Congress Should Block Brendan Carr from Becoming the FCC Chairman and Investigate the Conflicts of Interest, and the Corporate Capture.
TRUE OR FALSE: A lawyer testifying in Congress for an FCC Commissioner position or more importantly, to be the Chairman of the FCC, must disclose all material facts about former clients who are regulated by the FCC if those facts pertain to potential conflicts of interest or affect their ability to serve impartially.
BING AI: “You’re correct. For someone testifying for an FCC Commissioner position, full disclosure of any material facts about former clients regulated by the FCC is crucial, especially if those facts could lead to potential conflicts of interest or affect their ability to serve impartially.”
NOTE: We asked BING AI and other AI programs the same question and there was consensus.
In short, the Chairman of the FCC should not be Regulatory Captured and violate the public trust.
Incoming president, Donald Trump has selected Brendan Carr, the current Republican FCC Commissioner to be the new Chairman, the lead regulator to guide and to provide oversight of America’s communications companies and services. However, there is no formal Congressional hearing planned, yet our tracking of Carr has uncovered serious conflicts of interest.
Carr blames the Biden-Harris plan for America’s Digital Divide and testified in front of Congress “A Legacy of Incompetence: Consequences of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Policy Failures” on September 19, 2024.
Carr’s testimony included the statement:
“The $42 billion program being led by Vice President Harris is being used to pursue a climate change agenda, with DEI requirements, technology biases, price controls, preferences for government-run networks, and rules that will undoubtedly lead to wasteful overbuilding. All of this will leave rural and other unconnected communities behind. And the Biden-Harris Administration has chosen to head down this path despite Congress expressly prohibiting the Administration from doing much of this partisan improvising.”
Brendan Carr has never stopped representing his former clients: AT&T. Verizon, and CTIA wireless association, among others who were not identified, and gave massive financial presents based on biased telco -created-financed analysis. How bad does it get?
“5G will have speeds 100 times faster than 4G”?
ANSWER: 5G is 99–98 times slower than Carr said would be the speed in 2017 and has been an industry joke as it requires a fiber optic wire and has a very short range, and has problems if there is no direct visible line to the cell site. The speed, with the wind at its back, is double 4G and it can’t compete with fiber, wired services. It is not available everywhere, even though your phone may have that 5G logo.
Carr is blaming the Biden-Harris plan for “Technology Bias”? A Chairman who is going to get the basic analysis wrong by listening to the wireless (former clients) companies is not what America needs.
Worse, Carr has been working with ALEC members, the American Legislative Exchange Council, best known as a corporate bill mill, he has used their telco-created pieces of legislation that strip-mined the rights of municipal telecoms to buildout infrastructure for the delivery of wireless and wireline services.
But all this pales to the fact that he and former Chair Ajit Pai may be responsible for one of the largest accounting scandals in American history — and it is even ongoing stronger today — -working for Verizon’s interests; he helped to get rid of the requirements to supply full financial analysis for each state’s telecommunications utilities, allowing for billions of dollars per state in overcharging and it has been going on with no audit trail for a decade.
Brendan Carr continually quotes the industry — Did you know prices for wireless, broadband and cable actually went down over the last few years?
Carr is the last person we need to lead America’s communications critical infrastructure — or to help reduce prices or solve the Digital Divide. And as many know, he thinks that taking on Tik Tok or Google or writing sections of some “Project 2025” is what’s needed.
Some Basic Points:
1) Brendan Carr testified in front of Congress to become an FCC Commissioner and he left out basic material facts about his former legal work for his Communications Companies clients on multiple levels.
2) Carr worked at the Wiley Rein law firm from 2005-to 2012, then went to the FCC.
Brendan Carr Timeline
- FCC Commissioner Aug 2017 — Present · 7 yrs 6 mos.
- General Counsel Jan 2017 — Sep 2017 · 9 mos.
