mobile network, says it’s keen to deliver “faith-focused mobile service,” according to the company’s website.

According to NIT Technology Review, the MVNO is working alongside Israeli cybersecurity firm Allot to impose a network-level blockade of not just all pornography on the internet, but all LGBTQ+ content as well:

“We are going to create—and we think we have every right to do so—an environment that is Jesus-centric, that is void of pornography, void of LGBT, void of trans, Radiant Mobile’s founder, Paul Fisher, told MIT Technology Review.”

“Void of trans,” indeed. Good luck with all that. Porn filter systems, no matter whether device or network centric, are notoriously fickle and routinely make all manner of filtering mistakes that wind up blocking all manner of additional content. They’re also historically easy to bypass, depending on how they’re designed.

The article makes it clear that Fisher’s primary target is porn, and it sounds like censoring gay and trans related content isn’t something that’s been particularly well thought out. They’ll figure out in practice that trying to “sanitize” the internet on the network level to somehow conform to narrow worldviews isn’t technically possible, no matter what promises Allot is making to Reliant to justify their price tag:

“The technology to do this blocking is a blunt instrument: Allot groups website domains into more than a hundred categories, which include pornography but also violence, malware, gaming, and in Radiant Mobile’s case “sects,” which includes websites about Satanism. If one of its users tries to visit a website that belongs to a blocked category, the page won’t load.”

Yes, this would technically violate FCC net neutrality rules if the corrupt U.S. courts hadn’t dismantled them, but even if the rules still existed they wouldn’t have been enforced by the Trump FCC anyway. And yes, this raises all sorts of First Amendment and privacy legal questions, which is probably why T-Mobile tried to distance itself from things when contacted by MIT Technology Review:

“A representative for T-Mobile did not comment on whether these content blocks violate any of its policies. In a statement, the representative added that T-Mobile does not have a direct relationship with Radiant Mobile but instead works through the MVNO manager CompaxDigital.”

Fisher, who is apparently pivoting from a career as a supermodel agent to sell this heavily censored version of the internet to purportedly moral religious folks, is trying to strike brand partnerships with evangelical churches. Fisher’s backed by $17.5 million in investment from Compax Ventures and Roger Bringmann, a vice president at Nvidia.

There’s been a flood of these lazy MVNOs that pander to Trump zealots and operate on the T-Mobile network, not least of which is the Trump Organization’s Trump Mobile, which promised customers an expensive new Trump reskinned phone “made in America” that was being made in China and it never actually delivered (despite a lot of down payments). So: It’s all quite on brand.

Flimsy and corrupt authoritarian populism is dedicated to pretending that the oligarchs and autocrats really care about the people. One way Trumpism has done this is by pretending they actually care about reining in corporate power. That’s included an elaborate, multi-year performance about how MAGA Republicans were going to curb abuses by “big tech” and bring back meaningful antitrust reform.

As we’ve warned and witnessed repeatedly, that’s always a lie. The Trump administration has relentlessly dedicated his second administration to devastating whatever was left of regulatory autonomy, consumer protection, and antitrust reform. If MAGA is taking aim at a company it’s almost always either to harass them for doing something Trump doesn’t like, or to help benefit a billionaire ally.

Texas AG Ken Paxton is no exception. Every so often Ken likes to take a break from fueling dangerous conspiracy theories and harassing trans people to pretend he’s being tough on corporate power. Ken’s latest gambit is a new lawsuit against against Netflix for… monetizing streaming advertising viewer data and creating “addicted” users:

“Netflix’s years-long bait-and-switch has led the company right to where it promised never to be: addicting children and families to its platform, mining those users for data, and then converting that data into lucrative intelligence for global advertising juggernauts.”

Granted Netflix is not unique here. In a country too corrupt to pass meaningful privacy laws (because MAGA Republicans just like Ken routinely work to kill them), nearly every company you interact with on a daily basis now monetizes your every movement and online choices, “anonymizes” it (a meaningless term), sells access to dodgy international data brokers, then repeatedly lies about it.

