Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
The gradual consolidation of America’s telecom companies is a classic regulatory concern. They’re large, geographically entrenched firms with anticompetitive tendencies. Customers often don’t have many options, so when two companies become one, they might lose their ability to switch. The FCC has clear jurisdiction over proposed mergers and takes a keen interest for both straightforward and political reasons: These things are important, but also, most people don’t love their internet providers, cable companies, or wireless carriers, and quite a few people despise them.
One would expect an administration that believes in the FCC’s broad regulatory mission to exert strict oversight on such deals, as the Biden administration did. Likewise, it would be reasonable to expect a Republican administration to scrutinize them less thoroughly. Indeed, the FCC under Trump appointee Brendan Carr, a former telecom attorney and Project 2025 contributor, is moving fast to approve mergers. Last month, the FCC approved T-Mobile and EQT’s acquisition of home-fiber provider Lumos. Verizon’s $20 billion deal for Frontier, which was announced late last year, got the green light a few days ago. Next up is Charter’s proposed merger with Cox, which would make it the single biggest internet provider in the country, and which analysts expect to be approved.
This isn’t just any “Republican administration,” however, so there’s a catch. In a March interview with Bloomberg, Carr warned companies about a new condition for merger deals:
We can only under the statute move forward and approve a transaction if we find that doing so serves the public interest. If there’s businesses out there that are still promoting invidious forms of DEI discrimination, I really don’t see a path forward where the FCC could reach the conclusion that approving the transaction is going to be in the public interest.
As familiar as this sort of anti-anti-racism has become, the premise here deserves attention every time it shows up: It’s the Trump administration’s position that any program resembling a DEI initiative — from a goal to hire a more diverse workforce to officially supported employee resource groups — is against the “public interest” and is, in fact, itself discriminatory. Making it effectively illegal to attempt to address racism or sexism in the workplace is the goal. Borrowing the language and policies of past regulators and companies is the method, and absurd inversions — see the Trump administration’s recent Afrikaner refugee carveout — are part of the performance. You might call such things bigoted or racist. It is now the position of the government that, if you do, then actually, you’re the real racist, and they’ll use whatever leverage they have to punish you for it.
T-Mobile’s recent experience illustrates how this works in practice. A few days after Carr’s interview, the company wrote the FCC a letter saying that it “recognize(s) that the legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’) under federal law has changed,” and that it would be “conducting a comprehensive review of its DEI policies, programs, and activities,” including training materials, HR processes, and supplier programs. It outlined some preliminary material changes; its merger was then approved. And last week, Verizon wrote its own letter to Carr’s FCC, outlining how the company was “changing its HR structure and will no longer have a team or any individual roles focused on DEI.” It would remove references to “diversity, equity and inclusion” from its training materials, end “qualitative” goals around supplier diversity, and “will no longer maintain any workforce diversity goals.” In response, Carr posted this:
Verizon has now agreed to end its DEI policies as specified in a new FCC filing.
These changes are effective immediately.
A good step forward for equal opportunity, nondiscrimination, and the public interest. https://t.co/4a0SYgFcr2 pic.twitter.com/yrVdUVrxmV
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) May 16, 2025
More importantly, he gave Verizon’s deal an almost immediate thumbs-up.
Corporate America has struggled to figure out how to respond to the Trump administration’s direct attacks on diversity initiatives and the broader MAGA backlash to DEI. Early on, companies like Target and Costco took different approaches and got different results. Target acquiesced, and sales are down; Costco, to some extent, stood its ground, and was rewarded by customers and investors.
Telecom companies, however, are more insulated from backlash — again, they’re entrenched and already quite consolidated, and their customers are largely stuck with them. As such, they can provide, for the Trump administration, useful counterexamples and an outline of what you might call its DEIregulatory program. Companies can expect less hassle and oversight from the government except on matters of great importance to the most extreme factions of the MAGA base, the president, and a handful of ideologues assigned to weaponize various regulatory agencies. A vast bundle of regulations has been superseded by a single new regulation, which is to never officially talk about diversity except maybe to raise concerns about discrimination against white people, men, or conservatives. For an internet-service provider, this is an ugly concession that leadership might find acceptable. For other sorts of companies betting on big mergers — say, Paramount’s marriage with Skydance — a compulsory commitment to anti-wokeness could extend beyond the HR department.
What do consumers get out of this? Less recourse if they don’t like their local telecom companies. The companies get to merge, but the strange informality of these public exchanges contains an implicit threat that they could happen again, over any issue the administration chooses. For now, their flexibility is being rewarded. In the long term, as law firms and universities can already attest, it could come back to haunt them.