- Legal Advisor, Office of Com. Ajit Pai Feb 2014 — Jan 2017 · 3 yrs
- FCC Safety Team, Admin. Law, General Counsel (6/2012–2/2014)
Wiley Rein LLP
- Wiley Rein LLP Sep 2005 — Jun 2012 · 6 yrs 10 mos. Attorney, Communications, Appellate, and Litigation Groups Attorney, Communications.
(Note: Carr leaves Wiley either May or June 2012 and starts at the FCC soon after.)
3) Brendan Carr left out basic details about his clients, the cases or filings he did and moreover how he would help these companies as commissioner.
We have been examining that at the core, Brendan Carr omitted critical facts about his past clients in his testimony to Congress, He worked for AT&T, Verizon, Et Al. From HuffPost, June 30th, 2017.
4) Brendan Carr worked for Verizon on the removal of the fundamental financial accounting required by the FCC since 1939; it is one of the largest accounting scandals in American history.
In 2007, Brendan Carr was one of the lawyers at Wiley working for Verizon and they filed to remove, “forbear”, on all required financial reporting based on the USOA Uniform System of Accounting. Also known as “ARMIS” it was available in reports known as The Statistics of Common Carriers, first published in 1939.
5) David Bergmann, Esq, former senior lawyer for the Ohio Consumer Counselor and attorney for NASUCA (and in 2014, founding member of the IRREGULATORS) pointed out that the removal of the financial reporting would have stopped the ability for the regulators to do their jobs.
David Bergmann wrote as NASUCA’s counsel:
“NASUCA’s overall conclusion on all the compliance plans, however: Although the plans purportedly respond to the specific directives set forth in the Commission’s order approving AT&T’s forbearance from certain cost assignment rules, the Commission’s review of AT&T’s plan has far reaching implications because of its likely foundation for plans filed by other incumbent local exchange carriers (“ILEC”), following in the path charted by AT&T.
“Also, as these comments demonstrate, the Commission’s deliberations in this compliance phase will affect state and federal regulators’ ability to obtain meaningful data from AT&T in pending and future proceedings. The Commission should reject all three compliance plans.”
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As this played out, Verizon et al were able to stop critical financial reporting requirements by statute as well as enabled a massive financial cross-subsidy scheme for the wireless subsidiary to take billions of dollars from the state utilities to build out 3G and 4G first. At the same time, customers would be charged thousands of dollars for the fiber to the home upgrade that never showed up, and was all hidden from view.
6) In 2017, as Chairman, Ajit Pai’s first action as detailed in an interview in 2017, revealed that his staff never examined the FCC’s accounting rules or the impacts they were having.
“Re/Code: “In the early days, you had said that you wanted to take a weed-whacker to remove the rules that are holding back investment. What did you mean by that?
Pai: “What I had in mind were some of the regulations that we’ve had on the books for a while that stand in the way of investment in networks. Our Part 32 accounting rules — exceedingly boring, I recognize — but just the fact that companies have to maintain two different sets of books, literally one for their business and one for the FCC’s purposes, and the FCC hadn’t relied on any of that paperwork in years. I asked our staff, ‘When was the last time you looked at these reports?’ They said, ‘Pretty much never’.”f
7) In 2017, Ajit Pai became the FCC Chairman and started the first action; the removal of the remaining accounting regulations.
“In this Report and Order (Order), we complete our proceeding to review our Part 32 Uniform System of Accounts (USOA) to consider ways to minimize the compliance burdens on carriers while ensuring that the agency retains access to the information it needs to fulfill its regulatory duties. Section 220 of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended (the Act), authorizes the Commission to prescribe the system of accounts to be used by carriers subject to the Act, and the USOA and its predecessors have historically performed this function for regulated telephone companies. But the USOA comes with a cost: Many regulated companies must maintain two sets of books — one for financial reporting and another for regulatory purposes — with the attendant costs of additional training for accountants, creating a second set of customized accounting software, and auditing two sets of processes for compliance.