They do this because Republicans, corporate lobbyists, and many “centrist” Democrats have, quite unsubtly, worked tirelessly to dismantle corporate oversight and regulatory autonomy. Most companies have been eager to take advantage, including Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who, like countless other CEOs, used to at least pay empty lip service to never tracking or monetizing consumer data.

Paxton’s lawsuit insists Netflix has built a vast surveillance economy that includes peoples’ kids viewing habits, violating Texas consumer protection law:

“Netflix built this surveillance machinery to scrutinize how users and their children behave—what they click, how long they linger, what they avoid, when they pause, what draws them in, what they replay or skip, where they are, what devices they use, what other devices are in their home, what other apps they interact with, and much more. Each action is a data point revealing something about the user. This is not simply about deciding what show to queue up next.It is about learning who the users and their children are.”

Again: almost every single company you interact with does this now. Many in ways that are far worse than Netflix (see: the entire unregulated data broker economy). Paxton knows this. So why single out Netflix? And why now?

Well, Netflix has been a recent thorn in the side of Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison’s efforts to acquire Warner Brothers, CNN, and HBO. Starting earlier this year, Trumpland made Netflix public enemy number one, pushing a pretty broad misinformation campaign targeting the company. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley went before Congress to accuse them of “pushing trans ideology.” More recently, Paramount has been trying to blame Netflix for all the negative criticism of their giant, terrible Warner Bros merger.

These sorts of lawsuits take a while to build momentum, so I suspect Paxton’s inquiry began during the mad conspiratorial heat of MAGA’s Netflix breakdown earlier this year, and is only culminating now. And I suspect Paxton will be eager to share any juicy and harmful tidbits found during trial prep to help frame the company (which in reality has been pretty amicable toward Republicans and trans bashing comedians) as a useful “woke” culture war prop.

That’s not to say Netflix doesn’t do anything wrong and isn’t (like every tech company) abysmal on surveillance and privacy, but it is to say that authoritarians don’t actually care about the public interest. And they certainly don’t actually care about mass commercialized surveillance, given they’ve played a starring role in cementing it and eliminating all accountability for it.

The American public’s broad and growing hatred of corporations and the extraction class has long been a fertile recruitment playground for autocratic zealots like Trump and Paxton, who love to put on adorable little stage plays where they pretend to be “reining in corporate power” and “embracing meaningful antitrust reform.” But it’s uniformly a performance always driven by ulterior motives.

If guys like Trump and Paxton actually cared about consumer privacy, they’d openly and loudly support a national privacy law that holds all companies (and executives, personally) accountable for privacy and security failures when it comes to consumer data. If they cared about consumer privacy, they’d relentlessly target data brokers that sell oceans of consumer data to any nitwit with a nickel (including foreign intelligence). They’d fund and staff U.S. regulators tasked with policing privacy abuses.

They don’t do that because that might impact them and their friends financially, and disrupt the U.S. government’s ability to spy on Americans without a warrant. So instead you get these highly selective and flimsy populist performances that single out administration “enemies” for failing to adequately bend the knee, while tricking rubes into thinking they’re being tough on corporate power.

ABC/Disney, like most major media companies, has spent much of its time during America’s bout with authoritarianism being a feckless wimp. The company was quick to ditch its already fleeting embrace of civil rights to please our dim, racist president, and were just as quick to pay Trump a $15 million bribe to settle a baseless Trump lawsuit they could have easily won.

But as Trump’s health and power becomes more shaky, ABC appears to be showing the faint outline of a backbone.

ABC/Disney execs are now more directly accusing the Trump administration of violating the First Amendment with its endless threats to pull the company’s broadcast licenses if it platforms journalists, comedians, or talk show hosts who refuse to kiss the administration’s ass.

Quick background: we’ve noted repeatedly how Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has been abusing the FCC’s dated “equal opportunity” (or “equal time”) rule to try and threaten daytime and late night talk shows with government retribution if they refuse to enthusiastically coddle Republicans.

Recently, the Carr FCC took the unprecedented step of demanding that ABC-owned Houston affiliate KTRK file a petition for declaratory ruling to the FCC, explaining to the agency why it didn’t file the appropriate paperwork for a February 2nd appearance by Democrat James Talarico on The View (the traction Talarico is making among Christians clearly seems to worry the administration).

