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

A fusion of authoritarianism and corporatism is destroying what’s left of U.S. federal consumer protection.

Whether by dodgy Supreme Court ruling, executive order, or captured regulators, the U.S. right, often in lockstep with consolidated corporate power, are making massive, historic, and potentially irreversible inroads in destroying federal corporate oversight, labor protections, public safety provisions, environmental standards, and regulatory autonomy.

I don’t say that as hyperbole. It’s happening now, and you’d think it would be a bigger story.

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. Not with any consistency, anyway.

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). That’s left a smorgasbord of semi-functional state governments to try and fill the void with shrinking budgets, something that’s going to be a consistent theme in the years to come.

Net neutrality (some modest rules trying to keep telecom monopolies from abusing their market power to harm competitors and consumers) was always treated like fringe (and even irrelevant) tech policy, but, at its heart, it asked a functional question: do we, or don’t we want large corporations to face any sort of oversight and accountability for abusing consolidated market power.

The government’s answer, in telecom and media’s case, was a resounding no.

Congress, for decades, proved too corrupt to protect U.S. consumers from telecom monopolies or pass even the most basic of consumer protection updates for the modern era. That drove the FCC to impose some modest broadband privacy rules that were killed by the GOP using the Congressional Review Act. It also drove the FCC to develop some modest net neutrality rules that were summarily dismantled by an antidemocratic right-wing court system fixated on protecting corporate revenues.

When the public complained, companies, courts, and “free market” libertarian think tanks told them to go talk to a Congress they knew was too broken and corrupt to take action, because it had repeatedly proven itself too broken and corrupt to take action. Fixated on the threat of unchecked government power, many of these folks turned a blind eye to the perils of unchecked corporate power.

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. A smattering of states tried to fill the void with their own state net neutrality laws, but generally haven’t bothered to enforce them.

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.

In Pennsylvania, state leaders are responding to the Trumpy Sixth Circuit’s dismantling of net neutrality protections by introducing a net neutrality law. Sponsored by PA Rep. Ismail Smith-Wade-El, This one’s of note (and likely extra doomed) because it attempts to classify telecom giants as essential public utility demanding of healthy state oversight:

“The Internet is not a luxury but a daily necessity. All Pennsylvanians deserve a fair Internet that provides equal access,” Smith-Wade-El said. “With only a handful of large companies providing these services, consumers should expect that the company providing their service will transmit the service fairly and not manipulate access to the Internet and the prices that they pay.”

The reason U.S. broadband is spotty, slow, and expensive was always consolidated telecom monopoly power and the corruption that protects it. Most politicians are keen to pretend this isn’t the core problem because they like getting campaign contributions from AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.

So generally, over forty years, we’ve steadily been eliminating oversight of these companies under the pretense that this results in near-miraculous levels of “free market innovation.” But when you eliminate both competition and regulatory oversight from telecom, what you get instead is giant, unaccountable regional monopolies dedicated to doubling down on all their worst behaviors.

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.

ISPs have long been obsessed with having broadband viewed as a fun and frivolous luxury, as to avoid the oversight we reserve for essential utilities. And, pretty much uniformly, they’ve been successful at ensuring federal and state officials don’t wander down this path.

Again here, Pennsylvania’s law is unlikely to pass, given the state’s lawmakers historically 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.

With authoritarians taking the dismantling of federal consumer protection to an entirely new level, you’re going to see more and more states trying to fill the void with their own consumer protection laws. But as the fusion of corporatism and authoritarianism finishes irreversibly defanging federal governance, it’s going to increasingly set its sights on state autotomy.

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.

Again, net neutrality signaled this coming consumer protection apocalypse. I feel like I spent the better part of an adult life being dismissed as hyperbolic for warning that it was coming. And while there’s certainly a lot going on, you’d think the total evisceration of all remaining corporate oversight and federal consumer protection enforcement would warrant a skosh more more attention than it’s getting.