“Most Americans are not able to get the data that they need to keep themselves safe,” says Mark Lloyd, the associate general counsel and chief diversity officer at the FCC in 2009-2012. Lloyd, also an author, An Emmy Award-winning journalist and A Professor of Communications at USC’s Annenberg School, discusses with Robert Scheer media consolidation and consumer protection during this week episode of KCRW’s “Scheer Intelligence.”
Lloyd has written for Truthdig about media consolidation and the communications drawbacks happening in America, and he expands on these ideas in his discussion with Scheer.
This communications drawback has started “before Trump,” Lloyd says. He explains how a lack of effective telecommunication affects health, finances and other important factors of Americans’ lives.
“In the U.S., our priorities are to make sure that citizens are making money in communications,” Lloyd continues, “and not making sure that people are safe with the communications devices and services that they use.”
“So we’re not even talking about whether they’re being informed about trading with China or the war in Syria,” Scheer notes. “We’re talking about, actually, what are they need for their well-being of their lives.”
The two go on to discuss the FCC, where Lloyd once worked as a lawyer. Lloyd explained that, while at the FCC, he tried to make communications services available to all—but then the 2016 elections happened.
He goes on to break down the current battle over net neutrality:
The challenge is that organizations like Google, like Netflix, like Facebook—they don’t really provide you with internet services. What they provide you with is the entertainment, with the application that you need to search the internet, with your ability to connect with your friends and things like that because you’re connected to an application or their service. Internet service providers—Comcast, AT&T, Verizon—those folks actually provide you with internet service. That’s where the rubber meets the road. So Google, Facebook, these other companies, they don’t want to have to pay any more than they have to have access to you.
Lloyd also explains the constitutional origins of U.S. communications and delves into media consolidations in the U.S.
“There’s nothing radically new here,” Lloyd says of the Trump administration’s stance on net neutrality and consumer protection. “The big challenge is that we have an FCC that is not really even looking at the impact of media consolidation, on what it means to local communities.”
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