So KTRK last week filed their petition for declaratory ruling. And it shows slightly more backbone that we’ve become used to, directly stating that the Trump FCC’s actions violate the First Amendment and are having a “chilling effect” on free speech. While the petition is technically on behalf of KTRK, it was signed by Paul Clement, a former Bush-era solicitor general and very experienced Supreme Court litigator.

Talk shows have historically been exempt from the dated, golden-era-of-television rules, which required that any airing of a political candidate on “publicly owned” airwaves is countered with the appearance from a candidate from the opposing party. But Carr isn’t interested in equilibrium; he’s interested abusing FCC authority to try and silence critics of Donald Trump and his increasingly unpopular policies.

ABC’s notice to the FCC notes that the target of the administration’s censorial rage, The View, was clearly granted a Bona Fide Exemption to the rule back in 2002. Most talk shows have broadly been viewed as exempt since 1984 or so (and increasingly so, as the Internet challenged TV’s supremacy). From the ABC filing:

“The View has been broadcasting under a bona fide news exemption granted to it more
than twenty years ago, consistent with longstanding Commission interpretations designed to
minimize the serious First Amendment problems inherent in the equal time regime.
The View’s exemption remains valid and the constitutional infirmities in the equal time doctrine are even more pronounced today, when the broadcast airwaves account for a slice of the numerous media options through which Americans get their political information.”

Carr’s FCC has also been threatening to pull ABC’s broadcast licenses in the wake of Jimmy Kimmel making fun of the president’s wife; but as we’ve previously reported, ABC only holds eight broadcast licenses in total; most in reality are owned by right wing affiliate companies already loyal to Trumpism.

Here’s an interesting bit of note: It appears that the Carr FCC staged things in advance with the help of those affiliates to make ABC-owned KTRK seem like it was doing something wrong.

First, the FCC tried to tell ABC and KTRK that The View being widely viewed as exempt is “not a position uniformly held by broadcasters that air the program” (it is).

But on pages 3-4 of ABC’s filing, they note that not only did those other affiliates not originally file the paperwork for the appearance (because there’s no need to given their exemption), the FCC personally reached out to a number of non-ABC owned affiliates to have them file paperwork late so it would appear that the ABC-owned KTRK was an outlier that did something wrong. From ABC’s filing:

“The Bureau neglected to note, however, that while certain ABC affiliates documented Talarico’s appearance in their online public inspection files, the filings were made more than two weeks after Talarico’s appearance and apparently at the request of the FCC, which reportedly promised to eschew enforcement for the late filing. KTRK Television received no such request and no such offer, despite the Bureau specifically contacting it about the Talarico appearance less than 10 days after it occurred.”

That’s really profoundly greasy behavior. These other affiliates, that the FCC pressured to file late notices of Talarico’s appearances, would be companies like Sinclair, Tegna, Nexstar, Gray Media, or Scripps, most of which are owned by Trump-loyalists and/or are seeking FCC approval for approval for mergers that illegally ignore the country’s last remaining media consolidation limits.

So again, the FCC accused ABC and its directly owned affiliate of something false, then told non-ABC owned affiliates to file paperwork they never would have otherwise planned to if they wanted merger approval to make it seem like KTRK did something wrong. And since a lot of these affiliates are already very Trump-friendly propaganda mills, the FCC likely didn’t have to apply much pressure.

While it’s always possible the Trump-stocked Supreme Court makes an insane ruling in Trump’s favor, these threats to pull broadcast licenses are not fights the Trump FCC wants to actually litigate. They’re designed to simply be a form of harassment that makes life so costly and difficult for companies that threat targets — and everybody else — just pre-emptively bows to pressure to censor.

Trump and Carr expect companies to pre-emptively quiver and not put up a costly fight. And while these threats have worked for a while (because our corporate media is broadly opportunistic and pathetic), Trump’s abysmal poll numbers in the wake of the Iran war and soaring gas prices are likely instilling new confidence even among the most weak-kneed companies.

Last month we noted how tech companies, automakers, and others were trying to kill Colorado’s existing “right to repair” law, which is supposed to make it cheaper and easier to repair the things you own.