“We now conclude that, in light of the Commission’s actions in areas of price cap regulation, universal service reform, and intercarrier compensation reform, as well as the advancement of robust intermodal competition in the market for telephone services, the duty to maintain two sets of accounts is generally not necessary for price cap carriers. Moreover, with respect to all carriers, we streamline and eliminate outdated accounting rules no longer needed to fulfill our statutory or regulatory duties. By reducing the costly burden of outdated regulatory requirements placed upon carriers, today’s reforms give carriers the ability to better allocate scarce resources toward expanding modern networks which are critical to bringing economic opportunity, job creation, and civic engagement to all Americans.”
In short, what this says — we are removing any of those burdensome accounting requirements. The impact was — no more audit trail of the state utilities and no way of tracking the financials to see if customers were being overcharged or even whether the company was building out broadband. Moreover, we had found illegal subsidies of the other lines of business, such as wireless expenses being charged to wired local phone customers.
8) In 2019 we took IRREGULATORS vs FCC to court; after filing for over 5 years — and ignored. Some of the states, especially NY, still collected the financial reports and it showed massive cross-subsidies of the other lines of business with local services, and the FCC ignored all of our attempts to get them to ‘do the right thing’ and start audits of the companies as ‘forbearance’ was based on the promise that there would be no financial shell game, as it was and still is rampant in 2024.
At every turn, the FCC decided that we did not make the case or know the information. Our consortium included multiple experts and lawyers, some of who worked for the FCC and knew how the accounting scandal occurred.
Full Circle: Carr should have recused himself from these proceedings, as should have Ajit Pai. In fact, as we mentioned, in an interview with Re/Code, once becoming FCC Chairman he claimed that these accounting rules were ‘a burden’,
When we presented it, Carr and Pai were supposed to be working for the public good; and should have examined the data, especially since we started to file at the FCC in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018…
The Legacy of Brendan Carr and Ajit Pai: The Verizon NY 2023 Annual Report, published June 2024 shows massive financial cross-subsidies of the wireless networks, almost $1 billion dollars annually, charged to the local phone customers vs this corrupt accounting, as we documented and discuss in the link.
9) Brendan Carr’s First Amendment Win for the CTIA, wireless association, vs San Francisco, CA
Owe a decade ago, we found that Carr’s work was directly related to theca proceedings, and it is still relevant today in multiple ways.
· “Wiley Rein Secures First Amendment Victory for the Wireless Industry, October 28, 2011
· Wiley Rein defended the CTIA, the wireless association, against the City of San Francisco and won claiming that this was a ‘First Amendment’ win — for CTIA.
· Wiley Rein’s Andrew McBride, Josh Turner, Megan Brown and Brendan Carr are among the counsel for CTIA in this matter.
And a decade ago, the defending of the industry against the wishes of a city is going to came up again and again as the FCC is planning on ‘preempting’ state and city zoning and laws
And there are a continuous stream of other proceedings where the FCC is asking — “Why shouldn’t the FCC preempt all those pesky city and state laws pertaining to wireless with a federal law, (which mainly helps AT&T, Verizon and the CTIA)”?
11) The gifts to the wireless industry, from Brenda n Carr.
In announcing the plan to roll out 5G wireless, Brendan Carr made the following statement about the speed, Brendan Carr’s failed business model.
“As the next generation of wireless connectivity, 5G will be 100 times faster and five times more responsive than current technologies.”
In 2016, Verizon announced 5G tests and claimed by 2017 there would be deployment with speeds of 1Gbps. Anyone in the industry knows how to check the hype before making any decisions about wireless deployments; 4G was also supposed to be wiz-bang and wasn’t — a point we made multiple times.
And here is the FCC parroting the wireless companies’ statements. But in 2025, the speed of 5G service speed is not 100 times faster. According to multiple sources 5G’s speeds can be 1.5–2 times faster, not 100.
But that’s only a small caveat as 5G is not available everywhere and it has serious problems with distance and with objects in the way, like foliage or buildings.
