Project 2025's FCC Blueprint: Consolidating Power, Silencing Voices

Project 2025's FCC chapter is a wish list for the nation's largest media conglomerates and broadband providers. It calls for eliminating net neutrality rules, which currently ensure that internet service providers cannot block, throttle, or prioritize lawful content for profit. Without these protections, ISPs gain the power to pick winners and losers online—slowing streaming services that compete with their own offerings, charging websites for faster access, or simply blocking content they don't like. This is not about innovation; it's about rent extraction from every corner of the digital economy.

The chapter also urges raising or eliminating caps on how many media outlets a single company can own. In markets already dominated by a handful of giants—Sinclair, iHeartMedia, Nexstar—this would hasten the death spiral of local journalism. When one corporation owns the local TV station, several radio outlets, and the major newspaper, the incentive to serve the community with original reporting evaporates. Instead, we get syndicated content, uniform opinion, and a shrinking civic square. Project 2025 would also strip the FCC of its ability to review mergers for the public interest, greenlighting a wave of consolidation that leaves communities voiceless.

The plan goes further: it would eliminate public participation requirements in FCC license renewals and privatize spectrum auctions, removing two of the few avenues communities have to challenge broadcasters or ensure public-airwaves revenue serves the public. On universal service, the chapter recommends restricting Lifeline—the program that helps low-income families afford phone and internet—and weakening E‑Rate, which connects schools and libraries to broadband. This is a direct attack on the most effective tools we have for closing the digital divide. Millions of students, rural patients, and working families would lose access to telehealth, remote learning, and job applications.