Fake Populism at the FCC

WITH EACH PASSING week of his administration, the epic scale of the deception Donald Trump pulled off last November becomes more evident.

In his last TV ad of the presidential campaign, Donald Trump decried “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.” Two weeks earlier, when the AT&T-Time Warner merger was announced, Trump said: “As an example of the power structure I’m fighting, AT&T is buying Time Warner and thus CNN, a deal we will not approve in my administration because it’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.” Later he added, “Deals like this destroy democracy.”

Since then, of course, the great champion of the people has given us a Treasury secretary (Steven Mnuchin) who, as a hedge fund manager and banker, made a specialty not only of “robb[ing] our working class,” but foreclosing on their homes to boot. And now the candidate who condemned the AT&T-Time Warner merger as oligarchic and anti-democratic has become a president whose most recent comment on the merger was simply, “I haven’t seen any of the facts, yet.” Worse still, Trump has appointed a Federal Communications Commission chair (Ajit Pai) who has promised to undo the Obama-era net neutrality regulations, and who never met a media merger he didn’t like. For example, Pai, who has worked as a lawyer for Verizon, said he would have approved the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger that the Obama FCC blocked in 2015.

Of course, candidate Trump was right in his original opposition to the AT&T-Time Warner merger, and for at least some of the right reasons. AT&T is currently the country’s second biggest provider of wireless services and a major provider of pay-TV and internet service. If this merger goes through, AT&T would also control HBO, CNN, TBS, and Warner Brothers Pictures.

Historically, federal anti-monopoly law used to frown upon the same company controlling both the product (in this case news and entertainment content) and the delivery mechanism (the wireless or cable networks). Back in the day, the Hollywood movie studios had to sell off their theater chains for this very reason. But Pai and his Republican allies on the FCC (who now comprise a majority) see no problem with a very few giant corporations exercising a chokehold on American news media and culture. In response to the AT&T move on Time Warner, Verizon (AT&T’s biggest competitor) has doubled down on its investment in digital content by acquiring first AOL, which includes the Huffington Post, and now Yahoo. In this environment, we can expect that some giant internet service provider will make a move on Netflix.

Digital content producers are especially attractive to internet service providers if the end of net neutrality is in sight. Currently, internet service providers, cable or wireless, are considered public utilities (like railroads or electric companies) and so are prohibited from giving faster download speeds to content providers that they own or that pay them extra for the privilege. All internet content—whether from Indymedia or sojo.net or Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, for that matter—has to be treated the same.

If Pai succeeds in reversing these rules, a newly expanded AT&T could, for instance, put CNN on the fast track and throttle Fox News. That, in itself, might not be so bad, but in the process it would also allow any internet service provider to throttle Democracy Now or the BBC.

I’m guessing that narrower media options and more power to the corporate establishment are not exactly what the Rust Belt voters who gave Trump his electoral edge were looking for. But it’s what they got. The question now is what they, and we, are going to do about it.