Telecom Lobbyists Have Had The FCC Under Their Boot Heel For 7 Straight Years And Nobody Much Seems To Care

For four years under the Trump administration, the FCC was little more than a mindless rubber stamp, stripping away media consolidation rules, gutting net neutrality, and approving competition-eroding telecom mergers (often without even reading the deal details).

Things were supposed to be slightly better under the Biden FCC. But an inexplicable eight month delay in staffing the agency by the White House, followed by a grotesque smear campaign against the belated nomination of popular reformer Gigi Sohn, has left the agency without a voting majority two and a half years into Biden’s first term, leaving it incapable of implementing meaningful reform.

Hoping to have better luck after Sohn’s derailed nomination, Biden recently selected someone arguably safer for the spot: Anna Gomez. Gomez is generally well liked and has experience in both industry (lobbying for Sprint) and government (the FCC, NTIA), but her policy positions are a black box, and she’s generally not seen as somebody eager to challenge telecom and media giants.

Congress, for its part, continues to make it very clear their interest in telecom consumer protection is muted at best. Gomez isn’t expected to even see a Congressional hearing before the fall, ensuring she’s not seated until the tail end of 2023 or early 2024:

In a note for New Street Research on Monday (registration required), analyst Blair Levin said it was “unlikely there will be a hearing before the fall,” pushing a potential Democratic majority at the FCC until late 2023.

“While we expect a Democratic majority to quickly move forward with a process to adopt an order like the 2015 Open Internet Order (classifying ISPs as Title II carriers), it will take a while and may not be done before the 2024 election,” added Levin.

While the telecom industry seems to approve of Gomez, they still might try to obstruct or delay her appointment, ensuring the Biden administration has as little time as possible to implement key and popular reforms, like the restoration of net neutrality. Telecom and media giants want to keep the FCC without a voting majority until the next presidential election for what should be obvious reasons.

But this still assumes that even with a voting majority, the Biden FCC has the political backbone to wade into policies that seriously challenge telecom and media giants. I’ve seen no indication current FCC staffers much care about the bipartisan media consolidation limits stripped away under Trump. Nor has there been much urgency to restore the FCC’s broader consumer protection authority.

And while Democratic FCC Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks talk a good game about bridging the “digital divide” and addressing the “homework gap” (a lack of affordable broadband for kids), they generally lack the courage to even identify that concentrated monopoly power is the primary reason US broadband is spotty, slow, and expensive. It’s a political risk to do so.

It doesn’t get much attention in the Big Tech era, but the telecom’s lobbying gambit here has proven to be a masterful one. They’ve effectively sidelined the nation’s top media and telecom regulator for 7 (what will ultimately be 8) years. And because telecom and media policy isn’t deemed that interesting in the big tech “censorship” era, it’s generally seen only passing press attention.

If I’m a telecom lobbyist, I’m positively thrilled that I’ve sidelined regulators for the better part of the decade. But this attack on federal regulatory power (soon to be worse thanks to Supreme Court Chevron deference decision) has a counter pendulum: it shifts the fight to the state and local level where it may be more difficult for telecom lobbyists to manage.

In broadband, for example, corrupt federal incompetence at policing monopoly power has resulted in towns and cities all over the country taking the matter into their own hands and building better, faster, cheaper, fiber networks. Networks often directly owned by locals with an eye on competitive open access. All looking to enjoy a massive infusion of federal funds thanks to COVID relief and infrastructure bills.

Lobbyists may find it easy to corrupt Congress and derail federal top down solutions to monopoly power, but fighting every pissed off town and city in the country simultaneously as they work to directly shove a stick into the eye of telecom monopolization will prove to be another fight entirely.

With a 50 year assault on the regulatory state (read: even semi-competent federal government oversight of corporations) approaching the end game thanks to the Supreme Court, all fights are now local brawls. Anybody interested in reform will have to fight block by block and work outward. For lumbering, unpopular corporate giants, I’m not sure that’s a battle that will prove to be so easily won.