More specifically, tech companies like Cisco and IBM were pushing Colorado lawmakers to sign off on  SB26-090, the Exempt Critical Infrastructure from Right to Repair law, which would neuter much of the state’s existing protections under the pretense of making the public safer.

After previous journalism from the likes of Ars Technica and Wired drew some unwanted attention, the effort appears to have failed, according to Wired:

“SB26-090 was introduced during a Colorado Senate hearing on April 2 and was supported by lobbying efforts from companies such as Cisco and IBM. It passed that hearing unanimously. The bill then passed in the Colorado Senate on April 16. On Monday evening, the bill was discussed in a long, delayed hearing in the Colorado House’s State, Civic, Military, and Veterans Affairs Committee. Dozens of supporters and detractors gave public comments. Finally, the bill was shot down in a 7-to-4 vote and classified as postponed indefinitely.”

Like many similar efforts, tech companies falsely tried to convince lawmakers that making things cheaper and easier to repair would pose entirely new privacy and security risks, and that independent repair shops would be prone to make constant and dangerous mistakes. Pre-Trump Lina Khan era FTC studies had repeatedly indicated those claims are false.

In this case, IBM and Cisco had tried to use an updated definition of “critical infrastructure” that was so large and vague as to render all the protections meaningless. While they failed this time, they’ll be back. Countless companies, across countless industries, are desperate to boost revenues by monopolizing repair and driving up the cost of ownership for consumers and other companies alike.

Unfortunately, while all fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws. And of those states, not one has actually managed to enforce their new laws despite no shortage of targets, something that gets curiously omitted by most reporting, and indicates the movement has a lot of work left to do.

More than 4,000 Hollywood insiders recently signed a letter blasting Paramount’s planned $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers, noting that the massive consolidation will be very historically harmful to labor, consumers, and creatives. That’s a very correct observation, especially as it relates to Warner Brothers, which has never been involved in a merger that didn’t result in mass layoffs, higher prices for everyone, and a significantly shittier overall product.

Now a coalition of press groups, including Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) and Reporters Without Borders, are pressing Paramount regarding “potentially corrupt acquisitions and deals” they argue could undermine shareholder value by degrading the (already sagging) quality of journalism at CBS News and CNN, while “relinquishing editorial control of major news outlets to the Trump administration.”

In a letter sent to former Trump DOJ “antitrust enforcer” (using that term ironically) turned Paramount top lawyer Makan Delrahim, the groups highlight all the dodgy bullshit that we’ve well-covered over the last year, whether it’s CBS paying the president a $16 million bribe to gain merger approval, CBS agreeing to install an “ombudsman” to ensure the network is consistently kissing the president’s ass, or Paramount billionaire owner Larry Ellison privately meeting with his friend Trump to promise he’d fire certain CNN anchors if the government allowed him to buy Warner Brothers.

The journalism groups make the point that the Ellison family effort to turn CBS into a Trump and Netanyahu-friendly agitprop machine has been disastrous for the company’s share price. And because both organizations are technically shareholders, they’re demanding deeper access to the Paramount books to see what other dodgy bullshit may not have been revealed yet:

“Since Paramount Skydance announced its most consequential Trump-friendly changes at CBS News in October — acquiring The Free Press and appointing Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief — the company’s market capitalization has decreased by 40%, wiping out more than $8 billion in shareholder value. Ratings for key programs, like “CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil,” have also dropped precipitously. Freedom of the Press Foundation and Reporters Without Borders, which are both shareholders in Paramount Skydance Corp., are entitled to inspect the company’s books and records related to these developments under Section 220 of the Delaware General Corporation Law.”

They’ve given Paramount five days to respond to their request for more documents and data related to any promises Paramount may have made the Trump administration. I’m not convinced the gambit will go anywhere, but it’s nice to see these kinds of groups (historically absent from many of these fights) suddenly paying closer attention to media consolidation.

Larry Ellison’s interests here are two-fold. He wanted to gift his nepobaby son David with two major Hollywood studios so David can pretend he’s a very big boy doing very serious things. But he’s also keen on dismantling what’s left of journalism at places like CBS News and CNN (already reeling from years of corporate cowardice) turning them into right-wing friendly agitprop mills that are even more friendly to his favorite autocrats (Trump and Netanyahu).

