Net Neutrality Is Dead As A Doornail Under Trump 2.0

While the concept has been endlessly demonized by right wing media (working hand in moist hand with shitty companies like AT&T and Comcast), net neutrality was always well intentioned. It was, in essence, some inconsistent, rarely enforced rules to try and prevent regional broadband monopolies from abusing their regional broadband monopolies to rip off consumers and harm competition.

The idea was portrayed as some sort of diabolical, extremist bogeyman by your shitty local cable company and Republicans. It wasn’t as good as a “fix” for broken U.S. broadband markets as taking direct aim at telecom monopoly power with serious antitrust reform, but in a country where Congress is literally too corrupt to pass the most basic of meaningful reforms, it was one of the only options on the table.

But the focus on net neutrality specifically has proven to be a bit of a distraction from the real fight: whether or not you think the government has a responsibility to protect the public and markets from massive, predatory telecom monopolies bone-grafted to our intelligence gathering systems.

Time and time again, Republicans (and some Democrats), working hand in hand with telecom industry lobbyists, decided that the best approach is to let a company like Comcast or AT&T not only do whatever it wants, but dictate the entire contours of federal and state telecom policy. That means banning community broadband. That means ripping off the poor. That means no coherent consumer protection. No real merger review. Lots of tax cuts and subsidies in exchange for doing nothing.

You know, for freedom. And innovation. And “free markets.”

The result has historically been U.S. consumers paying some of the highest prices in the developed world for patchy, slow broadband with some of the worst customer service of any industry in America (quite a feat). And when the government tries to do absolutely anything differently, Republicans, some centrist Democrats, the courts, and a corporate press treat it as an act of radical overreach.

Your Dead Aunt Opposed Net Neutrality

You might recall that the FCC’s 2015 net neutrality rules were stripped away in 2017 during Trump’s first term, when his agency, led by Ajit Pai and Brendan Carr, turned a blind eye as telecom giants used fake and dead people to pretend eliminating the rules had public support (it didn’t, net neutrality protections actually have very broad, bipartisan support across a majority of the electorate).

The rules were restored again this year by the Biden FCC, only to be immediately put on ice by the Trumplican-stocked 5th Circuit, 6th Circuit, and Supreme Court — which are trying to declare (quite successfully) that all consumer protection is basically now illegal (I wish I was being hyperbolic).

Even if the courts don’t crush the FCC’s attempted restoration of the rules, Trump’s appointment of Brendan Carr to the FCC is all but certain to deliver a killing blow to federal net neutrality protections. And not just net neutrality: Carr’s guaranteed to put an end to all consumer protection, whether it involves policing usage caps, stopping racism in fiber deployment, keeping your cable company from ripping you off, or holding your wireless provider semi-accountable for spying on your every movement.

Again, the conversation gets fixated on “net neutrality,” but this is really a debate about whether the federal government plays a role in protecting markets and consumers from giant, lumbering monopolies dead set on using their size and leverage to rip you off and quash competition. The feds never did a particularly good job on this front, but at least there was, as with net neutrality, a fleeting effort.

Any Pretense Of Giving A Shit Is Dead Now

Not all is lost: Trump’s 2017 net neutrality repeal not only tried to block the FCC from broadband consumer protection, they tried to ban states from protecting consumers or passing their own state-level net neutrality rules. But courts have repeatedly ruled that if the federal government abdicates its responsibilities on consumer protection, they can’t step in and tell states what to do.

The problem: once the unholy alliance of authoritarianism and corporate power get done corrupting Congress and federal regulators (with the help of a Supreme Court and both houses of Congress), where exactly do you think they’re going to direct their vast resources and legal attention? State rights (so seemingly precious to Republican ideology once upon a time), of course.

With the planned Trumpist dismantling of federal governance, the fights over consumer protection, immigration, environmental law, public safety, etc., will be heading to the state level and clogging the courts in historic fashion. Anybody who thinks even well-resourced states like California and Washington will have the time and resources for wonky net neutrality policy battles are probably clowning themselves.

So for now, the battle over net neutrality — and any sort of consistent federal consumer protection standards — are dead as a doornail. Thanks to voters deluded and misinformed into believing they were voting for populist reform or getting an upgrade to the mean old status quo.

That’s not to say people shouldn’t stop fighting. Though they will need to pick the most efficient targets. The key one in telecom being consolidated telecom monopoly power. There’s a huge grass roots U.S. movement toward highly-localized, community owned and operated community owned broadband networks; and if you’re looking for a place where you can help, supporting them is a great start.

States may not pick net neutrality fights they can’t win, but they won’t give up on broadband and wireless consumer protection entirely. They’ll just be sporadic, be more hesitant than ever, and take longer than ever due to a court system flooded with well-funded challenges to any effort to hold corporations accountable across every industry that touches every last aspect of your daily life.

There are a lot of hard lessons coming (and not just for Trumpers) about the importance of a coherent, federal, regulatory state. Hopefully those lessons come in handy during the attempt to rebuild functioning federal governance, assuming this hot mess of an oligarchic kakistocracy makes it out the other side of this tunnel of violent idiocy intact.