Finally Close To Having A Voting Majority, Will The Biden FCC Actually Restore Net Neutrality?

// Last month we noted how the country’s top telecom and media regulator has been under the bootheel of industry for the better part of seven years, and nobody much seems to care.

For four years under Trump the agency was a glorified rubber stamp to industry interests. Telecom and media giants then lobbied Congress into gridlock for two years under Biden to ensure Democrats couldn’t fill vacant commissioner seats, keeping the agency without a voting majority, unable to do pretty much anything deemed controversial by industry (like restoring net neutrality).

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After the industry-backed derailing of the Gigi Sohn nomination set a new high water mark for sleazy Congressional corruption, the Biden administration last May decided to try again by nominating Anna Gomez, a former NTIA official and Sprint lobbyist widely viewed as a safer and less “controversial” (read: she historically hasn’t been much of a consumer advocate or reformer) candidate.

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Not too surprisingly, Gomez’s confirmation is moving through Congress more quickly than Sohn’s. Despite some performative outrage by Ted Cruz pretending Gomez is the type of nominee who’ll embrace “regulatory overreach” (whatever that means for an agency that hasn’t shown political courage for the better part of a decade), Gomez’s nomination was approved by the Senate Commerce Committee and now heads to a full Senate vote:

Democrats hold a 14-13 majority on the Senate Commerce Committee. Gomez’s nomination was passed without a full roll call, but nine Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), asked to be recorded as a “no” on Gomez’s nomination.

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Republicans are just being obstructionist here, as usual. There’s absolutely nothing controversial about Gomez. There wasn’t actually anything controversial about Sohn either; Republicans and the telecom industry just didn’t want the FCC under Biden to function, so they made up an entirely bogus narrative about how Sohn was a radical cop hater, then seeded it across right wing media with great success.

But if you’ll recall, Sohn’s nomination was scuttled not just by Republicans (who routinely vote in lockstep with the interests of AT&T and Comcast on nearly every issue), but thanks to three key Democratic Senators (Joe Manchin (WV), Mark Kelly (AZ), and Catherine Cortez Masto (NV)) who, worried about being vulnerable politically in swing state midterms, parroted industry’s false concerns that Sohn (a hugely popular reformer) was some sort of extremist.

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Said Democrats are far more likely to sign off on Gomez, whose positions on key public interest issues are more of a black box. That said, the kind of nominees that can survive a corrupt congressional nomination process generally aren’t the kind of “rock the boat” types you actually need if you’re looking to implement reform on issues like broadband consumer protection or media consolidation.

The result, as you can pretty clearly see with existing FCC commissioners from both parties, are officials who talk a lot about their ambiguous dedication to “bridging the digital divide,” but generally are too worried about future career prospects to meaningfully challenge the giant telecom monopolies responsible for a large segment of the industry’s biggest problems.

Still, Gomez says she supports reverting the Trump era dismantling of net neutrality. And from my conversation with insiders, the Biden administration remains keen on restoring the rules. But with limited time left in Biden’s first term, and an agency staffed with the kind of folks not known for disrupting the status quo, a restoration of well-crafted net neutrality protections remains something I’ll have to see to believe.

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Net neutrality rules were flawed but important guidelines aimed at keeping telecom monopolies from abusing their market power to harm competition and consumers. Despite a lot of misinformed people claiming that “the repeal must not have mattered because the internet still works!”, it mattered. It gutted the FCC’s already flimsy consumer protection authority generally, and the only reason big ISPs haven’t behaved worse in the years’ since is because numerous states passed their own net neutrality protections.

So restoring net neutrality, and specifically once again reclassifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II, remains important from a general consumer protection perspective.

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But at this point I think the public and policy worlds are so burned out on the net neutrality debate after 20 years, it makes sense to focus most telecom policy energy and messaging on the real underlying cause of shitty, expensive broadband: telecom monopolization and the corruption that protects it. That messaging also needs to focus on what’s actually working, namely the various community-backed alternatives directly taking aim at concentrated monopoly power.

But I don’t get any real sense the Rosenworcel FCC, Gomez or not, actually has the political courage to meaningfully wage that particular fight. And with a corrupt Congress built to ensure that popular reformers can’t survive the regulatory nomination process, it’s doubtful it’s going to anytime soon.

Finally Close To Having A Voting Majority, Will The Biden FCC Actually Restore Net Neutrality?

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Net Neutrality, Technology