You’ll recall Bari Weiss sold herself to Paramount as an expert who could modernize CBS News through virality and mass audience appeal (despite having no actual experience in journalism). But Weiss, who got her start at the helm of a strange contrarian troll blog, has the instincts and ideas of a 90 year old man, and clearly isn’t capable of generating watchable propaganda in any ratings-grabbing way that actually appeals to anyone (even MAGA folks, who already have no limit of agitprop options).

The Trump administration will certainly rubber stamp the deal. Paramount will likely keep this effort locked up in the courts indefinitely. And the Democrats’ demand for the FCC to investigate the dodgy Chinese and Saudi financing propping up the deal isn’t likely to go anywhere. That leaves a collaborative looming lawsuit by state AGs as the most likely path toward ensuring this deal never gets off the ground.

But even if the deal gets approved, this giant company’s long-term survival is far from guaranteed. Especially given the shaky state of Hollywood, the steady enshittification of streaming, and the fact that there’s very little evidence that the any of the Paramount folks are competent.

There’s a very high likelihood that the combination of Paramount’s massive debt load from both the CBS and Warner deals– and fleeing audience (either bored by bad product or disgusted by the companies’ Trump allegiances) — combines with Larry Ellison’s over-extension on AI to result in some very precarious financial footing.

These major media deals always go terribly for consumers and labor, but execs often benefit from tax breaks, temporary stock boosts, and compensation in no way dictated by competency (see: CEO David Zaslav). But this series of deals is so massive and problematic, it could generate some very significant pain for the extraction class, and make all past merger disasters seem adorable by comparison.

In late 2023, I wrote a feature for The Verge exploring the FCC’s attempt to stop race and class discrimination in broadband deployment. For decades, big telecoms have not only refused to evenly upgrade broadband in low income and poor areas (despite billions in subsidies for this exact purpose), they’ve provably charged poor and minority neighborhoods significantly more money for worse service.

To be clear: the Biden FCC’s plan didn’t actually stop such discrimination. The previous FCC didn’t even have the moral courage to call out big telecoms with a history of such practices (see: AT&T’s “digital redlining” in cities like Cleveland and Detroit). The FCC simply acknowledged that this discrimination clearly exists and set up a complaint process for consumers who had been discriminated against.

I’m not sure the loophole-filled rules would have ever resulted in meaningful accountability for providers, given holding telecom monopolies accountable has never been a serious priority for either party. But it was at least an acknowledgement that this obvious discrimination exists. For the first time ever. Which was important for what I would hope is obvious reasons.

No longer: the Republican-stocked 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down the entire FCC effort in a ruling, stating the FCC exceeded its legal authority by imposing liability for actions resulting in “disparate impact,” instead of merely policing “disparate treatment.” And by extending the complaint process to include subcontractors who help ISPs with deployment:

“[The FCC] exceeded its statutory authority in two respects that are the core of the final rule—disparate impact liability and the definition of covered entities. We therefore vacate the final rule in its entirety, leaving the FCC with an unfinished obligation to ‘adopt final rules to facilitate equal access to broadband Internet access service’ in compliance with 47 U.S.C. § 1754.”

That resulted in the whole effort being discarded.

The FCC could try to re-establish the rules with a new effort, but that new effort likely wouldn’t survive our new reality created by our corrupt courts dismantling Chevron Deference. Republicans and corporate power have made holding large U.S. companies accountable for almost anything illegal, and it’s still somehow not being talked about enough, given the vast (and quite deadly) looming ramifications.

While the Judges and case intervenors like to put on a very serious adult face and pretend they’re engaging in very serious legalese, the goal here really is no meaningful oversight of telecom monopolies. There’s always something they concoct to suggest the U.S. government can’t engage in basic consumer protection oversight of telecoms. If it wasn’t this, it would be something else.

The impact of this assault on the U.S. federal regulatory state is everywhere you look. Especially in broadband access, where dominant regional monopolies and state and federal regulatory capture (read: corruption) result in spotty access, slow speeds, and abysmal consumer service for everyone. Minorities and marginalized communities just get hit hardest, and usually first.

