News

Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr was recently hauled before Congress to discuss his numerous, often illegal abuses of FCC authority. The hearing mostly fixated on Carr’s failed, clumsy attempt to censor a comedian, and clumsy lie that the FCC now serves exclusively at the whims of our mad, idiot king.

Which are certainly important things to discuss, given that Carr’s actions are extremist, illegal, and dangerous.

But what struck me reading the transcript is how little time was actually spent pressing Carr on the numerous other problematic behaviors he’s been engaged in, including Carr’s baseless attacks on public media, his dismantling of media consolidation rules, or his effort to destroy consumer protection.

These are things that will cause generational harm to markets, consumers, and the public interest. We’ve discussed at length about how Carr’s “leadership” has involved the complete decimation of corporate oversight as part of his cutesy-named “delete, delete, delete” agenda, which attempts to disguise regulatory capture and wholesale corruption as a government efficiency initiative.

These “reforms” have involved making life easier on robocallers and scammers, making it easier for prison telecom monopolies to rip off inmate families, making it easier for your local cable and phone monopolies to rip you off with bogus surcharges, making it easier for right-wing propaganda operations posing as local news (Sinclair) to dominate dying local media, making it harder to switch wireless phone carriers, and generally just doing whatever America’s biggest, shittiest companies tell him to, including doing significant harm to national security and telecom cybersecurity oversight.

When this stuff was fleetingly mentioned at the hearing, it was by the likes of men like Ted Cruz, who helped prop up the lazy idea that Carr’s just “clearing regulatory underbrush:”

“On day one of the new administration, the FCC, under Chairman Carr, hit the ground running and already has an impressive list of accomplishments to show. These include the Delete, Delete, Delete docket, which continues to clear out the regulatory underbrush.”

The stuff Carr is doing is the stuff consolidated industry lobbyists asked him to do. Virtually none of it is actually in the public interest. We’ve had corrupt revolving door FCC leaders many times before, but never to the level of Carr’s extremism. To her credit, a tiny portion of this stuff was brought up by Senator Maria Cantwell, but it was clearly a hearing afterthought with no serious follow up.

In his responses, Carr was repeated allowed to take a page from Elon Musk’s playbook and pretend that his dismantling of oversight of shitty broadband monopolies and large media conglomerates is an act of modernized efficiency:

“…the FCC is now pursuing the largest deregulatory effort in the agency’s history. To date, we’ve teed up for removal over 1000 rules or regulations and terminated a record 2000 inactive proceedings. Eliminating those costly regulations is part of our affordability work too. For instance, we shut down a Biden era plan that could have spiked the price of internet for millions of Americans living in apartments by up to 50%.”

That last bit? Where Carr claims to have lowered broadband costs for apartment dwellers? He’s actually referring to a Trump FCC action at the beginning of the year to kill rules preventing your landlord and your local ISP from colluding to strike predatory deals that block other competitors from doing business in your building, driving up broadband access costs. It was a complete lie, with no follow up.

Carr is, as we’ve well covered, a shameless opportunist and liar who’ll do whatever he’s told by industry or Donald Trump. If Donald Trump was a brony, you’d see Carr immediately prancing around in a velour zebra onesie. It’s not actually clear Carr believes in much of anything outside of a general disdain for corporate oversight and his post-FCC revolving door career opportunities, which likely involve being a telecom sector lobbyist so he can continue basically doing the same “work.”

Carr’s juggling two jobs at the moment; one involving keeping the party’s radical authoritarians happy with censorship and a frontal assault on what’s left of U.S. journalism and public media. But his primary job, the one he’s been groomed for by industry for decades, is in destroying whatever’s left of the FCC’s ability to rein in unchecked corporate power in all of its various forms.

In some ways, the more headline grabbing (and genuinely problematic) authoritarian censorship operates as cover for corruption. While the former role gets oodles of attention, the latter gets summarily downplayed if not outright ignored. There were no serious congressional follow up questions about Carr’s efforts to destroy functional consumer protection. It was generally congressional oversight kayfabe.

I was also struck by press coverage of Carr’s testimony. More specifically, how literally none of the press coverage could be bothered to mention any aspect of Carr’s brutal destruction of what’s left of U.S. consumer protection. Even in passing.

As a life long consumer protection reporter, it often feels like I’m Roddy Piper living in the 1988 film They Live, facing a broad, existential threat while the public and press (and even many policy folks) stumble around obliviously drinking cappuccino.

Again the harms here are generational. Whether it’s letting predatory telecom monopolies run amok and off the public, or it’s scaling back robocall protections because they might upset a “legit” telemarketer, Carr is doing generational, lasting damage to the public interest, and even in the rare instance we feign to hold him accountable before Congress, it’s treated as some kind of distant afterthought.

This has been generally true beyond the confines of the FCC as well. The Trump-loaded Supreme Court, 5th Circuit, and 6th Circuit in particular have put a generational bullet in the head of consumer protection, public safety, labor protection, and corporate oversight, making it largely impossible to hold corporate giants accountable for literally anything.

The implications and scope of this corruption are incalculable. Yet you’ll notice, across the vast majority of the consolidated corporate press (and even many policy circles), the decimation of consumer protection and corporate oversight is treated as a distant, boring, anecdotal tangent if not outright ignored completely.

