Techdirt: Federal Consumer Protection Is Dead. The Fate Of Net Neutrality Warned You It Was Coming.

[ancianita]

"...In many sectors, and for many people, it’s going to be a life or death issue. No more enforced pollution standards. No more functional CDC guidance. No more real oversight of corporate fraud. No more serious policing of “unfair and deceptive” predatory company practices...
In telecom, it means pretty much turning the FCC into a mindless rubber stamp for the interests of monopolies like Comcast and AT&T (assuming they prove themselves racist and sexist enough for Trump’s liking) ...

The attack on net neutrality didn’t just kill “net neutrality.” It eviscerated the FCC’s authority to protect broadband consumers from giant, shitty telecom monopolies ...
This is the future of consumer protection across industries.
Feds abdicate their responsibility to protect workers and consumers,
regulatory agencies are steadily hollowed out like pumpkins, and
a rotating suite of states (with varying degrees of competence) try to fill the void. The companies that lobbied to dismantle stable federal oversight then complain about the “discordant nature of fractured state law.”
You’re going to be seeing this exact sequence play out a lot. And the net neutrality fight was a modern pioneer.

Under PA’s proposed law, a new chapter on “Internet Neutrality” would be added to Title 66 of the Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes, which would expand the definition of “public utilities” to include broadband ISPs. This would subject ISPs to greater regulatory oversight and prohibit practices such as blocking lawful content or unfairly throttling Internet speeds ... Pennsylvania’s law is unlikely to pass, given the state’s lawmakers [having] been extremely corrupt when it comes to pandering regional telecom giants. In most states, AT&T and Comcast’s influence is so profound, they genuinely directly write most state telecom legislation. Occasionally they’ll get busted for bribery, but generally this kind of thing has been broadly normalized...

States, facing unprecedented legal assault on everything from immigration law to healthcare, aren’t going to have the time, resources, or staff to meaningfully pick up the feds’ dropped ball on consumer protection corporate accountability (see: popular right to repair reforms). That’s going to result in untold millions of Americans getting ripped off, neglected, or in many instances, killed...."

More with hyperlinks at ...
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/04/07/federal-consumer-protection-is-dead-the-fate-of-net-neutrality-warned-you-it-was-coming/
... about how for decades, Congress (mostly the GOP, partly the FCC) were too broken and corrupt to help a complaining public.

The bad news: For We The People, it will be 3.5 long years of silent, lazy, stupid, cruel, sellout fascists allowing for-profit, privatized human impoverishment and suffering, with a measles epidemic thrown in.


The good news: With collective righteousness, we protested April 5 with "Hands Off" and will again on April 19 (the day before Easter).
If anyone is going to be the light in this darkness, it's us.

[in2herbs]

1. What about if we started a kickstarter account for enough money to purchase property next to

a R member of Congress of a USSC judge, etc., and then tear the house down and then dig for oil????

[ancianita]

4. Assuming you're serious, have you ever seen a kickstarter raise millions?

[LearnedHand]

2. I read TechDirt frequently and really appreciate their tech snarkiness

However, they have recently swiveled into serious advocacy for democratic principles. So much so that it got the attention of other tech publications. Here's the opinion piece the TechDirt editor wrote about it.

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/04/why-techdirt-is-now-a-democracy-blog-whether-we-like-it-or-not/

While political reporters are still doing their view-from-nowhere “Democrats say this, Republicans say that” dance, tech and legal journalists have been watching an unfortunately recognizable plan unfold — a playbook we’re all too familiar with. We’ve seen how technology can be wielded to consolidate power, how institutional guardrails can be circumvented through technical and legal workarounds, and how smoke and mirrors claims about “innovation” can mask old-fashioned power grabs. It’s a playbook we watched Musk perfect at Twitter, and now we’re seeing it deployed on a national scale.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a few people reach out about our coverage these days. Most have been very supportive of what we’ve been covering (in fact, people have been strongly encouraging us to keep it up), but a few asked questions regarding what Techdirt is focused on these days, and how much we were leaning into covering “politics.”

