If You Like Being Ripped Off By Comcast, You’ll LOVE Trump’s Likely New FCC Boss

Current FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has spent much of the last decade positioning himself to be Trump’s likely pick for the next boss of the FCC. He’s likely to get his wish; after spending a lot of time crying about TikTok to get on cable TV and kissing AT&T’s and Comcast’s asses, Carr’s widely considered the frontrunner to head the country’s top telecom and media regulator.

If you’ve tracked Carr’s policies, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to you that one of his top goals will be to dismantle the FCC’s already shaky consumer protection efforts.

That means the death of net neutrality, the end of the agency’s inquiry into shitty broadband usage caps, the end of broadband consumer privacy, the end of the FCC’s efforts to stop broadband “redlining” (read: racism in fiber deployment), the end of any good faith efforts to help the poor afford broadband, and an end to efforts to stop Comcast from ripping you off with shitty fees.

Carr’s policies are basically AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast’s policies, dressed up as original thought.

Carr is one of these guys who thinks that if you let giant, unpopular telecom behemoths do whatever they want; miracles and innovation start magically sprouting from the sidewalk. You’ve seen repeatedly how that turns out for the public (be they Republican or Democrat): higher prices, slower speeds, shitty customer service, and a variety of annoying problems like privacy abuses.

As a telecom beat reporter of 25 years now, I can say with absolute certainty that anybody claiming Carr has the slightest interest in a competitive broadband market and consumer welfare is lying to you. I’m writing this down now so that nobody acts surprised when this stuff comes to pass.

Consumer Protection Is Now Basically Illegal

Given the Trump Supreme Court and 5th Circuit have already primed the pump on letting companies basically declare all corporate oversight and consumer protection illegal (I’m really not exaggerating); I don’t suspect the initial assault on consumer rights will take up much of Carr’s time. He should have the agency’s consumer protection efforts fairly well lobotomized by next summer.

In telecom, I suspect no shortage of time will be spent rewarding Elon Musk with Starlink unearned subsidies where ever possible, even if taxpayer money is better spent on more reliable and affordable options not managed by a conspiratorial bigot.

I also expect Carr will follow through with his plan to impose a big new tax on tech services (read: you) to even further subsidize his friends at AT&T and Comcast (you can read more about that here). I also suspect Carr will find creative ways to undermine the exploding and hugely popular community broadband movement, and he’ll certainly rubber stamp shitty mergers (like the Verizon Frontier deal) resulting in more telecom consolidation and higher prices and worse service for everyone.

It’s after that where things should get truly interesting in terms of FCC policy under Carr.

Carr you might recall wrote an entire chapter of Project 2025. There he makes it clear that he’s hoping to leverage whatever authority the FCC has left to harass tech and media companies that try to rein in Trump’s authoritarianism, whether that’s broadcast journalists critical of Trump, or tech companies doing the absolute bare minimum to stop racists and fascists from being hateful assholes on the internet.

Carr isn’t quite as unhinged as many “thought leaders” in the Trump delusion extended infotainment universe, so I’m not entirely sure he’ll go along with Trump’s lust for pulling the broadcast licenses of critical media outlets. But Carr has proven to be such a sniveling sycophant, it would be hard to guarantee he’ll show any real backbone here — which is worrying in and of itself. Indeed, a week ago he did say he supported pulling NBC’s license for putting Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live, even though NBC absolutely followed the “equal time” rule, giving Donald Trump free ad space the next day (and even as, in other contexts, Carr has been critical of rules like the “equal time” rule).

Again Carr’s primary, most immediate goal will be in doing whatever AT&T and Comcast want: namely turning the FCC into the consumer protection and policy equivalent of a decorative seasonal gourd. That means making it easier for giant, shitty telecom monopolies to rip you and your family off. Despite all the rhetoric about “Trump populism,” none of what Carr has planned is at all popular.

Keep in mind that despite all of Carr’s bootheel licking it’s entirely possible Trump’s team picks somebody even worse as head of the FCC. In which case, all bets are off.

The question for me then becomes (in telecom and elsewhere), will any of the folks who “voted for this” ever tether their coming pain (higher prices, worse service, more privacy and net neutrality violations) to their own choices? Or are Americans so saturated with propaganda, and U.S. journalism so profoundly broken, that the blame for the suffering to come is just endlessly shifted elsewhere.