Hey Brendan Carr, Next Time Link To Our Article That Proves You’re Full Of Shit, Coward

Recently, Karl had a post taking FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr to task for a painfully misleading Wall Street Journal article that attacked Kamala Harris. The article claimed that her policies resulted in the lack of new broadband deployments under Joe Biden’s 2021 Infrastructure Bill that put aside $42.5 billion in broadband grants for underserved communities. Except that’s not accurate at all.

Leaving aside that Carr’s WSJ article was clearly political, violating laws that prevent federal government employees from engaging in political activities (which also didn’t stop Carr from contributing a chapter to Project 2025), Carr has spent the last few days just repeating the misleading bullshit from his article, trying to drum up misplaced anger towards Harris.

If there’s anyone to be angry about regarding the failure to close the digital divide, it’s Brendan Carr himself. He’s trying to do two things here: to distract from the fact that he fucked things up back during the Trump years, which caused the mess we’re digging out of now, and to suck up to Trump, whom he hopes will appoint him chair.

Part of that misleading nonsense crusade was to tweet a screenshot of the headline of our article, as syndicated to Above The Law, but without a link to the actual article.

That’s Carr saying:

Amazing. VP Harris has failed to connect even one person to the Internet despite leading a $42 billion program for 1,069 days. But it is not her mismanagement that’s the problem. No, the problem is highlighting her failures. I’ve undermined the narrative, not the program.

Then he showed the headline of our story as a screenshot, but without a link. I don’t know why he didn’t link, but it likely has something to do with the text of Karl’s story debunking his claims and showing that no, in fact, it absolutely is Carr who is to blame for many of the delays. (The other reason not to link is that Elon Musk, whom Carr keeps cozying up to, has tweaked the algorithm enough that posts with links seem to be downranked in the algorithm, and Carr can’t afford to miss out on bogus clout among the bots and cultists).

So, let’s go through this again in great detail. Next time, Brendan, man up and link to us, you coward. Let people read what we actually wrote, rather than your lies. We know you can’t actually survive in the “marketplace of ideas” so you have to hide behind screenshots. But, let’s just pretend you actually had the courage to let us tell the truth to your followers.

Back during the Trump administration, the FCC led by Chair Ajit Pai, where Carr was one of the other Republican Commissioners (after having worked directly for Pai), completely shit the bed in trying to distribute money to underserved rural communities under the “Rural Digital Opportunity Fund.” This program, which Carr supported, has generally been seen as a total disaster of epic proportions. While Carr put out a statement falsely claiming credit for “clos[ing] the digital divide” the reality wasn’t so bright. From the Benton Institute’s analysis of the disaster, which was supported by Carr:

When the winning RDOF bidders were announced in December 2020, many were surprised at the results. The top winner was a company most people had ever heard of — a small fixed wireless provider called LTD Broadband—followed by Charter, a consortium of electric cooperatives, and Starlink. Several other fixed wireless providers were in the Top 10. The vast majority of winning bidders were committing to offer Gigabit speed broadband.

Under the FCC’s two-part application process, however, the real scrutiny occurs on the backend, after the auction. Ultimately, 20 months after the auction concluded, the FCC declared Starlink and LTD to be in default. To date, the FCC has authorized about $6 billion to serve about 3.5 million locations, with the remaining bids in default.

A big part of the problem was that the FCC under Carr & Pai structured the RDOF in a manner that almost guaranteed failure, ensuring those who could never actually build the broadband promised won the auctions. The end result was a ton of bids won by firms that couldn’t possibly deliver, or agreements to close the “digital divide” in places that didn’t have a digital divide.

A big part of the reason why that failed so badly was that the FCC under Carr & Pai (despite tons of people pushing them to do so) failed to fix our abysmal broadband mapping setup, which at least would have helped the FCC determine where such broadband was really needed, and how to best provide it.

But real maps would also make clear that the US broadband market wasn’t nearly as competitive as Carr liked to pretend. And given that Carr’s policies have long been focused on protecting incumbents like AT&T and Verizon from competition, that would be a problem. Because AT&T and Verizon made it crystal clear that they did not want the FCC to provide better maps.

End result: ridiculously bad maps (to protect incumbents) that make it impossible to know where broadband is needed, followed by a bad auction designed to not actually provide broadband to the places that needed it. A total failure, which is on Carr’s resume.

When Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, it included this new program, the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program (which Republicans vocally opposed!) designated $42 billion to broadband investment.

However, because the FCC under Carr and Pai shit the bed so badly with the RDOF program and its joke of a broadband map, the BEAD program was given over to NTIA to administer. The initial stage of the project was (as directed by Congress) for NTIA to figure out where the fuck the money should go.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) requires NTIA to identify “high-cost areas” in the United States – areas in which at least 80 percent of the locations are unserved, and in which the cost of building out broadband service is higher than the average for all such unserved areas.

That wouldn’t have been necessary if Carr had fixed the broadband mapping issue back when he had a chance. And, maybe the project management wouldn’t have gone to NTIA if Carr hadn’t fucked up so badly with RDOF.

But, he did fuck it all up.

And thus, NTIA had to spend years cleaning up the mess Carr enabled to determine where to put the funds.

After going through that process to make sure that the money isn’t wasted (like the waste that came about under Carr’s RDOF program), the money and buildouts are starting to happen and will go online shortly. Which Carr well knows. But he has to make hay now and pretend the project has been a failure to attack VP Harris and to stump for Donald Trump.

But the simple fact is that the FCC didn’t get the BEAD program because of Carr and Pai’s earlier incompetence. The delay in BEAD actually connecting people wasn’t because of incompetence of the current administration, but rather having to clean up from the earlier incompetence of Carr and Pai.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out (again) that under a GOP administration, there would be no BEAD program anyway. Republicans have spent the last few years fighting back against it and screaming about this system that will actually connect people to high-speed broadband. However, they’re happy to take credit for the connectivity when it happens, even after they voted against it.

So, Brendan, I know you’re just sucking up to your hopeful future boss, but don’t be such a spineless coward. Link to our story that explains how your fuckups and incompetence resulted in the long timeline to a program you never really supported in the first place.

And then, maybe, the damn fools who follow you won’t be confused as well.