Trump Tags Brendan Carr To Dismantle What’s Left Of Broadband Consumer Protection At FCC

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.

All fights over these sorts of issues now head to the state or local level, bogging the court system and regulatory reform down indefinitely (the entire point). If you live in a state that couldn’t care less about corporate oversight or consumer protection, you’re shit out of luck for the foreseeable future. Thank a Trump voter when the myriad impacts start to materialize. You may need to use pie charts.

Carr’s extremely likely to rubber stamp terrible media and telecom mergers, ensuring that your prices skyrocket and service quality suffers. He’ll also take a hatchet to whatever’s left of media consolidation limits, which Trumplicans only pretend to care about when they’re spreading bigoted conspiracy theories. The result of both will be higher prices, more harmful consolidation, and lower quality services.

Carr’s primary pet project on the telecom front will be to try to impose AT&T’s long-percolating plan to tax tech companies (read: you) in order to throw billions in new telecom subsidies at AT&T and Comcast. Subsidies, if his track record holds, he’ll fail utterly to ensure are spent intelligently. This will be framed as good faith reform by both Carr and gullible press outlets, starting sometime next Spring.

Mainstream media journalism is already sanewashing Carr. The Washington Post, as just one example, spends its first four opening paragraphs parroting the false Republican claim they’re being “censored,” and at no point really makes it clear to readers that the entirety of broadband consumer protection is on the chopping block. The New York Times breakdown of the appointment barely thinks Carr’s primary appointment goal — to make life easier on AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast — is worth a mention.

You’d think, were you a journalist paid to inform readers, you could work in a mention somewhere that Carr is the exact opposite of the “populist” leadership Trumpists deluded themselves into voting for. A status quo captured regulator whose primary function is to coddle telecom monopolies.

Carr does differ from traditional Republican and Libertarian mindless “deregulation” orthodoxy in a key way: he supports the Trump fascism project. That means he’s going to talk a lot about “small government” when it’s convenient to coddle and enable corporate Republican allies (AT&T, Comcast, Walmart, Oracle), then pivot on a dime to abuse government authority to harass companies authoritarians don’t like in the very next breath.

That means harassing journalists and media companies even lightly critical of Trumpism, or any tech companies that try and do the bare minimum to stop the spread of race-baiting Republican propaganda on the internet. Since their actual policies are routinely dogshit, a cornerstone of modern Republican power is the use of propaganda across old and new media to ensure that a disgruntled electorate has no idea what they’re voting for beyond the racism (I’d say that’s going pretty well, don’t you?).

Carr’s top job will be to protect that apparatus, and I suspect he’ll pursue it with the usual zeal reserved for sniveling sycophants in Donald’s orbit. I’d suspect Trump FCC 2.0 will be notably worse than the Ajit Pai era, given that Trumpism now has the backing of the Supreme Court (which can easily appear corrupted with a Winnebago), and potentially both houses of Congress, putting historically terrible legislation in play.

Again, Trump voters think they voted for status-quo disrupting populism, but you really can’t get any more unpopular status quo than Brendan Carr. He’s a water boy for the telecom industry’s least popular companies, and the end result of his tenure absolutely will not be inexpensive or subtle.