Trump 2.0 Is Proving To Be A Bonanza For More Harmful Consolidation Among Broadband Giants
from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept
Despite the ongoing fake promise of “populism,” so far Trump 2.0 has proven to be a bonanza for telecom giants seeking to get even bigger. As usual that means higher broadband prices and shittier broadband service are just over the horizon.
As a reward for promising to be more racist, Verizon recently saw its $20 billion merger with Frontier approved by the Trump FCC. Comcast is rumored to be eyeing a merger with T-Mobile. And cable giant Charter is pushing for a new $34.5 billion merger with Cox Communications. As usual, the two companies are promising that more industry mergers will somehow make the sector more competitive:
“This combination will augment our ability to innovate and provide high-quality, competitively priced products, delivered with outstanding customer service, to millions of homes and businesses,” Charter CEO Chris Winfrey said in the press release. “We will continue to deliver high-value products that save American families money, and we’ll onshore jobs from overseas to create new, good-paying careers for U.S. employees.”
We’ve got forty years of hard data illustrating that this is not what happens when you let the U.S. telecom industry consolidate. Even if two merging companies don’t directly compete, the resulting telecom companies tend to be more politically powerful than ever. And one of their favorite pastimes involves abusing that political power to crush all competition and regulatory oversight.
Charter is, you might recall, the company that almost got kicked out of New York State after it lied to regulators repeatedly about whether it was meeting requirements fixed to its merger with Time Warner Cable.
These mergers never serve the public interest. And America’s historically too corrupt to care. Such consolidation helps temporarily boost stock valuations and generate rich tax cuts, while overcompensated executives celebrate their savvy deal-making acumen. The public harms of consolidation is then swept under the carpet with the help of an equally consolidated corporate press and captured regulators.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
So Trump 2.0 is both encouraging more of this harmful consolidation at the same time they’re taking an absolute hatchet to whatever was left of regulatory autonomy and corporate oversight. It’s the culmination of a generation of delusion by right wingers and Libertarian “free market” guys who (quite falsely) claim that unchecked monopolization results in near-mystical Utopian outcomes.
It doesn’t: letting telecom giants like Verizon and Comcast get bigger while you dismantle government oversight only results in those giants doubling down on existing bad behaviors. Again, that always means exploiting regional geographic monopolies and duopolies to drive up prices, undermining small business, fraudulently obtaining more taxpayer subsidies, and eroding the exact free market competition the supporters of these deals claim to be such huge proponents of. It’s utterly theatrical.
The same thing is playing out in media, with companies like Time Warner Discovery calling for even more mergers and greater media consolidation under Trump — at a time when the enshittification from such consolidation couldn’t be any more apparent. That’s simultaneously resulting in shittier journalism, higher prices, lower quality choices, and a flood of corporatist bullshit and right wing propaganda.
U.S. broadband is a patchwork of regional monopolies, coddled by corrupt federal and state lawmakers, who’ve worked tirelessly to demolish anything closely resembling competition in local broadband markets. U.S. media is a lazy patchwork of consolidated corporate giants obsessed with “growth for growth’s sake.” More mindless consolidation is the exact opposite of what these industries need.
We’ve taken that already broken model and somehow managed to make it dumber and more harmful under Trump 2.0, by fusing it all to the erratic whims of authoritarian zealots. Zealots looking to further exploit the merger approval process in exchange for these companies’ promises that they’ll be more racist and shittier than ever. Great stuff. What could go wrong?
Filed Under: antitrust, broadband, competition, consolidation, corruption, fcc, mergers, oversight, racism, regulation, trump
Companies: charter, cox communications
