from the nothing-to-see-here dept

Last week a corrupt court system bought and paid for by corporations effectively made it illegal for the federal government to protect broadband consumers from widely despised regional telecom monopolies.

That, as we wrote at the time, is at the heart of the death of the several decade net neutrality fight.

But if you read most U.S. press coverage of the ruling, you’d be hard pressed to walk away with that knowledge. Most of the nap-inducing articles can’t even be bothered to mention that U.S. broadband is a failed market dominated by hugely unpopular regional monopolies, coddled and protected by significant state and federal corruption (kind of an important part of the story).

This NPR story, for example, can’t be bothered to mention that U.S. broadband is some of the most expensive in developed nations thanks to monopoly power. Or that American consumers continue to pay an arm and a leg for patchy, slow, substandard access due to corruption. The underlying fact that U.S. broadband is broken due to monopolization doesn’t seem of interest to the press.

And when NPR talks about “net neutrality,” they discuss it through the “view from nowhere” “both sides” media framing suggesting it was a purely partisan issue exclusively harmful to Democrats and Joe Biden:

“It’s a largely partisan issue that has found Democrats on the side of so-called net neutrality in an effort to hold ISPs more accountable for providing fast, safe and reliable internet for all. The decision deals a blow to the Biden Administration, which prioritized implementing net neutrality rules.”

But net neutrality had broad, bipartisan support. One 2022 survey found that 72% of Americans supported reinstating net neutrality, including 82% of Democrats, 65% of Republicans, and 68% of Independents. At the same time, letting a corrupt court system defang federal consumer protection hurts everybody, it’s not going to selectively hurt just Democrats. The framing here is bullshit.

This Reuters article suffers from the same problems. If you don’t fall asleep halfway though the story, you’re unlikely to walk away with any understanding that there’s an actual problem here (monopoly power coddled by congressional corruption) that needs fixing, or that the ruling was anything more than the dullest of ambiguous, procedural fisticuffs.

Reuters also takes the “both sides” approach to journalism, with perfectly symmetrical quotes by partisan operatives offered up for the sake of balance, and the journalists never really thinking that it might be their fucking job to establish for the reader where the truth actually resides.

The truth is that the U.S. is too corrupt to protect its residents from unchecked corporate power. The truth is that companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast spend an estimated $320,000 every single day lobbying the federal government to ensure consumer rights are an afterthought and the market is as uncompetitive as possible. They spend even more bribing state officials.

Net neutrality wasn’t perfect, but it was at least some sort of stopgap efforts to protect consumers and markets from consolidated monopoly power. And again for those in the back, the Trumplican repeal doesn’t just hurt net neutrality — it curtails the FCC’s already shaky ability to protect consumers and markets from fraud, abuse, predatory behavior, privacy and security scandals, 911 unreliability, and more.

Again: a corrupt court, bought and paid for by corporate power, is defanging the federal government’s consumer protection authority, which will result in widespread harm that extends well beyond net neutrality (this same fate is awaiting most consumer protection under Trump 2.0).

There’s plenty of eyeball-grabbing but truthful headline potential here, and I shouldn’t fall fucking asleep halfway through your description of what’s happening.

Filed Under: broadband, consumers, corruption, fcc, high speed internet, loper bright, net neutrality, privacy, security, telecom