Comcast Spent Millions Repealing Net Neutrality, Now Wants You To Believe It Won't Take Full, Brutal Advantage

from the one-born-every-minute dept

Despite the nation's biggest ISP and cable company having spent millions of dollars and lobbying man hours on repealing broadband privacy rules and soon net neutrality protections, executives at the least-liked company in America hope you're dumb enough to believe they won't be taking full advantage.

Comcast has spent months now falsely claiming that it will still adhere to "net neutrality" once the FCC's rules are gutted by Ajit Pai. But the company's pet definition of net neutrality is so narrow as to be effectively meaningless. For example, last week as the FCC was trying to hide its obvious handout to telecom duopolies behind the cranberry and stuffing, Comcast issued a tweet again insisting that you can trust them to be on their best behavior despite the fact there will soon be no meaningful rules holding their feet to the fire:

Comcast would have you ignore the fact that net neutrality violations are just a symptom of a lack of competition in the broadband market. They'd also like you to ignore that there's a myriad of ways that ISPs like Comcast have taken advantage of this lack of competition to engage in even worse anti-competitive behavior, with "throttling" and "blocking" just being a small subsection. For example, a lack of competition lets Comcast impose arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps and overage fees, then exempt its own content from those caps while penalizing direct competitors like Netflix.

Comcast also hopes you've forgotten this debate began, in part, when Comcast decided to throttle the upstream traffic of all BitTorrent users on the Comcast network without telling anybody, then lied about it repeatedly. Similarly, Comcast hopes you don't realize that as people grew wise to ham-fisted throttling and blocking, ISPs began abusing net neutrality in other, more "creative" ways -- like intentionally letting peering points congest in order to drive up costs for transit and content operators who foolishly wanted their traffic to reach consumers unimpeded (aka "double dipping," or less generously: extortion).

There's a reason Comcast and other large ISPs are happily promising not to throttle or outright "block" websites: large ISPs now know it's hard to get away with either now that the public and press are more savvy to what they've been up to. They know that blatantly throttling or blocking a website completely would generate a tidal wave of negative PR.

That's why they've long-since moved on to more creative technical abuses of limited competition they can hide behind half-baked techno-babble and semantics, whether that's usage caps and zero rating, charging you more money for privacy, or strangling innovation via their lucrative cable box hardware monopoly.

Anybody that honestly believes that uncompetitive duopolies won't take full, brutal advantage of limited competition and incompetent/corrupt regulators is ignoring history and fooling themselves. Fortunately, most people seem to understand that when it comes to not abusing a lack of competition, large, incumbent telecom providers are the very last companies in America you should trust:

Filed Under: ajit pai, fcc, net neutrality, open internet
Companies: comcast

NY Attorney General Investigating Why Dead People Supported The FCC's Attack On Net Neutrality

from the something-doesn't-smell-right dept

So as we've been noting for a while, the FCC's policy order taking aim at net neutrality has been rife with all kinds of bizarre and fraudulent behavior, from the agency's made up DDOS attack (apparently a ham-fisted PR attempt to downplay the "John Oliver effect") to the numerous fake or otherwise dead people that have oddly supported the agency's unpopular plan in the FCC's comment proceeding. It's clear the FCC's plan is extremely unpopular, and it's also clear the agency, ISPs and some policy groups have engaged in some extremely dodgy behavior to try and downplay that fact.

The GAO is already investigating the FCC's bogus DDOS claims, and the FCC is already being sued for turning a blind eye to the problem and ignoring FOIA requests. The fraudulent comments by fake or otherwise non-breathing individuals will surely play a starring role in the inevitable lawsuits against the agency. If evidence is found that the FCC violated procedural norms (or hey, the law), it could help to reverse the agency's myopic and unpopular hand out to the nation's telecom duopolies.

The latest is that the New York Attorney General also acknowledged that his office has been looking into the fake comments submitted to the FCC's net neutrality proceeding. Early analysis had found that a massive portion of the 22 million public comments on the agency's plan came from a group or individual using a bot to stuff the ballot box with phony support for the plan. Many of these names were pulled from a hacked database of some kind, with many of the individuals in question stating they had never even visited the FCC website and have no idea what net neutrality even is.