12) Carr 5G Order — Carr’s previous clients have gotten a series of presents from him and the 5G order was one. Based on model legislation created by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council and paid for by phone and cable companies, a very harmful piece of regulations went through. It guts the cities’ rights, it makes customers pay and does not fix the wires — it exempted “small cells from “certain federal historic and environmental reviews” and streamlined the reviews that remain for larger towers.
And let’s shut down the rights of cities and states. “The FCC should provide even more certainty about access to rights-of-way and our views on state and local moratoria.”
To sum up, Brendan Carr’s 5G order was a gift to the wireless companies.
It removed the rights of the cities to block wireless, and it got rid of history and environmental examinations, among other presents.
And all of these regulations and deregulations and plans to have America rely onslow, expensive wireless services, especially in rural areas — - and not have towns and homes wired with fiber optic networks. This is all in motion. With the new Trump FCC, we also expect satellites and hype.
Conclusion:
We found that there are many laws and regulations about testifying for a leading position in a government agency, and certainly an FCC Commissioner position or more impressive, the chairmanship of the commission, should be held acountable to the highest standards.
But besides the gifts to the wireless companies, Carr’s analysis was trash; 5G is not good in rural areas when it requires a fiber optic wire.
The bias of the FCC and Carr has closed down basic issues that need addressing.
- No mention that there are state telecommunications public utilities,
- No mention of previous fiber optic upgrade commitments,
- No mention of price increases to build out wired fiber to the home that didn’t happen.
And this failure runs through the first Trump FCC:
Jessica Rosenworcel, during the pandemic, as a commissioner wrote:
Re: GN Docket 19–285, 2020 Broadband Deployment Report.
“This report is baffling.
“We are in the middle of a pandemic. So much of modern life has migrated online. As a result, it has become painfully clear there are too many people in the United States who lack access to broadband. In fact, if this crisis has revealed anything, it is the hard truth that the digital divide is very real and very big.
“But you’ll find no evidence acknowledging that in today’s Broadband Progress Report from the Federal Communications Commission. Instead, you’ll find a glowing assessment that all is well. According to this rosy report the nation’s broadband efforts are all good. They are proceeding in a reasonable and timely fashion and they are reaching all Americans.
“This is just not right. Check the headlines decrying the lack of broadband in this country. Look at Congress.
“Making matters worse, the FCC relies on information submitted by providers without a system to independently verify the data. Last year, this allowed one company overstate its service coverage by tens of millions of people….”
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Sadly, I note that instead of investigating what happened to the billions collected in each state to roll out fiber optic broadband, the Dem FCC decided to throw money at the problem with no investigations.
Did Brendan Carr fail to provide material facts at the time of his confirmation to commissioner?
Multiple AI programs think so. Congress should take action and require answers.
Carr was required to submit a full written resume and list his clients where there could be a conflict of interest, especially if it could impact the decision making process as Commissioner.
These are some of the questions: We ask Congress to do this investigation before Carr becomes Chairman.
Questions
2. Do you have any commitments or agreements, formal or informal,to maintain employment, affiliation, or practice with any business, association or other organization during your appointment? If so, please explain.
3. Indicate any investments, obligations, liabilities, or other relationships which could involve potential conflicts of interest in the position to which you have been nominated.
4. Describe any business relationship, dealing, or financial transaction which you have had during the last ten years, whether for yourself, on behalf of a client, or acting as an agent, that could in any way constitute or result in a possible conflict of interest in the position to which you have been nominated.
5. Describe any activity during the past ten years in which you have been engaged for the purpose of directly or indirectly influencing the passage, defeat, or modification of any legislation or affecting the administration and execution of law or public policy.
“8. List all post-undergraduate employment, and highlight all management-level jobs held and any non-managerial jobs that relate to the position for which you are nominated.
In the testimony for Commissioner Brendan Carr mentioned no phone, wireless, broadband, internet or satellite company, or their associations in 2017 as Commissioner.
Bruce Kushnick, New Networks Institute.
(Note: The IRREGULATORS have differing positions.)