The ruling, issued unanimously by three judges appointed by Republican presidents, is a double win for folks like FCC boss Brendan Carr, who likely enjoys both the racism and protecting lumbering telecom monopolies from accountability for decades of predatory behavior. As usual, Carr insisted in a statement that fighting discrimination somehow discriminates against white people:

“Today’s appellate court decision is another common-sense win for nondiscrimination.

…the FCC’s decision to adopt those illegal rules only made it harder for providers to bridge the digital divide and took the FCC’s focus off of our core mission.

Now, the FCC is focused on advancing our Build America Agenda and ensuring that regulated entities do not discriminate, including through our efforts to end invidious forms of DEI discrimination. I commend the appellate court for correcting the FCC’s misguided 2023 decision. The court’s ruling follows the Supreme Court’s decision last week making clear that intentional discrimination is unlawful.”

That is, well, patently false. And weird. And an extremely dystopian inversion of reality by zealots. Consumer groups fighting for equitable and affordable broadband (like Public Knowledge) were, in contrast, not impressed. From Public Knowledge’s Legal Director, John Bergmayer:

“The practical effect is to eliminate a rule that addresses a documented problem,” he said. “Lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color get slower service, older equipment, and higher prices for the same product their richer neighbors buy. After today, the FCC can act only when it proves a smoking-gun case of conscious bias, which almost never exists in writing.”

This is just one of several efforts by Republicans to destroy efforts to mandate equitable and affordable broadband access, including Trump’s illegal destruction of the Digital Equity Act, the dismantling of programs that provide free Wi-Fi hotspots to rural school kids, and the general destruction of FCC authority to hold telecoms accountable for stuff like spying on you.

This is occurring at the same time that Trump Republicans are leveraging Carr’s same twisted, inverted logic on “DEI” and inverted discrimination to do everything from censor journalists and comedians to gerrymander maps, stripping representation rights away from millions of American minorities.

Great stuff. Thanks again to all the folks (especially rich Silicon Valley CEOs) who decided that a corrupt kakistocracy at the hands of racist zealots was just what an already struggling America needed.

Anna Gomez, the FCC’s lone Democratic Commissioner (because Republicans refuse to seat the second one) is calling for a rigorous review of Paramount and the Ellison family’s planned $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers. As Paramount recently revealed, 49.5 percent of the deal’s funding comes from Middle East and Chinese government-linked sources; just the sort of thing Republicans pretend to get mad about when engaged in stuff like, say, offloading TikTok to the POTUS’s rich friends.

The FCC doesn’t have much of a role in the giant media merger approval process because public license transfers aren’t involved. But it does (in a theoretical country that respects the law) have a role to play in enforcing Communications Act restrictions that restrict foreign entities from holding more than a 25% indirect equity or voting interest in a U.S. company that holds broadcast licenses. 

Carr and the Ellisons have spent months publicly insisting the law doesn’t matter because the countries won’t have a meaningful management and board presence. It doesn’t matter, it’s still technically illegal.

But Carr is eager to ignore the law because the merger is of benefit to a rich Republican looking to gift his nepobaby two major Hollywood studies and turn what’s left of corporate news media (both CNN and CBS News) into an even-friendlier safe space for rich Republicans and global autocrats.

While Gomez’ actual power here is negligible, her call for a meaningful review is a useful reminder of Trump-era Republican hypocrisy and the importance of functional media ownership regulation (which the U.S. hasn’t had in a very long time). From Gomez’ statement:

“The American public deserves to know who owns the airwaves that carry their news. I
am alarmed by what appears to be an effort to rubber stamp a financial structure that
places nearly half of one of America’s largest broadcast and media companies into the
hands of foreign governments with documented records of press suppression and a
troubling willingness to silence journalists.

There are serious, unresolved questions about how this foreign investment may jeopardize national security, and this Commission has a legal obligation to answer them before handing
wealthy friends of this Administration yet another Billionaire Buddy Bypass on a
transaction that strikes at the heart of American journalism.”