Throughout all of this, the FCC has turned a blind eye to the fraud occurring on its website, likely because it helps the agency downplay the massive public backlash against the plan. And according to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, the FCC rather unsurprisingly refused to aid his office in investigating what group or individual was behind the phony support, despite nine requests for data between June and November of this year:

"Specifically, for six months my office has been investigating who perpetrated a massive scheme to corrupt the FCC’s notice and comment process through the misuse of enormous numbers of real New Yorkers’ and other Americans’ identities. Such conduct likely violates state law — yet the FCC has refused multiple requests for crucial evidence in its sole possession that is vital to permit that law enforcement investigation to proceed.

We reached out for assistance to multiple top FCC officials, including you, three successive acting FCC General Counsels, and the FCC’s Inspector General. We offered to keep the requested records confidential, as we had done when my office and the FCC shared information and documents as part of past investigative work.

Yet we have received no substantive response to our investigative requests. None."

It's unlikely that the FCC is dumb enough to have engaged in this fraud itself. But the telecom sector is filled with ISP-funded proxy groups that have engaged in this kind of nonsense in the past. The FCC could easily put this issue to bed by providing a closer look at who used the necessary APIs to file these comments en masse. Of course that might expose not only the group responsible but the folks funding the effort, and we certainly wouldn't want that.

As I found out personally, it's clear the FCC approves of the fraud occurring on its website, because raising questions about the integrity of the public comment system allows it to downplay the groundswell of opposition to the plan. But if the truth comes out in AG investigations or the inevitable lawsuits expected later this year, the FCC's victorious dismantling of popular consumer protections could prove to be short lived.

Filed Under: ajit pai, comments, dead people, eric schneiderman, fcc, net neutrality

FCC Releases Net Neutrality Killing Order, Hopes You're Too Busy Cooking Turkey To Read It

from the nothing-to-see-here dept

As we noted yesterday, the FCC is trying to use the Thanksgiving holiday to distract the press and public from its blatant handout to one of the least liked and least competitive industries in America. As we also noted yesterday, trying to bury such an epic middle finger to consumers behind the cranberry sauce is an obvious underestimation of just how unpopular this plan is, and the policy, political, and cultural backlash it's going to generate for years.

That said, all six of you not currently driving long distances, buying turkeys and potatoes, or otherwise distracted by holiday preparation can now read a fact sheet provided by the FCC (pdf) explaining what Ajit Pai and his lobbying friends in the telecom industry have planned for you.

To Ajit Pai's credit (and I'm using that term loosely here), the rules do pretty much everything he promised they would, including rolling back the Title II classification of ISPs as common carriers that gives the FCC its ability to enforce net neutrality. Without that authority, the FCC can't really protect you as giant broadband providers abuse the lack of competition in the last mile (a lack of competition Ajit Pai refuses to acknowledge, much less actually fix). ISPs have been very busy trying to claim that gutting this authority doesn't kill net neutrality protections, though we've already explained at length why that's nonsense.

Throughout the order, the FCC repeatedly tries to claim that the very real harms we've seen in the broadband sector thanks to a lack of healthy competition are entirely "speculative" and "hypothetical":

"Because of the paucity of concrete evidence of harms to the openness of the Internet, the Title II Order and its proponents have heavily relied on purely speculative threats. We do not believe hypothetical harms, unsupported by empirical data, economic theory, or even recent anecdotes, provide a basis for public-utility regulation of ISPs.428 Indeed, economic theory demonstrates that many of the practices prohibited by the Title II Order can sometimes harm consumers and sometimes benefit consumers; therefore, it is not accurate to presume that all hypothetical effects are harmful."

You know, speculative instances like that time AT&T blocked customer access to Facetime in order to drive them to more expensive mobile data plans. Or the time AT&T throttled users then lied about it (something AT&T's still fighting a lawsuit over). Or that time Comcast applied arbitrary and completely unnecessary usage caps and overage fees to its broadband service (again, thanks to a lack of competition), then exempted the company's own content from those caps while still penalizing competitors. Or how about that time Verizon blocked competing mobile wallets from even working on its phones to give its own payment platform an advantage?

There's plenty more very real, very non-speculative examples where that came from, and the problem gets worse if you look at the bad behavior by ISPs on the privacy front (also caused by a lack of competition). Like when AT&T decided to charge users hundreds of extra dollars a month just to opt out of snoopvertising, or the time Verizon was busted covertly modifying user packets to track users around the internet without telling them -- or letting them opt out.

If you think these very real market harms are "speculative" you've been in a coma for the last decade. Yet this argument that net neutrality is an entirely theoretical problem sits at the heart of the FCC's order. It's an order that makes it abundantly clear that the real goal is to completely dismantle the FCC's authority over broadband mono/duopolies, then shovel any remaining authority to an FTC that's technically incapable of actually policing abuses in the sector. Anybody framing this as anything other than a grotesque example of crony capitalism is either viciously misinformed -- or intentionally lying to you for personal financial benefit.

