The Trump FCC Makes It Easier For Your Landlord And Your ISP To Collude To Rip You Off
To be clear: if there’s a policy decision to be made between the consumer interest and big giant shitty telecom monopolies, the Trump FCC is going to always side with the big shitty telecom monopoly. It’s why I find the Matt Stoller-type claims that Trump is a serious anti-corporatist keen on “reining in corporate power” laughably naïve, if not maliciously misleading.
Trump’s hand-chosen courts are already hard at work dismantling everything from net neutrality to financial aid for low-income broadband users. But his hand picked boss Brendan Carr is also busy dismantling all the consumer-friendly stuff the FCC accomplished, and even a lot of the stuff it hadn’t gotten around to yet.
Case in point: Carr has killed an FCC plan to stop landlords and ISPs from colluding to rip you off via arbitrary exclusivity arrangements. The proposal to block such harmful arrangements was sitting in a list of Biden FCC proposals they hoped to implement, but former FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel never got around to despite having an available voting majority:
“Rosenworcel’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking was opposed by Internet providers and sat on the FCC’s list of items on circulation throughout 2024 without any final vote, despite the commission having a 3–2 Democratic majority at the time. Carr, who was elevated to the chairmanship by President Trump, emptied the list of items under consideration by commissioners on Friday.”
It’s a silly mistake by the Rosenworcel FCC. Caused, in part, by the telecom industry’s relentless smear campaign that blocked the nomination of more aggressive reformer Gigi Sohn and delayed the Biden FCC from having a voting majority for several years. That left the Biden FCC with less time to accomplish policy. Combined with Rosenworcel’s lack of killer instinct, it left a lot of potential actions unaccomplished on the table.
For decades, U.S. broadband providers have struck cozy deals with landlords effectively elbowing out competitors and allowing them to create building-by-building broadband monopolies. That stifled competition results in higher costs, slow speeds, and worse overall service. And while the FCC passed rules in 2007 trying to ban the practice, they were so full of loopholes as to be effectively useless.
Susan Crawford wrote pretty much the definitive story on this at Wired in 2016, noting that the original rules were so terrible, ISPs and landlords could easily tap dance around them by simply calling what they were doing… something else:
“…The Commission has been completely out-maneuvered by the incumbents. Sure, a landlord can’t enter into an exclusive agreement granting just one ISP the right to provide Internet access service to an MDU, but a landlord can refuse to sign agreements with anyone other than Big Company X, in exchange for payments labeled in any one of a zillion ways. Exclusivity by any other name still feels just as abusive.”
So after being nagged about this for fifteen years (!), the Biden FCC finally updated the rules in 2022. But the updated language still didn’t actually fix the problem, in part because the rule revisions only applied to cable and phone companies, not any of the numerous broadband-only fiber, fixed-wireless, or Wi-Fi ISPs that cut exclusivity deals directly with landlords to avoid having to compete.
Then last year the Biden FCC proposed new rules that they hoped would ban “bulk billing,” which involves your apartment building or development striking a (usually) exclusive deal with a broadband provider, often subsidized through your HOA or rental fees. It’s often presented as a way to save money, but usually doesn’t work out that way in practice. Broadband prices still rise, competition is muted, and escalating HOA fees usually offset any money that might be saved.
Enter the Trump FCC, which genuinely doesn’t think there should be any rules protecting consumers or reining in telecom monopolies at all, and here we are.
It’s fairly typical of the dysfunctional partisan dynamic in U.S. telecom policy. Democrats often fecklessly try, in a very clumsy and ineffective way, to try and do the absolute bare minimum on competent, competition-encouraging policy. Republicans come in and destroy it all, claiming (falsely) that dismantling oversight of companies like AT&T and Comcast results in near-mystical, Utopian outcomes.
Wash, rinse, repeat.