Trump's new FCC chief, Ajit Pai, has wasted no time rolling back already-established consumer protections. The latest is the rollback of price caps for broadband services to small businesses:
[T]he FCC voted today to approve a controversial plan to deregulate the $45 billion market for business-to-business broadband, also known as Business Data Services (BDS), by eliminating price caps that make internet access more affordable for thousands of small businesses, schools, libraries and hospitals. The price caps, which have been in place for years, are designed to protect small businesses and other community institutions from predatory behavior by monopoly broadband providers like AT&T and Verizon. [...]
"This is crony capitalism that favors broadband giants, is anti-business, and kicks consumers," Chip Pickering, CEO of pro-competition tech industry trade group INCOMPAS, said in a recent statement. According to Pickering, Pai's BDS proposal is likely to result in a 25 percent broadband price increase for small businesses, ultimately costing consumers billions of dollars per year—dollars that will flow straight into the corporate coffers of companies like AT&T and Verizon.
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—The Tortured Path:
It seems transparently obvious to Washington, to the Obama administration and its allies, to the Republicans and the Democrats of Congress, to all the very important people working very serious jobs, that while we can with great fanfare and self-satisfaction no longer torture prisoners in our care -- a war crime, in any context not involving ourselves -- it is far more challenging a proposition to think that we would actually take steps to enforce the myriad laws and conventions against it.
And in that sense, torture by the United States of America is as good as legalized, because we have all but declared that it will never be that illegal, the kind of illegal that leads to investigations and punishment. It will merely remain a deplorable act -- a war crime, in any context not involving us doing the torture -- that we will never, ever use, except when we do, and without consequence. We will not condone it but, like in Serbia, or Guatemala, or Cambodia, or the thugs of any one of a hundred pissant groups and countries that used the practice to vicious effect, when to their advantage, we will ignore the laws, the treaties and conventions, and we will not prosecute our torturers. Or, God forbid, those that specifically ordered the practice. Or those that sought to legalize it, on pen and paper, with arguments comprehensible only to sociopaths or monsters.
On
today’s Kagro in the Morning show: How will The Donald vacation/melt down this weekend? Read up on the next name coming under the microscope. Jeff Gannon x a million!
Media Matters’ Matt Gertz documents the Bannon/Mercer axis that should, by rights, deny
Breitbart press credentials.