One thing of particular note in the Orwellian-named "Restoring Internet Freedom" order is the fact that the FCC wants to ban states that try to protect net neutrality and consumer welfare in the wake of the federal handout to industry. The agency doesn't specifically spell out how it intends to do this, but it's something ISPs like Comcast have been lobbying for for several months. ISPs have similarly been lobbying the government to ban states from protecting your broadband privacy after the GOP and Trump administration rushed to kill fairly basic broadband privacy protections earlier this year.

For years, ISPs have quite literally been allowed to write awful protectionist state laws that prohibit towns and cities from building their own broadband networks, or even striking public/private partnerships with companies like Google Fiber. Even in cases where the private sector refuses to. When folks pointed out that maybe giant uncompetitive duopolies shouldn't be allowed to write shitty state law, ISPs and their pay-to-play allies insisted this was an assault on states' rights. But when these same states try to protect consumers, you'll notice these concerns magically disappear.

Another thing to note: the FCC's original net neutrality order contained some very useful transparency rules that required that ISPs be entirely candid about what kind of traffic management they're using on your connection. And while Pai and his friends at Comcast have made a big deal about how they'll be retaining some of these protections, the order itself makes it abundantly clear that they intend to strip out most of the enforcement mechanisms that actually make these transparency protections work. For example, the order proclaims:

"Our enforcement changes will ensure that ISPs will be held accountable for any violations of the transparency rule.

But then proceeds to point out how it intends to eliminate most of the safeguards in place to ensure these requirements are actually adhered to:

"We eliminate the formal complaint procedures because the informal complaint procedure, in conjunction with other redress options including consumer protection laws, will sufficiently protect consumers. Additionally, we eliminate the position of Open Internet Ombudsperson because the staff from the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau—other than the Ombudsperson—have been performing the Ombudsperson functions envisioned by the Title II Order. We also eliminate the issuance of enforcement advisory opinions, because enforcement advisory opinions do not diminish regulatory uncertainty, particularly for small providers. Instead, they add costs and uncertain timelines since there is no specific timeframe within which to act, which can also inhibit innovation."

The FCC's order also makes it clear that it wants to do away with protections governing interconnection. You'll recall that as people got wise to how ISPs were trying to throttle or otherwise hamstring competitors, ISPs got more creative -- and began intentionally letting interconnection points with transit operators and companies like Netflix get congested. Why? ISPs like Comcast and Verizon hoped to 1) kill the common practice of settlement-free peering, and 2) force companies like Netflix to pay an additional toll if they wanted video packets to reach subscribers on time, and intact (aka "double dipping" or more bluntly, extortion).

Unnoticed by many in the lawsuit by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman against Charter over slow speeds was the fact that Charter executives were busted candidly discussing this strategy to drive up costs for competitors and transit operators. When the FCC passed its 2015 net neutrality rules, this behavior mysteriously and magically ceased. Not surprisingly, the FCC is eager to eliminate any protections for this kind of anti-competitive behavior, insisting said protections were "unnecessary" and could magically be resolved by "market forces":

"We believe that applying Title II to Internet traffic exchange arrangements was unnecessary and is likely to inhibit competition and innovation. We find that freeing Internet traffic exchange arrangements from burdensome government regulation, and allowing market forces to discipline this emerging market is the better course. Indeed, the cost of Internet transit fell over 99 percent on a cost-per-megabit basis from 2005 to 2015.

In short, the FCC's plan to dismantle net neutrality rules is every bit as bad as most people expected it to be, and potentially a little bit worse. It opens the door to all manner of anti-competitive behavior by AT&T, Verizon, Charter and Comcast, while mindlessly dismissing the very real harms a lack of broadband competition is having on numerous industries. It tries to ban states from stepping in and filling the void in the face of obvious federal regulatory capture, and opens the door to giant, unaccountable ISPs to do pretty much whatever they'd like as they take full advantage of the broken residential and business broadband markets.

It's easy to be disheartened by this grotesque handout to duopolists, but users should take heart in the fact that this FCC order is so aggressively vile and obnoxious as to be potentially legally indefensible. In court, the FCC will have to prove that the broadband market has changed so substantially in the last two years as to justify such a brutal reversal of consumer-friendly policies. It will also have to defend the fact that it ignored 22 million, largely oppositional public comments on the FCC effort, and turned a blind eye to numerous instances of fraud and abuse of the comment system in order to downplay the massive backlash to its plan.

