One of the many unfortunate side effects of the blatant criminality emanating from the White House and Attorney General is the fact that the regular run of the mill corruption that is the hallmark of this administration goes largely unremarked. One of the most corrupt of our regulators is Ajit Pai, the FCC Chair. Today he okayedthe proposed T-Mobile acquisition of Sprint, which everyone with a living brain realizes will result in an increase in the already outrageous cost of mobile phone service.
Now Pai says, despite all the evidence, that this will be good for consumers because the merged company has promised to deploy a 5G network and has also agreed not to raise rates for three years. But…, as you might expect:
Industry watchers doubt whether Pai’s FCC would enforce conditions given the agency’s unwillingness to stand up to major carriers on a litany of subjects, ranging from the foot-dragging on implementing robocall tech, casual treatment of consumer location data, and repair delays in the wake of hurricanes in both Florida and Puerto Rico.
This may not rise to Scott Pruitt levels of corruption, at least not obviously, but rest assured that if and when we get our country back Pai will be handsomely rewarded for his fealty to his former employers. All of the carriers benefit from this decision, because it will green light rate increases across the board, as the linked article discusses. Every carrier knows and Pai knows that he won’t enforce the conditions on the merged company so none of the other companies will be under competitive pressure to provide US consumers with a phone network on a par with that in other countries.
Indeed, that’s the way it works in this country and everyone knows it. Corporations say what they need to say to get the governmental action they want and then simply don’t do what they promised, especially now when they know that each and every regulatory body will look the other way.
Consider what Amazon is now trying to do to the town of Braintree, Massachusetts, where Amazon recently sued the Town over a requirement that “ delivery vehicles going to and from a warehouse that Amazon plans to build must carry signs identifying them as such.” It was a condition the Town Planning Board imposed on approving the facility in the first place in order to assure compliance with a traffic management plan to which Amazon agreed in order to get the zoning approval. At that time Amazon’s attorney said the requirement “makes sense”. The town relied upon that to grant the zoning approval in the first place. Had the attorney opposed the requirement, Amazon would likely not have gotten the approval. Now Amazon is suing to overturn that requirement, given that it has the approval safely in hand. If it were a federal regulatory issue, at this point in time, Amazon would not even bother to sue; it would simply ignore the requirement secure in the well founded belief that nothing would come of it.
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