Again, recall how Chinese private ownership of a social media company doing business in the United States caused a four year embolism by FCC boss Brendan Carr and other Trump loyal Republicans. Here you have a billionaire right wing Trump friend ignoring the law and gobbling up whatever’s left of U.S. media with the help of several autocratic buddies and there’s curiously no problem.

It’s almost as if Trump Republicans don’t have any coherent ideology beyond propping up their own wealth and power. If only the United States had a diverse and healthy news media capable of explaining that.

With Gomez in the minority there’s virtually no chance of a meaningful FCC review. Still, it’s nice to see a Democrat at least get the messaging on this right. Dem media reform policies have historically ranged from highly performative to nonexistent in a country increasingly too corrupt to care about meaningful antitrust reform (recall how Democratic leadership abandoned popular media reformer Gigi Sohn’s appointment to the FCC after a baseless Republican and telecom/media sector smear campaign).

Ellison’s effort to dominate media, and the authoritarian threat more broadly, is so ham-fisted and dire it’s been hard for Democrats to ignore this one. Carr has unsurprisingly ignored other Democrat lawmakers’ call for meaningful inquiry.

A potential lawsuit by a coalition of state attorneys general remains the best path for blocking the deal, though their focus will obviously be on the inevitable mass layoffs, price hikes, and shittier overall service that arrive every single time giant media mergers (especially involving Warner Brothers) get rubber stamped by our pay-to-play federal government.

Last week the Trump FCC quietly announced that it was cooking up a new ban on any labs that have testing offices in China from testing electronic ‌devices such as smartphones, cameras and computers for sale in the United States.

That’s going to create some major issues given that roughly 75% of all U.S.-bound electronics are currently tested in Chinese facilities. Many of these operations are owned by U.S. or European companies that have testing facilities in China because that’s where the lion’s share of technology is manufactured, so it’s simply more efficient for testing evolving iterations of new product.

That these companies have offices in China doesn’t inherently mean the testing labs are somehow all magically compromised and in dutiful service to the Chinese government, though that’s certainly the implication the xenophobic Trump administration is making (and has made before in previous, similar announcements).

One major problem outside of the raw logistics of it all: Carr’s planned cybersecurity fix would be significantly more expensive, driving up costs for everyone:

“27 of the affected facilities are Chinese subsidiaries of major Western testing firms, including Intertek, SGS, TUV Rheinland, and Bureau Veritas. Those companies operate labs in the U.S., Europe, and Taiwan that can absorb redirected work, but the shift won’t be seamless. Basic FCC certification testing runs between $400 and $1,300 at Chinese labs, compared with $3,000 to $4,000 at U.S. equivalents.”

Who is going to eat the difference in those costs? You are, of course. In addition to the higher costs from the AI boom, the tariffs, and Trump’s pointless war in Iran. Whatever companies lobbied Carr and Trump will do great. You probably won’t.

Given the terrible nature of smart IOT home security standards (more a byproduct of unregulated crony capitalism than China-based testing locations), having a more direct line of control over the testing of U.S. bound hardware makes superficial sense.

But then you have to remember that this is Brendan Carr, who does nothing authentically in the public interest, and is likely just looking to drive more business to a handful of U.S. companies that lobbied for his attention. And you have to remember that these folks, as you saw when they talked about shifting smartphone production to the States, don’t actually know what the fuck they’re doing.

The other major problem: Trump and Carr’s rabid deregulatory, anti-governance zealotry on other fronts has repeatedly worked to undermine U.S. cybersecurity, making these sorts of fixes leaky and highly performative, even if they were to be successful (which they won’t be).

While Carr and Trump profess to be super worried about Chinese threats to national security, with their other hand the Trump administration has gutted government cybersecurity programs (including a board investigating the biggest Chinese hack of U.S. telecom networks in history), dismantled the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) (responsible for investigating significant cybersecurity incidents), and fired oodles of folks doing essential work at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Brendan Carr is also engaged in a massive effort to destroy whatever’s left of the FCC’s consumer protection and corporate oversight authority, despite the fact that the recent historic Chinese Salt Typhoon hack (caused in large part because major telecoms were too incompetent to change default administrative passwords) was a direct byproduct of this exact type of mindless deregulation.

