Verizon CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath Gives Predictably Wimpy Response To Being Bullied By Radical Trump FCC

For decades, telecom giants like Verizon reacted hysterically every single time the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) tried to do anything to protect consumers or hold telecom giants accountable. I spent decades covering it as a telecom policy reporter.

Whether privacy rules or popular net neutrality rules, Verizon (and its lobbying proxies at various think tanks) insisted that these modest, loophole-filled efforts were “radical government overreach.” Even government efforts to create accurate broadband map data, or make sure poor people could afford broadband were treated as government extremism and greeted with endless whining and lawsuit after lawsuit. I can’t overstate how obnoxiously whiney Verizon has been about oversight, historically.

Fast forward to 2025, the FCC is actually now radical, and Verizon is just, apparently, a helpless little baby.

Verizon is one of several companies being “investigated” by Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr for not being racist enough for Donald Trump’s liking. Carr is openly crowing about how he’s abusing FCC authority and the merger approval process to stifle the First Amendment, take a giant dump all over journalism, censor critics, and harass private companies that aren’t suitably deferential to our mad king.

You know, truly historically radical behavior. Like nothing the U.S. has ever seen before.

Verge Editor-In-Chief Nilay Patel recently sat down with Verizon CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath. The interview has some interesting bits, including Sampath just openly lying about net neutrality (at one point he insists net neutrality supporters just “don’t know how networks work,” despite many early critics being network engineers and networking academics.)

But Patel also presses Sampath on the feckless hypocrisy involved in Verizon completely freaking out about pretty basic U.S. consumer protection efforts for decades, but treating radical Trump authoritarianism as just another day at the office. Sampath’s response is just about as feckless as you’d expect:

Do you think that you’ll fight that as vociferously as you fought net neutrality?

It goes down to the rule of law. Whatever the rule is.

Do you think the FCC commissioner has the authority to tell you how to hire and fire inside your company?

It goes back to the rules and regulations that the administration puts in place. They have certain rules, they work through it, and we have to follow the rules of the way it lays itself out. That’s all we are going to work towards: a constructive dialogue with Chairman Carr on that piece, and we’ll continue to deliver that. But at the end of the day, I want the best talent pool for my company. I will do anything that is needed to get the best operators, the best marketers, and the best network operators in the world for Verizon to do that piece. I’m walking away from that. I’m going to follow that. In the process, I have to follow rules and regulations — we’ll do that. And if there are some changes that have to be made, we will make those changes. But let’s not forget, this is about getting the best talent from us, and we are not walking away one minute from that mission.

Literally, just a few days before we’re talking, I think T-Mobile closed the deal to do a JV on some fiber initiative. But to get there, they had to delete the word diversity from a bunch of its web pages. Is that the level of meddling that you’re willing to accept?

We are still working with the FCC on what the rules are. How we develop the rules. How we execute the rules on that. It’s a work in progress right now. We are still working through that. But look, at the end of the day, we’re going to have to follow the rules of the land. We did that before, we’ve done that. We’re going to do that after that. This is just one of those pieces, we’re going to have to follow the rules that are there.

I want to be very clear, I’m being very explicit about this. When the government passed net neutrality rules, it wasn’t, “We have to follow the rules of the land.” It was, “We are going to file lawsuits for a decade to get out of these rules because we think they’re dumb.” And in this case, you’re saying Brendan Carr, who has been openly censorious, openly chilling of speech, openly hostile to companies because they have diversity initiatives — you’re saying you just have to follow his rules?

We have to follow the rules of the land. I don’t think those are his rules. They are the rules of the land and administration —

Are you going to file a decade’s worth of lawsuits about these rules?

We don’t know. We’re going to work constructively with them to follow the rules that are needed. But at the end of the day… Look, our role is to the stakeholders that we have. My stakeholders are my shareholders, my customers, my employees, and society at large. We have to manage, and we are going to deliver to those stakeholders what’s needed for us, and we will do whatever is needed with the administration to deliver to all the stakeholders. When you run a large company our size, you have to balance the different stakeholders, and we will balance those stakeholders. We’ve done it extremely well in the last 25 years that we’ve been Verizon, and we’ll continue to do that going forward.

So you see, basic consumer protections require endless freaking out and lawsuits. Years and years of whining about the radical over-reach of government. But a genuinely rabid, authoritarian FCC emerges that abuses the agency’s authority to harass private companies, censor the press, and create absolute havoc across markets, and Verizon is just all shucks, shrugs, and giggles.

Of course Sampath is stuck in a box. He loves Carr’s mindless butchery of all remaining FCC consumer protection standards. He also loves tax cuts. And he wants Verizon’s $20 billion merger with Frontier approved. So like so many large companies now (including many major media companies) Verizon’s response to actual, radical authoritarianism is just a sort of feckless fucking mush.

I suspect that in a year or two, once companies get their tax cuts, regulators are irreparably destroyed, and all big mergers are approved, you’ll start to see something faintly resembling backbone among some companies and executives in response to the coming chaos and bloodshed. But until then it’s very clear that most major companies and executives are keen on being absolute fucking cowards in the face of an unprecedented, existential threat.