The Wall Street Journal Is Very Upset By Efforts To Stop Racism In Broadband Deployment

The 2021 infrastructure bill set aside an historic $42.5 billion for broadband deployment. It also tasked the FCC with creating rules aimed at ending decades of race and class based-discrimination in broadband deployment, which have been well documented by The Markup, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), and others. The goal was to try and keep history from repeating itself.

Before the Thanksgiving holiday the FCC finally released its rules. They're a mixed bag. It's historic that the FCC acknowledges decades of discrimination in broadband (regardless of overt, provable intent). But the rules do absolutely nothing about ISPs (like AT&T) with a documented history of discrimination, the complaint process isn't public and transparent, and consistent enforcement remains an open question.

But of course as with any effort to hold telecom giants accountable for anything, it wasn't long before the telecom lobby had loyal right wing news outlets chirping in coordinated unison about how the FCC's plan was some kind of dystopian government cabal.

With the help of FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, Fox News immediately published false stories claiming the plan was a dastardly, illegal plot by the Biden administration to take over the Internet (despite the fact the rules were mandated by a bipartisan majority of Congress).

This coordination between telecom giants and right wing news" outlets to spread misinformation is any everyday affair (see the industry smear campaign against Gigi Sohn's FCC nomination). If there's some policy decision Comcast and AT&T are fighting in DC, it takes no time at all for their anti-consumer, anti-reform policy positions to be parroted in careful coordination across the entirety of right wing media, including Breitbart, Fox News, Sinclair broadcasting, Newsmax, OANN, The Daily Caller, etc.

For example The Wall Street Journal editorial department also published an op-ed claiming that the FCC's acknowledgement of discrimination was extremist, and would force broadband providers to prioritize identity politics." The story contains no limit of theoretically terrible (and false) scenarios, including claims that the FCC will soon start punishing ISPs if their marketing pamphlets aren't inclusive enough:

The rule would give the FCC power to micromanage the industry. Marketing materials that feature too many white people could be ruled discriminatory. Companies could be forced to scrap credit checks that cause more minorities to be rejected for smartphone leasing plans."

Again, these claims are... absolute bullshit. The rules are the government's way of simply acknowledging what the data has clearly shown for a long time: that ISPs routinely fail to invest in poor and minority communities despite billions of subsidies, tax breaks and regulatory favors designed to fund exactly that.

The FCC's new rules create a new complaint process and basically acknowledge that discrimination played a role in broadband deployment (much as it did for highway and electricity deployment). It's not really a debate, no matter how much industry and its marionettes would like to pretend otherwise.

That said, I'll be genuinely surprised if the FCC ever (and I genuinely mean ever) takes any meaningful action against big broadband companies that discriminate. The agency simply has absolutely no track record of the kind of overreach" the GOP and telecoms routinely whine about. In fact, for the better part of several decades they've been somewhat useless on consumer protection of any substance.

This manufactured, coordinated right wing media hysteria is the status quo every single time anybody proposes any rules (however feckless) for the telecom industry to follow. It happened with very basic privacy rules. It happened with net neutrality. And it's happening again here.

ANY effort to hold regional telecom monopolies accountable for anti-competitive or otherwise shitty (or racist) behavior is government overreach." And the underlying implication is ALWAYS that if government is removed from the equation, the heavily monopolized, uncompetitive broadband industry will somehow miraculously thrive, driving no limit of amazing new innovation and consumer savings to market.

We've lobotomized our telecom regulators for the better part of a generation, yet that miraculous outcome somehow never arrives. And it never arrives because U.S. telecom isn't a free market," it's a bunch of regional monopolies (tied to our domestic surveillance systems) that have lobbied the majority of Congress and the FCC into apathy on consumer protection, antitrust reform, and competition policy.

But when you've got a sizeable chunk of the U.S. press basically parroting whatever Comcast and AT&T policy guys tell them to, it has a corrosive impact not only on the discourse, but any effort to do even the bare minimum when it comes to corporate oversight. This corporate propaganda masquerading as news and independent thought is, as they say, one of the major reasons why we can't have nice things.