Pluralistic: Trump's FCC abandons the future (24 Jul 2025)


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The Earth, suspended in space. It is topped with Trump's hair. A poop emoji with Elon Musk's face orbits it, beaming a cone of shit-colored radio waves over its surface.

Trump's FCC abandons the future (permalink)

The corollary of "you treasure what you measure," is "you don't give a shit about what you stop measuring," which is why Trump's FCC has decided to stop measuring the speed of the broadband it subsidizes with billions in public funds:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/22/biden_broadband_benchmarks_are_bs/

Getting broadband to the American public has been a policy priority since 1996, when the Telecommunications Act established a duty for the FCC to produce annual reports about the progress of America's sclerotic telcoms monopolies in rolling out advanced network services:

https://www.congress.gov/104/plaws/publ104/PLAW-104publ104.pdf

It's a universal truth that these incumbent communications companies love collecting public broadband subsidies, but they hate investing in broadband. From wireless companies that demand exclusive access to spectrum and then never bother to use it (and howl like enraged baboons whenever anyone proposes taking that fallow spectrum back) to cable and phone companies who demand billions in indirect subsidies (intra- and inter-city rights of way) and direct subsidies (billions in cash) and refuse to upgrade their switching or lines:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/frontier-botches-redaction-reveals-952000-potential-network-problems/

Despite what these companies would have you believe, running wires from point a to point b (or even from point a to every point b inside of city limits or at the end of every lonely country road in the county) is not the lost art of a fallen civilization. Figuring out how to pull fiber to every American is just a (very large) logistical task – it's not like we're asking them to embalm a Pharaoh or built a pyramid without any power-tools. This is just cable-pulling, it's not fucking Stonehenge.

And fiber is awesome. Each strand of fiber carries thousands of times more data than a copper phone or cable-wire is capable of, and millions of times more data than wireless can transmit. But no one pulls just one strand of fiber: fiber is cheap as hell to manufacture, so fiber loops have many strands:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/03/beautiful-symmetry/#fibrous-growth

Fiber is the future. Fiber is future-proof. The telcoms industry hates fiber, and Trump's FCC is so totally supine, so utterly captured by the telcoms industry, that it is abandoning fiber, even as it continues to shovel billions into the coffers of these dogshit companies to wire up the rural Americans who voted Trump into office, only to get shafted (again).

Remember DOGE? Remember Trump's promise to root out "government inefficiency and waste?" Apparently, they skipped the FCC, which previously handed out $45b to incumbent telcos to wire up rural America, only to have every cent of that wasted on copper lines (why they bothered with copper when America has so many idle tin cans and length of binder-twine, I'll never understand):

https://web.archive.org/web/20210408230323/https://conexon.us/conexon-blog/sunk-costs-a-cautionary-tale/

Now, Trump's FCC is doing it again, but it's not just the copper barons they're giving a handout to. In its communique killing broadband measurement, Trump's FCC says that focusing on broadband speed "risks skewing the market by unnecessarily potentially picking technological winners and losers." What they mean is that if they insist on measuring broadband speeds before handing out rural broadband subsidies, the only companies that will get those subsidies are the ones that provide fast broadband.

Won't someone think of the shitty, slow internet providers? Especially the fixed wireless and (especially) satellite internet providers, most notably Starlink, the brainchild of former First Buddy and DOGE Obergruppenführer Elon Musk.

While a satellite constellation like Starlink has many great use-cases (ships, planes, temporary encampments), these use-cases do not in any way add up to a profitable business, given the extraordinary expense of launching and re-launching a gazillion satellites (to say nothing of the dangers these pose to other users of stable orbits, and the problems they pose for astronomers).

The only way to make Starlink profitable is to get everyone to use it, and therein lies the problem, because Starlink is cursed with something business professionals call "dogshit unit-economics." Every time you add a new user to Starlink, everyone nearby gets slower internet:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/18/starlink-internet-satellite-speed-elon-musk/

That's because they're all sharing the same spectrum, within the footprint of the satellite they're connecting to. Starlink can make some marginal improvements by increasing the number of satellites and shrinking their footprints, and by getting licenses to more radio spectrum, but these quickly hit the hardest of limits: the financial limitations of increasing the number of satellites per customer, and the natural limits of pumping more radio-energy between satellites and ground stations (beyond a certain point, you start cooking passing birds on the wing).

Musk has a powerful reality-distortion field, but the fact that physics hates satellite broadband cannot be overcome by shitposting, cosmetic surgery, buying elections, or wanting it really badly. You can only add more satellites and spectrum for so long – eventually, improving the unit-economics of satellite internet requires adding new universes.

It's funny that Musk styles himself the "Technoking," because the thing that ushered in the Century of Tech was amazing unit-economics (the internet and computers get better and cheaper as they advance), while everything Musk loves is cursed with dogshit unit-economics.

Take cars: Musk hates public transit ("there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer"):

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-transit/

He insists that if you just add enough self-driving smarts to cars, and possibly dig enough tunnels, you can somehow beat the inexorable dogshit unit-economics of an automotive society, where every driver who shares the road with you makes your car worth less as a transportation system. This is nonsense. A train, a tram, even a bus, can transport dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people at a time. A bunch of single-occupancy robot-taxis simply occupy too much space to be efficient – multiply the number of people by the number of cars by the miles they wish to travel and simply fitting them on the road requires adding so much more road that everything gets further apart, meaning more cars, more roads, and more distance. It's a Red Queen's Race that you can't win.

