GOP Confirms Unqualified Simington to FCC With Eye On Crippling Biden FCC Wed, Dec 9th 2020 6:22am — Karl Bode
The Senate today voted 49-46 Tuesday afternoon along strict party lines to appoint Trump ally NTIA advisor Nathan Simington to the FCC. Simington is hugely unqualified, and his appointment sets another new low in the modern GOP's campaign of sleazy and blisteringly hypocritical politics at the cost of a functioning government or the public interest. Simington has absolutely no experience in telecom issues, consumer protection, or the other complicated issues facing the FCC. He was nominated because he literally helped write Donald Trump's idiotic and dangerous attack on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and is expected to continue (at least performatively for distraction's sake) the campaign at the FCC. If you ask Trumpland, the campaign is necessary to stop "censorship" of conservatives online. In reality, that censorship doesn't exist (in fact reality indicates the opposite). The campaign is really about bullying tech giants into not policing disinformation and hate speech, now cornerstones of GOP power. While the 230 drama will get all the press attention, Simington's appointment was rushed through primarily for another reason: to help Mitch McConnell (read: AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast) gridlock the FCC at 2-2 Commissioners for at least the next two years, preventing the reversal of hugely unpopular Trump FCC policies by the Biden FCC. By law, the party that wins the White House controls a 3-2 majority at the FCC, and gets to appoint the agency boss. But back in August Trump fired Republican FCC Commissioner Mike O'Rielly for some pretty timid comments (correctly) suggesting Trump's planned attack on social media didn't make much sense. With both O'Rielly and Ajit Pai leaving the agency on January 20, that left the FCC with a 2-1 Democratic majority in the new year. So despite the FCC attack on 230 now crippled with Trump's election loss, and despite Simington being an unqualified Trump sycophant, the GOP rushed the nomination through anyway, knowing he would create 2-2 agency gridlock. < - > https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201208/14401145847/gop-confirms-unqualified-simington-to-fcc-with-eye-crippling-biden-fcc.shtml _______________________________________________ Infowarrior mailing list Infowarrior@attrition.org https://attrition.org/mailman/listinfo/infowarrior
