Trump’s pick to run FCC is an ominous sign for Big Tech
2 Desember 2024
8 3 minutes read
The country’s tech titans might need to start fortifying defenses against the agenda of incoming Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr.
Carr made that clear in the hour after Trump announced his ascension to the FCC chairmanship seat last month.
“We must dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans,” Carr said on X, the social media platform.
Just days before he got that chairmanship appointment, Carr sent letters to Google (GOOG, GOOG) CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella, Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple (APPL) CEO Tim Cook predicting “broad ranging actions to restore Americans’ First Amendment rights” once Trump takes office.
That might include “a review of your companies’ activities as well as third-party organizations and groups that have acted to curtail those rights,” according to a copy of the letter Carr posted to X.
Many tech CEOs are trying to establish a good relationship with the incoming Trump administration, hoping to improve their standing in the nation’s capital after years of aggressive oversight and antitrust lawsuits. Last week, for example, Zuckerberg met face-to-face with Trump at his Florida hotel and club Mar-a-Lago.
Carr has long called for a focus on reining in Big Tech. He has accused Alphabet-owned Google of manipulating search results and demonizing YouTube users, Meta-owned Facebook of inconsistently tinkering with user content, and Chinese-owned TikTok of jeopardizing national security.
Carr has also outlined his vision for a remake of the FCC in a right-of-center policy proposal known as Project 2025. Trump distanced himself from that document during the 2024 presidential campaign.
One specific focus for a new Republican-oriented FCC, Carr said in Project 2025, should be to do away with legal immunity known as Section 230 protection that insulates social media companies from liability when they police third party content.
Carr said dominant technology corporations abuse their dominant market position and Section 230’s legal protection to “drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square.”
“Today, a handful of corporations can shape everything from the information we consume to the places we shop,” Carr wrote in the chapter he authored on the FCC.
Federal Communications Commission commissioner Brendan Carr while testifying in June 2020 before a Senate committee. Alex Wong/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo ·Reuters / Reuters
“They are not simply prevailing in the free market; they are taking advantage of a landscape that has been skewed—in many cases by the government—to favor their business models.”
As a remedy, Carr said Congress should not only remove “carte blanche” Section 230 immunity but also impose transparency rules similar to those that imposed on broadband providers.
That would require social media platforms to publish more specific terms of service and operate an appeals process for content creators to challenge companies that take down their posts.
Fight for the Future, a nonprofit group that advocates for online privacy, expressed concerns in an email to Yahoo Finance that Carr would upend net neutrality rules, which require internet service providers (ISPs) to treat all data on the Internet equally.
Carr voted to end net neutrality rules in 2017.
Carr in Project 2025 also said the FCC should do more to protect Americans against already identified national and personal security threats posed by the social media app TikTok, and telecommunication equipment manufacturers, Huawei and ZTE.
TikTok’s platform, Carr said, provides Beijing “with an opportunity to run a foreign influence campaign” by curating news and information seen by millions of Americans.
Congress and President Joe Biden agreed months ago to outlaw TikTok from operating in the US under Chinese ownership. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration ·REUTERS / Reuters
Congress and President Joe Biden agreed months ago to outlaw TikTok from operating in the US under Chinese ownership.
However, Trump’s statements on the campaign trail suggested he may at least try to lessen the impact of a law signed by Biden in April that makes Chinese ownership of the app illegal.
Carr also has called for the FCC to do a better job at updating its “covered list” of telecommunications equipment manufactures that pose a risk to US national security, Carr said.
Huawei and ZTE are included in that list. And a loophole, he said, should be closed so that companies like China Telecom, cannot operate unregulated data centers in the US.
Carr has said Big Tech should pay its “fair share” into the FCC’s $9 billion universal service fund that subsidizes affordable Internet and rural connectivity programs.
Instead of relying on telecommunications consumers for the bulk of its funding, he said, Big Tech should pay because the federally supported networks are used to deliver the company products and services.
