Karl Bode writes:

Surprising exactly nobody, Donald Trump has appointed Brendan Carr to lead the nation’s top telecom and media regulator. As we noted last week, there’s zero daylight between Carr’s policies and the policies of unpopular telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast. Carr is as close to the dictionary definition of “regulatory capture” as you’re going to get (with a few additional wrinkles we’ll get to down below).

You might recall that Trump’s team promised it would “blacklist” any participants in Project 2025, back when it was pretending to distance itself from the unpopular policy platform. That promise is already out the window, given Carr wrote an entire Project 2025 chapter on how he planned to use the FCC to harass any tech and media companies that didn’t adequately bend the knee to Trump authoritarianism.

Carr’s top priority will be dutifully dismantling all remaining FCC broadband consumer protection efforts, whether that’s net neutrality, the FCC’s recent inquiry into shitty broadband usage caps, broadband consumer privacy protections, efforts to stop broadband “redlining” (read: racism in fiber deployment), good faith efforts to help the poor afford broadband, and efforts to stop your cable, phone, wireless, or broadband provider from ripping you off with shitty fees.

FCC’s consumer protection efforts have been on shaky ground for a while, but Trump 2.0 (read: “populism” that isn’t actually all that popular) will be the absolute death of them. The Trump-corrupted Supreme Court has already set the stage for telecoms (any U.S. company, really) to declare that absolutely any effort to protect consumers is a violation of the law. I wish I was being hyperbolic. [Continue reading…]