Even if the FCC does manage to win in the courts, it then has to stop the inevitable political backlash that is likely to eject Ajit Pai and friends from power. That's why you'll likely see an ISP effort in the new year to try and pass a new net neutrality law ISP lackeys and sockpuppets will breathlessly claim "solves" this problem once and for all, but will be integrated with so many loopholes as to be effectively useless. It's real purpose: to prevent the FCC from revisiting this subject down the road under the guise of "putting this issue to bed once and for all."

The problem for ISP lobbyists is that we're entering an election season, and countless politicians are going to be tripping over themselves to distance themselves from the unpopular policies of the current administration. You're not going to find a more unpopular policy than this myopic assault on net neutrality and the health of the internet.

That said, it's important to remember that net neutrality isn't a fight that magically ends with the passage or elimination of consumer protections, strong, weak, or otherwise. Since net neutrality violations are just a symptom of a lack of competition in the broadband market, it's a battle we're going to have to fight in perpetuity -- or at least until somebody in the United States government discovers the fortitude and courage to actually stand up to AT&T, Verizon, Charter and Comcast and begins implementing policies that finally attempt to actually fix our obvious competitive logjam.

Filed Under: ajit pai, fcc, net neutrality

Wireless Industry Lobbies To Ban States From Protecting Your Privacy, Net Neutrality

from the zero-accountability dept

In the wake of the Trump administration's decision to gut modest FCC consumer privacy protections and net neutrality rules, telecom lobbyists are working overtime trying to stop states from filling the void. In the wake of the FCC's wholesale dismantling of consumer protections, states like California have tried to pass their own laws protecting your broadband privacy rights online, only to find the efforts scuttled by AT&T, Verizon and Comcast lobbyists, who've been more than happy to spread all manner of disinformation as to what the rules did or didn't do.

Worried that states might actually stand up for consumers in the wake of the looming attack on net neutrality, both Verizon and Comcast have been lobbying the FCC to ban states from protecting your privacy and net neutrality. The two companies were also joined this week by the wireless industry's biggest lobbying and policy organization, the CTIA. In an ex parte filing (pdf) with the FCC, wireless carriers whine about how unfair it is that states attempted to protect user privacy after the federal government made it clear it had no such interest:

"Earlier this year, legislators in various states attempted to countermand Congressional action on broadband privacy regulations. When states and localities are provided a wide berth to test the boundaries of what is or is not consistent with Congressional objectives, the Commission and the courts are forced to evaluate regulations case-by-case, with broadband providers subject to a patchwork of mandates at issue during the review."

Like Comcast and Verizon, the wireless industry would have you forget that states wouldn't be running to create discordant privacy protections if these same lobbyists hadn't just successfully killed modest federal rules. This is a problem caused entirely by lobbyists for some of the least competitive companies in America. Said lobbyists would also have you ignore the fact that when California presented a fairly modest EFF approved replacement that could be used as a template for other states -- they made up a whole bunch of bullshit to scuttle the effort.

Most importantly these folks would have you ignore that they're perfectly fine with states writing shitty, protectionist regulations designed solely to protect uncompetitive duopolists, but state legislation that actually attempts to protect consumers is just a bridge too far. When critics suggest that maybe giant ISPs shouldn't get to write awful state laws, said ISPs will often lament an "attack on states rights." But here you'll notice the hypocrisy in having no problem dictating what local states can and can't do.

Further in, the wireless industry makes it clear it's worried that states will also try to protect net neutrality after lobbyists and the FCC vote to gut net neutrality rules on December 15:

"The Commission therefore should preempt any state or local broadband-specific regulation, irrespective of whether the state or locality claims that its regulation promotes or supplements federal goals. Thus, for example, state “network neutrality” regulations addressing the treatment of traffic on the network would be preempted, as would state broadband-specific privacy requirements."

The end goal is virtually no oversight for an industry that has proven repeatedly that it's incapable of regulating itself within the boundaries of good taste. From AT&T charging broadband users hundreds of dollars annually just to opt out of snoopvertising, to Verizon covertly modifying user packets to track users around the internet, these companies have repeatedly shown that there's no end to the privacy-eroding concepts they'd love to implement. Without any meaningful guard rails on the state or federal level, and only modest market pressure to behave due to limited competition, you can expect this kind of behavior to get immeasurably worse.