As we announced a few weeks ago, it’s nearly time for the latest installment in our series of public domain game jams, Gaming Like It’s 1930! It’s an extra special jam this year as we begin a brand new decade of works entering the public domain, and as always it will begin on New Year’s Day (a.k.a. Public Domain Day, a.k.a. this Thursday!) and run until the end of January.

Head on over to the game jam page on Itch to sign up and read the full rules. There are also some ideas there for works that you could draw on, but we encourage you to go do some digging of your own, especially if you want to compete for the Best Deep Cut prize (personally, I suggest searching the Internet Archive for things dated 1930 to find some truly unexpected treasures). For extra inspiration, you can have a look at last year’s winners and our series of winner spotlight posts that take a look at each year’s winning entries in more detail.

Get ready, get set, and (in a few days) go!

Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, Congress sold out to Hollywood yet again by sneaking the CASE Act and a felony streaming bill into the funding omnibus, with the former introducing absolutely insane damages especially when compared to COVID stimulus money. Meanwhile, we looked at the issues with a new COVID bill that included billions to shore up broadband access, Trump finally went through with his threat to veto the NDAA, and Senator Tillis unveiled a massive plan to reshape the internet even more to Hollywood’s liking. Plus, Ron Wyden and Chris Cox felt it was time to yet again dispel some misconceptions about Section 230.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, we hoped (though not that much) that the government’s panic over the Juniper backdoor would make them realize the problems with backdoors, while Senator Cotton was slamming Tim Cook for protecting user privacy with encryption with an assist from Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, and we dedicated an episode of the podcast to asking how much surveillance is acceptable. India told Facebook to shut down its controversial zero rating “Free Basics” program, while the FCC responded to Comcast’s latest assault on net neutrality with nothing more than a sheepish letter. And a New Zealand judge ruled that Kim Dotcom was eligible for extradition in an opinion that showed an unfortunate willingness to ignore context.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, a closer look at the “evidence” Homeland Security used to seize domain names showed that it included songs voluntarily sent to sites by record labels, followed by the discovery of even more and bigger mistakes. The US ambassador to the UN was waxing about the extreme importance of patents and copyrights, the Harvard Crimson newspaper was getting a lot of things wrong about copyright in supporting a bad MPAA proposal, a Berkeley law professor explained how copying an entire article can still be fair use, and we debunked the myth that ISPs are profiting from “piracy”. Meanwhile, Apple joined the list of companies turning on Wikileaks, and we asked if those companies would do the same to the New York Times for its own investigative reporting.

We’re a few weeks into our end of year crowdfunding campaign—donate $100 or more (check out that $230 option!) and we’ll send you our first commemorative challenge coin celebrating 30 years of Section 230. I’ve already laid out why our coverage matters, why we’re not selling out (because we’re not like Bari Weiss), and why we’re one of the only sites getting Section 230 right.

But here’s the real reason to support Techdirt: we’re one of the rare remaining websites on the internet that doesn’t believe in annoying people as a business model.

You know the drill. You open a news article. There’s a banner ad at the top that won’t scroll away. Another at the bottom, also stuck. A skyscraper ad bisecting the text. You try to scroll past it and accidentally click, launching some garbage in a new tab. Or worse: the article itself is freely readable, but only after you’ve dismissed three different popups begging you to subscribe, register, or turn off your ad blocker.

Or you get six paragraphs in—just enough to get invested—and hit this:

Bait and switch. Every time.

Techdirt does none of that. You can read the site for free. You can also get the full text of all our posts via RSS or in your email with our newsletter. You don’t need to pay or register. Hell, you don’t even need to register to comment. We don’t cover the page in ads. We don’t pop up annoying reminders. You can share our content freely, safe from anyone saying “paywall, can’t read” in response.

When sites do that, it feels like the first stage of Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” curve, where a site starts to figure out ways to annoy users to extract value from them by making them pay to avoid the annoyance. It’s deliberately decreasing the value in the hopes you’ll pay to get rid of the annoyance.

And while the “paid newsletter” Substack-style setup is a fascinating business model, when I’ve asked supporters of Techdirt how they would feel if we offered something similar, the response was almost unanimous: people love reading Techdirt in part to share what’s here, and they’d get annoyed if they felt they couldn’t share our stories any more.

I’d rather people pay here not because we’ve annoyed them into supporting us, but because they feel they get genuine value from what we do here and would like to enable much more of that.

And, in order to keep providing value we do need your support.

But this is about more than just keeping Techdirt running. It’s about proving that a different model can work—that you can run a news site by treating readers like people you respect, not resources to be mined. Here’s our work, we think it’s valuable, and if you agree, support it.

Every other model on the internet right now assumes you need to annoy people into paying. Frustrate them with paywalls. Interrupt them with popups. Make the experience just bad enough that they’ll hand over money to make it stop. That’s not a relationship. That’s a hostage negotiation.

We’re betting that if you get value from what we do, you’ll support it because you want more of it—not because we’ve made it impossible to read otherwise.

If you think that model deserves to exist, back it. Because if this works, it proves something: that you can build a sustainable news site by trusting your audience, not by annoying them into submission.