Headline and text from article:
The Wall Street Journal Applauds Republicans’ Corrupt, Illegal Theft Of Billions In Taxpayer Dollars
Tue, Dec 30th 2025 05:27am - Karl Bode
I’ve written repeatedly about how Republicans effectively rewrote the 2021 infrastructure bill (they voted against) to ensure that billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded broadband grants (intended to be spent on affordable, next-generation fiber) was stolen from local communities, and instead given to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos for expensive, congested satellite service.
I’ve also explained in detail why that’s a problem: These networks may be initially cheaper to deploy, but the networks lack the capacity to actually scale to meet demand. Data indicates they harm astronomy research and the ozone layer. They’re ultimately more expensive for consumers than fiber deployments, especially if those fiber deployments are by cooperatives or community owned.
In short, taxpayer money directed toward Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is also money directed away from higher-capacity, faster, locally-owned (and usually cheaper) fiber and wireless alternatives. And it’s money given to billionaires for technology they already had deployed or would have deployed anyway. It’s a coordinated hijacking of taxpayer money that will actually undermine affordable internet access.
Enter the Wall Street Journal editorial board, which aggressively lies about all of this all of this in a new, comically terrible editorial....
![A quote from an article in the New York Review of Books: "He [Tim Berners-Lee] urges us to walk away from Facebook and X in exchange for “something pro-human”—decentralized platforms like Mastodon, a user-controlled, open-source alternative in the so-called Fediverse. One virtue of the Fediverse, as [Cory] Doctorow also emphasizes, is that users can move freely from one server or community to another without losing their friends and followers.](https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/115/562/142/000/099/640/original/6ad7b5e4b49e3f74.jpg)