Filed Under: ajit pai, fcc, mobile, net neutrality, privacy
Companies: ctia

FCC Moves To Gut Rules Protecting Broadband Users Telcos No Longer Want

from the ill-communication dept

As AT&T and Verizon shift their focus from fixed-line broadband to the more sexy world of Millennial advertising (often quite poorly), they've effectively decided to hang up on millions of unwanted DSL users they refuse to upgrade and no longer want. This has often involved imposing relentless rate hikes on service speeds straight out of 2003, or in many cases simply refusing to repair these lines. They've also convinced state after state that if they gut consumer protections keeping these lines intact, better, faster broadband connections will miraculously spring from the sidewalks.

AT&T and Verizon argue that state and federal guidelines on this front are just outdated regulations preventing them from building the next-generation networks of tomorrow. Fiber is more reliable and wireless is more flexible, they argue, making older lines irrelevant. That, however, ignores these companies' refusal to actually fully deploy fiber, the fact that pricey & capped wireless isn't a suitable replacement for unlimited DSL, that these lines were taxpayer subsidized, or that many of these DSL and POTS (plain old telephone service) services are still very much in use by the elderly and under-served.

In reality, this "IP transition" (as AT&T execs like to call it) is having a very real, very negative impact on broadband markets. The biggest impact being that with telcos refusing to upgrade their DSL networks at any scale, cable companies are running away with a growing fixed-line broadband monopoly in many parts of the country. That means higher prices, worse customer service, and the kind of punitive and arbitrary usage caps only made possible by a lack of competition.

Again though, if you ask AT&T and Verizon, none of this is a big deal because existing wireless services are perfectly suitable replacement for these fixed-line connections. But as people found out when Verizon refused to upgrade DSL lines in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, that's simply not the case. Wireless is often significantly more expensive, frequently capped (especially in rural areas), and often hard to get in many rural, tree-happy markets. Fifth-gen wireless may someday be a suitable replacement depending on cost, but for rural markets that future is a decade or more away.

So a few years back the FCC under Tom Wheeler crafted a set of fairly basic "functional tests" (pdf) intended to prevent telcos from pulling copper-based phone and broadband service without ensuring there's a comparable replacement. The goal: to ensure that services that rely on traditional DSL and POTS still work, and that competitors that service customers over these lines could still access them. Not too surprisingly, telcos have been lobbying the government to gut this guidance. Also unsurprisingly, current FCC boss Ajit Pai has been quick to help them do just that:

"The Federal Communications Commission will vote Thursday on a plan that, according to Chairman Ajit Pai, will strip away regulations that prevent telcos from upgrading their networks.

But in doing so, the Republican-controlled FCC plans to eliminate a requirement that telcos provide Americans with service at least as good as the old copper networks that provide phone service and DSL Internet. The requirement relates to phone service but has an impact on broadband because the two services use the same networks.

While it should be fairly clear that this is yet another gift to the nation's telecom duopolies, as with its net neutrality, media consolidation, and other recent policy 180s, the FCC is engaging in some tap-dance hyperbole to try and deny this is what they're doing:

More concisely, the FCC's existing "functional test" for carriers seeking to abandon DSL networks requires they prove that any replacement service is just as good as the services they're eliminating. Since these carriers know wireless is often more expensive and often unavailable, and really don't want to extend fiber into these areas (despite receiving countless billions to do so) they want those restrictions eliminated. It doesn't matter if these lines were paid by taxpayers and are very much still in use; they're focused on making money in mobile advertising.

To tap dance around these issues, Pai's proposal, misleadingly-titled "Accelerating Wireline Broadband Deployment (pdf)," doesn't technically get rid of the guidance, but weakens it to the point of being effectively useless, as consumer groups like Public Knowledge and the NAACP make clear:

"Under current rules, an incumbent carrier cannot discontinue, reduce, or impair service unless there is a replacement service that is as good as the discontinued service. This is called the Functional Test. The FCC's order will now interpret "service" to include a carrier's tariff. A tariff is a very basic description of what a carrier offers and at what rate. This means the Commission's remaining notice requirements will only apply to basic services, but will not include 911 services, ensure network reliability, or interconnection with devices consumers use such as medical monitors, alarm systems, fax and credit card machines, and equipment for people who are hearing impaired. In some cases, the sound of a dial tone may constitute service under the tariff test and therefore not even trigger a public comment and review."

