Departing FCC Commish Thinks Agency's Just a Giant Rubber Stamp

Departing FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn this week gave an interview in which she accused the agency she's leaving of now being a glorified rubber stamp for hugely unpopular telecom monopolies. Clyburn, who opposed Ajit Pai's hugely-unpopular attack on net neutrality, argued that the Trump FCC has strayed far afield of its mission to protect consumers and encourage healthy market competition. Instead, the agency appears to be blindly loyal to giant corporations like AT&T and Sinclair, both of which are pursuing massive mergers and the elimination of consumer protections.

"I'm an old Trekkie," Clyburn told Ars , likening the FCC's responsibility to the Star Trek fictional universe's Prime Directive. "I go back to my core, my prime directive of putting consumers first."

The FCC's net neutrality repeal and the destruction of the privacy rules that would have taken effect last year greatly annoy Clyburn, she told the website.

"We've taken ourselves out of the privacy business and I think that's left us too vulnerable," Clyburn argued. ISPs "know a lot about us," and "they can almost do whatever they feel like with the information that they have about us... to me, having a regulatory-free zone when it comes to privacy is extremely problematic."

Clyburn also argued that you don't need as much regulatory oversight in healthy markets, something the US broadband market most assuredly isn't, she stated.

"Let's just face it, ISPs are last-mile monopolies," Clyburn told Ars. "In an ideal world, we wouldn't need regulation. We don't live in an ideal world, all markets are not competitive, and when that is the case, that is why agencies like the FCC were constructed. We are here as a substitute for competition."

In contrast, Trump FCC boss Ajit Pai pretty clearly sees that agency as having one purpose: helping AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and Charter enjoy fatter revenues by gutting nearly all oversight of some of the least-liked, least-competitive companies in America.