[ancianita]

3. Thanks for this. I read it, and they clearly adhere to democratic principles for the net, as early

builders and users of the Internet did, like the Chaos Computer Club that's been around since 1981, six years before my youngest son (now an IT guy) was born.

More from your link:

Or take what’s happening at the FCC right now. The traditional media keeps repeating the claims that Brendan Carr is a “free speech warrior,” because that’s what Donald Trump called him. But if you’ve been covering tech policy for a while, you know full well that Carr isn’t actually a believer in free speech. Quite the opposite.

Carr made it clear he wants to be America’s top censor, but cleverly wrapped it in misleading language about free speech. Inexperienced political reporters just repeated those misleading claims. Then he started doing exactly what he promised: going after companies whose speech he seemed to feel was too supportive of Democrats. And now some of those same media companies who failed to cover Carr accurately are falling in line, caving to threats from the administration.

This is the kind of thing tech and law reporters spot immediately, because we’ve seen this all play out before. When someone talks about “free speech” while actively working to control speech, that’s not a contradiction or a mistake — it’s the point. It’s about consolidating power while wrapping it in the language of freedom as a shield to fool the gullible and the lazy.

This is why it’s been the tech and legal press that have been putting in the work, getting the scoops, and highlighting what’s actually going on, rather than just regurgitation administration propaganda without context or analysis (which hasn’t stopped the administration from punishing them).

Connecting these dots is basically what we do here at Techdirt.

[LearnedHand]

5. Oh yeah, those days

The very worst thing this country did with the internet was let advertisers have free reign. And I don't mean annoying ads. I mean the data hoovering that turned us into a surveillance capitalism state.

[ancianita]

6. Yep, the good ones....

Early on the major war factions were between the proprietary software companies moving in on open source software. Or fencing open software kernels like the powerful Linux with proprietary software. Privatizing the Internet began in the 90's, I think? The Linux kernel is STILL the core OS kernel of Microsoft, Google and other big name proprietary tech companies.

If you're concerned about surveillance capitalism, I wonder if you've read this.
It's the definitive analysis. Zuboff is a genius. She shows why Google was evil, along with so many other capitalist tech systems. At the time we hadn't a whiff of that until later when Ed Snowden (his book, Permanent Record, is excellent) and Glenn Greenwald blew up the inside scoop on capitalist services the NSA offered to globalists, and probably still does... which is why Putin's to-do list for the felon is to hobble three letter agencies, so his hacker groups can have free rein.

[LearnedHand]

7. I know about it but haven't read it yet

For the past couple of decades it's been very hard for me to read political thinkers. I tried reading Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival a while back and more or less ended up tossing it across the room. Frankly, it was too scary to have him validate my deepest fears about where this country was headed. And also as I feared, he was right.

[ancianita]

8. I hear you. It's worth your valuable time. (I studied, read, and loved

Chomsky for decades. Still do. But now realize that his being prescient hasn't given him the final word.)

First, because it's not about politics. It's about the capitalist virus that infected Silicon Valley OG startups like Google.
Second, it's about the technological "drift" we're in when surveillance capitalist owners assume we'll succumb to the naturalistic fallacy that because Google is successful -- because surveillance capitalism is successful -- its rules must obviously be right and good.

To know what secures or endangers humans' freedoms used to be the mission of the Fourth Estate. Since we now know that corporate media (nominally human) never intended any such thing, it's really up to us humans to not be afraid, not feel helpless & hopeless, and not run in the face of the corporate/capitalist world that's grown around us for over 200 years.
Finally, I won't try to persuade you to read the book. Yet I'll add one last point.
It explains the profit/power/commodification part of Big Tech world that (intentionally or not) is encouraging us humans to let them take over our governments, and not think or worry about our (great/grand) children's futures.

It explains the breadth of the moral moments (ty Cory Booker) we've already been in, whether they've been private or public contexts, or whether they've been political or techno contexts.