When He’s Not Busy Censoring Comedians, Brendan Carr Is Eliminating Free Wi-Fi For Poor Rural School Kids

from the screwing-over-toddlers dept

Brendan Carr has received ample attention for his recent failed attempt to ban a comedian and trample the First Amendment, something he’s facing several fledgling investigations over.

But that disaster class in shitty governance shouldn’t overshadow all the other, terrible things Carr has been up to. Like last week, when Carr announced he’d be killing a popular, bipartisan program that provided free Wi-Fi to school kids at no additional cost to taxpayers.

Some background: last year, the Biden FCC passed a new rule that would help bring free Wi-Fi access to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, the rule allowed schools to leverage the FCC’s E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses and libraries, making it easier for kids who lack broadband (or can’t afford broadband) to get online.

The FCC E-Rate budget was not increased, meaning the public didn’t have to pay a penny extra. It was a popular, no brainer, bipartisan effort to make internet access easier for the most disadvantaged, many of them living in areas that voted for Donald Trump in the belief he’d make their lives better.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Brendan Carr joined forces to try and destroy that effort. Big telecoms like AT&T don’t like the precedent of government offering free broadband when poor people might otherwise be forced to overpay for expensive cellular. AT&T also doesn’t want government Wi-Fi initiatives to imperil the company’s longstanding practice of defrauding school subsidy programs.

Killing this program is about protecting the interests of giant, shitty telecom monopolies. But Cruz and Carr couldn’t openly say that, so they lied and claimed the program was illegal (false), that they were looking to save taxpayers money (false), and the program “censored Conservative viewpoints” (insane and false, we debunked and explained this claim way back in January).

Carr’s facing some moderate blowback from a few Senators like Ed Markey, who fired off a polite letter. Carr’s also facing light pushback from advocacy groups including the American Library Association (ALA) and the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband (SHLB). All of them say Carr’s dumb policy choices are making it harder for schoolkids (Republican and Democrat alike) to connect to the internet:

“Rolling back the E-Rate hotspot and school bus decisions would undercut some of the most effective tools for addressing inequities in home connectivity and would reverse progress in closing the ‘Homework Gap.’ For millions of students, especially those from low-income households, internet access outside of school walls is not a luxury but a prerequisite for academic success.”

Spoiler: Carr doesn’t care. Polite letters aren’t going to be enough to deter him from his plan to effectively butcher every last part of the FCC that doesn’t serve AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon’s quarterly revenue goals (his inevitable future employers). The press barely finds this stuff worth covering.

Carr’s claim that this program is illegal leans heavily on the Trump-stocked Supreme and appeals court belief that literally any regulatory action that Republicans and corporations don’t like is now illegal. They’ve had more luck on this front than most people understand; effectively turning most U.S. consumer protection and safety regulators into the legal equivalent of seasonal decorative gourds, especially if a regulator’s enforcement actions run into the MAGA 5th Circuit, 6th Circuit, or Supreme Court.

Again, this particular program was built with broad, bipartisan support. It helped children do their fucking homework. It wasn’t controversial. Carr and Cruz targeted not just because it imperiled incumbent telecom monopolies revenues, but because they’re inherently shameless; gleefully engaged in a scorched-Earth war against the very people they pretend to represent.

I think there’s a lot of “Libertarian free market” think tank guys, companies, and extraction-class folks who would very much like it if the focus remained exclusively on the aspects of Carr they don’t support (primarily free speech), but the harm he’s causing to issues like consumer protection, public safety, and affordable connectivity simply can’t be overstated.

Carr’s been busy taking an absolute hatchet to the entirety of FCC broadband consumer protection, robocall enforcement, and media consolidation limits. He’s derailing useful cybersecurity programs, and basic FCC efforts to prevent longstanding racism in broadband deployment. He’s destroying any efforts to police fraud by giants like Comcast. His approach is basically a napalm blend of corruption, regulatory capture, and radical right wing extremism, dressed up as measured de-regulatory efficiency.

It’s unlikely his rollback of a popular plan to help rural schoolkids do their homework will see much press coverage. And what coverage there is will likely either downplay the harm or parrot Carr’s false claims unskeptically. But it’s important to not let Carr’s terribleness on free speech overshadow his other, equally terrible, policies that will reverberate for decades to come.

Filed Under: brendan carr, classroom, e-rate, education, fcc, hotspots, libraries, schools, ted cruz, wifi, wireless