In other words, geometry hates cars, even more than Elon Musk hates public transit:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft

Then there's AI, the dogshittiest of all the dogshit unit economics. While every successful technology has seen fantastic network effects and returns to scale, each generation of AI has been more expensive to train and to operate, and every new AI user makes AI more expensive:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/

Computer science hates AI, so naturally, Elon Musk loves it. This is a guy who can only succeed by triumphing over physics, geometry, and computer science. He is not going to accomplish any of this.

The common thread joining all of Musk's doomed love-affairs is that all the stuff he's obsessed with is useful in limited ways, but don't work at mass scale. As such, much of their potential will require public financing to be realized. There's plenty of useful things you can do with AI, but they don't add up to enough to justify the capex that goes into model-training nor the opex that goes into running the energy-hungry, water-thirsty foundation models. There's plenty of useful limited applications for self-driving vehicles, but they're all niches like closed-track airport terminal shuttles or closed-site mining vehicles. And, as noted, there's many remote and temporary sites that can benefit from satellite broadband, but they don't justify the titanic expense of operating Starlink.

Even space travel is useful as a scientific enterprise, while space colonization is unbelievably stupid and impractical, and has dogshit unit-economics that put even AI in the shade:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

It's not that Musk hates public subsidies. Like the telcoms sector, he's addicted to public money. The only reason Tesla is profitable is its gigantic, Obama-era bailout, and the ongoing clean-energy subsidies that Musk and Trump are warring over:

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/18/musk-tesla-climate-credits-trump-00198794

Despite his rhetoric, Musk supports vast public expenditures, but only when they are earmarked to his doomed projects so that he can keep trying to make fetch happen, absorbing endless public riches while assuming no public duties.

Musk is no Technoking, but he's a strong contender for Enshittification King: a guy who taps the capital markets and Uncle Sucker for funds he can use to subsidize the initial rollouts of his stupid ideas, in the hopes of becoming so indispensable that he later can squeeze both business customers and end users for ever-larger sums to keep the illusion afloat (think of the junk fees he's piled onto Twitter users and publishers).

The thing is, we know how to roll out ultra-fast, reliable, future-proof internet. All it takes is for public subsidies to come with public duties, like a duty to preference futuristic, high-capacity fiber over gimmicks like satellite "broadband." This isn't a leftist plot, either. Just look at this map of community fiber networks, which are most heavily concentrated in red states (because rural communities aren't gonna get fiber from the private sector, and they skew Republican):

https://communitynetworks.org/content/community-network-map

These are among the only Americans who like their ISPs, a sector whose dominant players routinely win annual "Worst Company in America" polls. Republicans are perfectly capable of providing their voters with an efficient, nutritious high-fiber diet, as they do in Utah, where the "Utopia" initiative is blanketing the blood-red state with publicly managed fiber:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/16/symmetrical-10gb-for-119/#utopia

But the Republican base has spent decades on the receiving end of an expensively funded campaign to get them to view fiber as a literal communist plot. It's wild, because if you're a swivel-eyed loon who's been kicked off of Big Tech for insisting that Obama told the lizard people to hide 5g nanocites in MRNA vaccines, fiber would let you run your own competing free-for-all service from your garage:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/17/turner-diaries-fanfic/#1a-fiber

And of course, governments – unlike corporations – are bound by the First Amendment, so publicly funded systems are far more limited in how they may moderate user speech than private sector systems.

Notwithstanding these 1A strictures, it's not unreasonable to want to have alternatives to publicly run services. I wouldn't want Ken Paxton – or Donald Trump – making moderation decisions for my broadband connection. But public network provision doesn't have to mean that you get your broadband from whatever shitshow is currently occupying your city hall. Public fiber can also mean "essential facilities sharing" (where competing ISPs can install their own switches in the data-centers where the fiber terminates). It can mean public conduit that anyone can lease space in and run fiber through. It can mean a whole infrastructural stack that is available to all comers: public sector ISPs, but also civil society groups, co-ops, tinkerers, universities, and small and large ISPs:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp

That's the vision that the FCC is running away from, as fast as its little hooves can carry it. Instead of using public funds to provide a public good, they're subsidizing Musk's war on physics and the telco sector's war on maintenance. The country that gave birth to the internet in the 1970s is set to preserve that Nixon-era copper infrastructure thorough the 21st century, even as the rest of the world rockets past us on blazing fast fiber.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Would you give a fiver a month for a UK tech/civil liberties org? https://web.archive.org/web/20050726235521/http://www.pledgebank.com/rights

#15yrsago The comics Bill Watterson sent to Berkeley Breathed https://web.archive.org/web/20100728151135/https://tvbarn.com/tv-barn/comic-con-2010/

#15yrsago Interview: Ian McDonald’s research secrets revealed https://web.archive.org/web/20100726181934/http://www.cclapcenter.com/2010/07/an_interview_with_ian_mcdonald.html

#5yrsago BLM footage censored by copyright bots https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/23/circuit-split/#dolphins-in-tuna-nets

#5yrsago Where Will Everyone Go https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/23/circuit-split/#migration-models

#5yrsago Canadian judge invalidates Safe Third Country Agreement https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/23/circuit-split/#kids-kages-kanada

#1yrago Holy CRAP the UN Cybercrime Treaty is a nightmare https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/23/expanded-spying-powers/#in-russia-crime-cybers-you

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Canny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
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  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1033 words yesterday, 9185 words total).

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