The primary Trump FCC tried to provide Musk almost a billion {dollars} to ship costly Starlink entry to some visitors medians and airport parking tons. The Biden FCC clawed again most of these subsidies, (accurately) arguing that the service couldn’t ship constant speeds, and if we’re going to spend taxpayer cash on broadband, extra future-proof and fewer capability constrained choices like fiber and 5G ought to most likely be prioritized.
This cheap ruling resulted in no restrict of manufactured grievance within the Trump and GOP prolonged conspiracy fiction universe, with proper wingers falsely claiming that Musk — who insists he hates subsidies till he doesn’t — was someway being unfairly victimized by the earlier administration.
Not surprisingly, Trump 2.0 goes to massively over-compensate for this pretend scandal, and slather their favourite pretend engineer billionaire manbaby with money at each conceivable alternative.
That apparently begins with giving Musk and Starlink a profitable new FAA contract as Musk and his 4chan tween DOGE minions set about pretending to repair authorities by throwing it into chaos. Musk seems to be attempting to elbow out Verizon, which has an current 15 yr, $2 billion contract with the company to improve its infrastructure that was obtained by means of conventional clear bidding processes.
The size and price ticket of Starlink’s new FAA contract had been, unsurprisingly, not publicly disclosed. Which is bizarre for a DOGE figurehead that professes to care a lot about transparency:
“The contract comes whereas Musk is main efforts to make deep cuts in federal authorities spending, together with staffing cuts on the FAA, and a few critics are elevating questions on conflicts of curiosity over his position overseeing authorities companies which can be purported to be regulating his companies.”
Bloomberg had a bit extra leaked inside element, noting the partnership would “finally” embody 4,000 Starlink terminals and be deployed over the following 12 to 18 months. Observe up reporting from the Washington Put up suggests there’s some consternation about Musk’s big handout amongst FAA officers.
In a submit to his proper wing propaganda platform, Musk acknowledged, with none kind of proof, that the “Verizon system shouldn’t be working and so is placing air vacationers at severe threat.” Principally falsely claiming that Verizon may be killing U.S. air vacationers:
I’d identical to to pause for a second to acknowledge that as anyone who has most likely written extra about Verizon than anyone alive, it takes a really particular kind of shitty villain to have me backing Verizon.
Verizon signed up for Trump 2.0 desperate to get a large tax lower for doing nothing. And relentless assaults on organized labor. And the whole evisceration of company oversight of no matter’s left of FCC client safety authority. They usually’re eager to get their big $20 billion merger with Frontier rubber stamped.
That’s a variety of potential cash at stake, so I’m undecided Verizon will present any spine and file go well with right here. But when they don’t, shareholders will definitely have the chance to sue. Figuring out Verizon’s greasy lobbying and authorized practices fairly intimately, it’s all a really leopards-eating-faces kind of affair.
However once more, Musk stealing Verizon’s FAA contract is only one of numerous conflicts of curiosity that come up with having an unelected bureaucrat illegally declaring how authorities ought to or shouldn’t operate and illegally bypassing bidding processes. To not point out the quite a few privateness and nationwide intelligence points.
The FAA contract is actually simply the opening salvo for Musk favoritism. The U.S. authorities has already threatened to pull Ukraine’s entry to Starlink until they log off on a mineral deal that will be useful to Tesla. You most likely additionally missed that USAID officers had been investigating Starlink‘s use in Ukraine proper earlier than Trump and Musk engaged in a fast unscheduled disassembly of the company.
It’s clear the Trump NTIA can be hoping to redirect a few of the $42.5 billion in BEAD broadband infrastructure subsidies away from current initiatives and towards Musk’s Starlink every time doable. That’s not simply dangerous as a consequence of corruption, however as a result of it’s going to wind up redirecting a variety of taxpayer cash away from small native companies and fashionable community-owned broadband networks.
Starlink is an effective possibility in case you’re caught in the course of nowhere with nothing else. However “I didn’t do the studying” guys like Joe Rogan are likely to suppose Starlink is akin to some sort of magic pixie mud you’ll be able to simply sprinkle round to repair every thing.
They wish to ignore that the platform can’t actually scale, customer support is largely nonexistent, and it’s too costly for the oldsters most in want of dependable broadband entry. They wish to ignore that the character of satellite tv for pc physics and capability means slowdowns and annoying restrictions are inevitable. In addition they wish to ignore the system is harming astronomical analysis and the ozone layer. You realize, small particulars.
Rank corruption apart, the GOP is genuinely satisfied that Musk is an engineering super-genius who can repair authorities with a wave of his hand. They genuinely don’t know that this persona was a press-enabled mythology offering cowl for a rank opportunist who takes credit score for different peoples’ concepts, one thing the tech press solely belatedly found throughout his bungled takeover of Twitter.
In order that they’re eager on throwing all of their eggs within the Elon Musk basket, pretty oblivious to the very fact they’ve given absolute energy to a conspiratorial oligarch who genuinely has no Earthly thought what he’s truly doing. So yeah, a variety of that is simply corrupt cronyism fairly typical in an authoritarian kakistocracy. However a variety of it genuinely is being pushed by rank delusion into Musk’s precise mind and experience, which goes to finish extraordinarily, extraordinarily badly for completely everyone concerned.
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