The Trump administration’s stacked courts are also making it extremely difficult to hold telecoms accountable for literally anything (see the Fifth Circuit’s recent reversal of a fine against AT&T for spying on customer movement), which also undermines consumer privacy and national security, and ensures zero real repercussions for companies that fail to secure their networks and sensitive data.

So, with one hand you have Carr claiming he’s “fixing cybersecurity” with stuff like this or his recent foreign router “ban” (which as we’ve noted is really a lazy extortion scheme), while with the other he’s doing everything in his power to ensure that domestic telecoms don’t really have anything even vaguely resembling meaningful privacy and security oversight.

Here’s where I’ll remind you that because the U.S. is too corrupt to pass even a basic modern privacy law, we also have a vast and largely unregulated data broker industry that hoovers up your every movement and online habit, then sells access to it to any random asshole (including foreign and domestic government intelligence agencies).

Here too, weird zealots like Trump and Carr have rolled back efforts to regulate data brokers or do anything about it. As authoritarian racists, they’re too blinded by personal self-enrichment and racism to have any genuine understanding of how any of this stuff actually works.

As with the TikTok “ban” (which basically involved shoveling ownership to Trump’s billionaire buddies), so much of this is heavily xenophobic, nationalistic, transactional, self-serving, and performatively detached from any actual reality. By the time the check comes due, guys like Carr and Trump will already be off to the next grift.

Good news if you really enjoy corporatism, autocracy, propaganda and a violently misinformed electorate!

The U.S. has fallen to sixty-fourth place (now below Ukraine) in the annual Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index. As corrupt, oligarch-coddled authoritarians the world over continue to enjoy their moment in the sun, journalism (aka the “enemy of the people”) continues to be violently disassembled by a lazy coalition of fascist ideology and corporatism.

From the latest report (see the full interactive index):

“For the first time in the history of the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index, over half of the world’s countries now fall into the “difficult” or “very serious” categories for press freedom. In 25 years, the average score of all 180 countries and territories surveyed in the Index has never been so low.”

The study notes that in 2002, 20% of the global population lived in a country where the state of press freedom was categorized as “good.” A quarter century later, less than 1% of the world’s population lives in a country that falls under this category.

In the U.S., Trump-friendly oligarchs like Larry Ellison and Elon Musk are gobbling up the remnants of dying traditional media and newer social media platforms alike, keen on turning both into oligarch and autocrat friendly agitprop machines. All while Trump destroys whatever was left of public media, and endlessly harasses companies that platform basic journalism and comedy.

At the same time, journalism layoffs continue to be rampant at the hands of corporate media giants dead set on destroying whatever was left of media consolidation limits, public interest reporting, and even archival and journalistic history. The result is a lazy, ad-driven, badly automated engagement ouroborus where anything serving the public interest is a distant and fleeting consideration.

The better performers in the index include Norway, Finland (where they teach kids media literacy and how to identify propaganda starting at the age of three), Sweden, Denmark, and Estonia. While decidedly smaller with vast differences, such countries have strange perks like functional public media and an operational social safety net not yet hollowed out by grotesque levels of corruption.

From the study:

“In the United States (which ranks 64th out of 180 countries and territories) journalists who were already fighting against economic headwinds and dealing with a crisis of public trust—among other challenges—now also contend with President Donald Trump’s systematic weaponisation of state institutions, including funding cuts to public broadcasters such as NPR and PBS, political interference in media ownership, and politically motivated investigations targeting disfavoured journalists and media outlets.”

It can, of course, always get worse. Autocracies start by consolidating media and turning established outlets in to autocratic agitprop bullhorns, but ultimately move on to dominating or destroying whatever’s left of independent journalism through legal harassment and ultimately murder.

There are paths out from under this, but it requires a lot of coordinated efforts the U.S. has historically had an allergy to. Including restoring antitrust reform and imposing not just consolidation limits but diversity ownership requirements. It would also help to drive creative new funding models for journalism, dramatically reshape media literacy policy, and aggressively support real publicly-funded media freed from corporate influence, historically a close ally to maintaining a functioning democracy.