Trump FCC Boss Declares All Racism In Broadband Deployment Magically Solved, Proclaims To End Agency’s Civil Rights Reforms

The 2021 infrastructure bill earmarked $42.5 billion in broadband subsidies that will be coming to the states starting this year. But it also tasked the FCC with creating rules surrounding “digital discrimination,” or the practice of big telecoms refusing to evenly deploy next-generation broadband to low income and minority neighborhoods (despite receiving untold billions in taxpayer funds to do exactly that).

Studies have repeatedly found that companies like AT&T routinely refuse to deliver next-generation fiber to marginalized communities, despite billions in subsidies, regulatory favors, tax breaks, merger approvals, and other favors. Reporters have also found that big ISPs routinely charge minority neighborhood residents more money for slower speeds than their less diverse, more affluent neighbors.

So in 2023 the FCC did what Congress asked: it created some very basic new rules governing digital discrimination. I wrote a whole feature for it for The Verge (now paywalled). The short version: digital equity folks were mixed on the implementation because it didn’t really call out big companies by name, or actually do much of anything about past instances of broadband deployment discrimination.

But it did involve the federal government acknowledging for the first time that such discrimination exists, which was a big deal for future policy. And it also involved requiring that the FCC do a better job uniformly mapping broadband access, so that the billions we spend on broadband deployment isn’t wasted, spent redundantly, or exclude minority, lower income, tribal, or marginalized folks.

This, you may be unsurprised to learn, upsets Big Telecom lobbyists and the bigots in the Trump administration. So new FCC boss Brendan Carr has issued a statement saying he’s ending the FCC’s diversity initiatives, mothballing all their websites, disbanding the agency’s “digital discrimination taskforce,” and basically declaring the problem of racial discrimination in broadband effectively solved:

“As Chairman of the FCC, I have concluded that the work of the FCC’s Communications Equity and Diversity Council is complete.”

Carr’s announcement is very typical Orwellian “up is down, right is left,” authoritarian speak, proclaiming that he’s eliminating efforts to improve broadband subsidy efficiency under the guise of efficiency. And that he’s ending efforts to stop broadband discrimination in order to stop discrimination:

“Chairman Carr will focus the agency’s work on competently carrying out the Commission’s statutory mission, as defined by Congress, without promoting invidious forms of discrimination.”

Congress literally told the FCC to build the things Carr is dismantling to end racism, under the flimsy pretence those efforts are themselves racist. It’s gibberish.

Carr is following the lead of the Trump “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” executive order, which takes aim at Biden’s Executive Order 13985 directing federal agencies to create DEI programs. But as some telecom experts are quick to point out, many of the initiatives he’s eliminating have nothing to do with “DEI”:

“What Carr calls the ‘DEI Equity Action Plan’ is actually just the ‘Equity Action Plan’ and has no connection to the Biden DEIA Executive Order, or to any staff/operations issues,” Bill Callahan, the director of Connect Your Community, told CNET.”

In fact in his statement, Carr appears to have just thrown “DEI” in front of a bunch of disparate (and some duplicative) efforts to try and bullshit around the fact that many of these efforts were not DEI, and were quite useful:

In case you’re new to the great, dumb, modern American experience, right wing propagandists have decided to call any popular civil rights reforms “DEI.” They hijacked the term from academia and half-assed corporate initiatives so they can portray all civil rights reforms as the wasteful, inefficient playthings of coastal academic elites. It’s a way to downplay and normalize being giant fucking racist assholes, and pretend that eliminating popular civil rights is “efficient reform.”

But again, many of these FCC initiatives were good programs that helped the FCC be more efficient about the funding and even deployment of affordable broadband access, which is good for everyone. Including Trump voters who were deluded into believing that guys like Brendan Carr care about the working class.

The problem for Carr is that the underlying law that required the creation of many of these programs (the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act) still exists, so they’ll have to do a lot of tapdancing to explain why they’re ignoring or violating the law. That may not be a huge problem given the number of corrupt MAGA and Big Telecom friendly judges currently on the bench, but I’m not sure it will be all that simple, either.

The actual digital discrimination rules Trump folks want to eliminate are in the process of being challenged in the Eighth Circuit by the telecom industry. Congress tasked the FCC with prohibiting discrimination in broadband deployment based on “race, ethnicity, color, religion, national origin, and income level.”

This will require time, favorable court rulings, and a fully stocked appointment of commissioners to unwind, and neither Carr nor Trump can simply wish it all away with a snap.

Brendan Carr was definitely brought on board by Trump to eliminate civil rights protections and harass any tech, media, or telecom company that doesn’t bend the knee to authoritarian power.

But his primary job remains to take an axe to any oversight requirements giant shitty telecoms don’t like, and they very much don’t like people pointing out they’ve received billions and billions of dollars in exchange for half-cooked, expensive, uncompetitive broadband networks unevenly deployed.