Again this is all very wonky, but a transition away from these taxpayer-subsidized fixed copper lines without ensuring there are reliable (or frankly any) alternatives will have a profound negative impact on your current cable broadband bill and service, while making it harder for less sexy markets to get quality broadband connections (already a significant problem we seem intent on ignoring). And again, Trump's FCC is pushing a telco wishlist policy they know full well will hurt consumers and the health of the nation's telecom infrastructure, while professing they're doing the exact opposite.

Filed Under: ajit pai, competition, dsl, fcc, fiber
Companies: at&t, verizon

FCC Boss Demolishes Media Ownership Rules In Massive Gift To Sinclair Broadcasting

from the the-big-get-bigger dept

FCC boss Ajit Pai has been busy ignoring the public while he kills popular net neutrality rules. But he's also been working hard to weaken broadband deployment standards to obfuscate a lack of broadband competition, to gut programs that provide broadband to the poor, killing previous FCC efforts to improve cable box competition, to protect prison telco monopolies from oversight, and to make it easier for business broadband monopolies to rip off smaller competitors. All while proclaiming to be a stalwart defender of the little guy and a champion for bridging the digital divide.

But Pai has also been taking heat for his pursuit of another pet project: gutting media consolidation and ownership rules solely for the benefit of Sinclair Broadcasting, which is seeking approval for its $3.9 billion bid for Tribune. In the last few months, Pai has, as promised, been "taking a weed whacker" to rules intended to protect local reporting, media competition, and opinion diversity. That has included killing an 80 year rule intended to protect local competitors and journalism from unchecked monopoly control of a market, and taking an axe to some protections but bringing back others solely to Sinclair's benefit:

"On Tuesday, the FCC eliminated a requirement for broadcasters to keep a local studio. A day later, Pai called for easing ownership restrictions, potentially taking pressure off Sinclair’s $3.9 billion deal for Tribune Media Co.’s TV stations. Earlier, he had restored an obsolete rule, making the deal possible. On Thursday, the agency moved toward blessing a new broadcasting standard that may enrich Sinclair as it offers viewers sharper pictures."

As he prepares to axe yet more media consolidation protections over the coming months, Pai has trotted out the growing power of Google and Facebook as partial justification for eliminating rules he declares no longer necessary:

"The marketplace today is nothing like it was in 1975. Newspapers are shutting down. Many radio and TV stations are struggling, especially in smaller and rural markets. Online competition for the collection and distribution of news is even greater than it ever was. And just two Internet companies [Google and Facebook] claimed 100 percent of recent online advertising growth. Indeed, their digital ad revenue alone this year will be greater than the market cap of the entire broadcasting industry. And yet the FCC's rules still presume that the market is defined entirely by pulp and rabbit ears."

Obviously the argument that "Google and Facebook are big" and therefore media consolidation rules are unnecessary doesn't hold a whole lot of water. And while it's true that many newspapers and local news outlets are "struggling," that's more a failure of adaptation than a justification for gutting media consolidation restrictions that still aid smaller, regional news outlets. Unsurprisingly, fellow FCC Commissioners like Jessica Rosenworcel have called for an investigation into Pai's giant, sloppy kiss to Sinclair:

"It has reached a point where all of our media policy decisions seem to be custom-built for this one company," Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democratic FCC member, said Wednesday at a congressional hearing. "It’s something that merits investigation.”

This mindless obsession with mergers and consolidation (with little thought as to the impact on markets or competition) has been a hallmark of the Trump administration. But opposition to this growth-for-growth's sake has been increasingly bipartisan in nature, with many smaller Conservative outlets worried they'll be unable to compete with giants like Comcast NBC Universal, Sinclair/Tribune, and soon AT&T Time Warner. Smaller organizations like the American Cable Association (ACA) applauded and supported Pai's rise to power, now seem surprised as his policies focus almost exclusively on aiding the biggest and wealthiest companies:

"ACA urges the Federal Communications Commission to deny the Sinclair-Tribune transaction because it would violate existing FCC rules while at the same timing failing to meet the obligation to demonstrate it would serve the public interest. Even if the transaction were not per se unlawful, it would create a broadcasting behemoth with unprecedented control over both the national and local television markets,” ACA President and CEO Matthew M. Polka said."

Whether it's gutting net neutrality solely for the benefit of a few giant ISPs, or gutting media consolidation rules exclusively to aid one giant media empire, Pai's legacy at the FCC will be one of brutal myopia, obfuscated by tall tales about his relentless dedication to the little guys he seems blatantly intent on ignoring.

Filed Under: ajit pai, competition, consolidation, fcc, media, media ownership
Companies: sinclair broadcasating