President-elect Donald Trump may not have said much during the campaign on the subject, but the Republican majority in the House and Senate doesn’t think much of most of President Barack Obama’s current policies. The only question is how many of them will be undone in the coming year.
Net neutrality
Most of the GOP eyes the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality regulations with almost as much fury as the Affordable Care Act. These regulations ban internet providers from blocking or slowing lawful sites or charging them for faster delivery of their content. But just as repealing Obamacare isn’t such a simple proposition, nuking net neutrality may also get complicated.
A new Republican majority at the FCC — chairman Tom Wheeler and commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, both Democratic appointees and net-neutrality advocates, are both exiting — can immediately stop enforcing net-neutrality rules.
Still, that might not differ much from the current regime, which waited until December to voice an objection to wireless carriers exempting video services they own from data caps imposed on their subscribers.
But a move by the FCC to dump the existing rules risks the same populist groundswell that led Obama’s FCC to reverse course on a 2014 plan to retreat to a gutted set of net-neutrality rules that would have allowed “paid prioritization” deals. Voters correctly saw those as a surrender to two of their least-favorite corporations, the cable and the phone companies.
A move by Congress to rewrite the Telecommunications Act to stop a future Democratic FCC from reviving net-neutrality rules would risk the same feedback — and is a task that has eluded Congress’s grasp since 1996.
Telecom consolidation
Big Telecom should also face fewer obstacles in Washington to bulking up through mergers. AT&T’s (T) purchase of Time Warner (TWX) now looks to be a go; candidate Trump denounced that, but President-elect Trump’s nominees and tech-policy advisors oppose regulation and have backed prior mega-mergers.
Some Wall Street analysts keep chirping away about the odds of Sprint buying T-Mobile, but that looks more like the product of their fetish for deal-making than a rational analysis of what would help Sprint, a company that should know what it feels like to buy a competitor, Nextel, and see billions of dollars in value vaporize.
Telecom companies also get a boost from Washington if Trump’s infrastructure program includes an expansion of broadband internet access — something the US needs badly and soon.
Cybersecurity
A year filled with headlines about email phishing, data breaches, ransomware attacks and Internet-of-Things botnets should be all the evidence that businesses’ and government agencies’ cybersecurity remains inadequate.