Brendan Carr, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for chair of the Federal Communications Commission, has called for the agency itself to clamp down on social media companies over accusations of censorship, a stance critics see as the kind of overreach that Republicans typically decry.
Carr is the senior Republican commissioner on the five-member FCC. Appointed to the body in 2017 by Trump, Carr contributed a chapter to the Heritage Foundation-led Project 2025, intended to be a blueprint for a second Trump administration but one that Trump disavowed during the campaign.
“Commissioner Carr is a warrior for Free Speech,” Trump said in a statement on Sunday. “He will end the regulatory onslaught that has been crippling America’s Job Creators and Innovators, and ensure that FCC delivers for rural America.”
Posting on X on Sunday, Carr said as FCC chair he would aim to “dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.”
Carr listed reining in Big Tech and ensuring FCC accountability and good governance as top policy priorities in the Project 2025 document. Notably, he called for the FCC to reinterpret the content moderation law known as Section 230 that allows social media companies to avoid liability for user-generated content on their platforms. This would eliminate “the expansive, non-textual immunities that courts have read into the statute,” Carr said in the Project 2025 document.
Industry groups and analysts said this view would face legal and congressional pushback while possibly hurting protections enjoyed by Trump’s own Truth Social platform.
“I don’t believe the FCC has the authority to do this,” said Adam Kovacevich, founder and CEO of Chamber of Progress, a group representing large tech firms such as Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Google LLC and Meta Platforms Inc.
Carr’s views trace back to Republican officials and lawmakers who began “laying the groundwork for this attack on Section 230 at the end of the first Trump term,” Kovacevich said in an interview. Trump issued an executive order in 2020 on preventing online censorship that directed the FCC to issue rules to that effect.
High court rulings
Kovacevich pointed to two Supreme Court decisions that could restrict the FCC’s ability in this area. One is NetChoice v. Paxton, a fight over a state social media law, in which the court in July unanimously ruled that social media content moderation is protected by the First Amendment. The second is the court’s decision to strike down the so-called Chevron doctrine, which cut back sharply on the power of federal agencies to interpret the laws they administer.
The court ruled that judges should rely on their own interpretation of ambiguous laws.
“In general, Republicans have been critical of activist agencies, but what Carr is proposing to do is to turn the FCC into an activist agency,” Kovacevich said. “And I think he’s going to run into a legal buzz saw.”
Even before he was nominated to be the next FCC chair, Carr on Nov. 14 told Big Tech CEOs, “Over the past few years, Americans have lived through an unprecedented surge in censorship. Your companies played a significant role in this improper conduct.”
A letter addressed to Sundar Pichai of Google parent company Alphabet, Tim Cook of Apple and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, and posted by Carr on X, asks for details of how their companies used NewsGuard, which provides ratings for news and information websites and tracks misinformation online.
NewsGuard is a “for profit company that operates as part of a broader censorship cartel,” Carr wrote in his letter, and he asked the CEOs to respond by Dec. 10.
Congressional panels, including the House Oversight and Accountability Committee and the House Small Business Committee, have been investigating NewsGuard over restricting free speech and influencing the online advertising market, Carr noted.
Even if Carr’s plan falls short, “there will definitely be use of the bully pulpit writ large both by the [Trump] administration, and Republicans in Congress to pressure social media companies not to moderate content in ways that conservatives view as biased or contrary to Republican interests,” one senior executive of a free speech nonprofit group said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid recriminations.
Social media companies, including Meta, have accommodated Republican pressures, the executive said, referring to the company’s decision to reduce content moderation on its platforms during the recent election.
Broadband access
Carr also has spoken out against the Biden administration’s program to expand high-speed internet across the country, mainly in rural areas.
Congress in the 2021 infrastructure law appropriated $65 billion to expand high-speed internet access across the country. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration at the Commerce Department got about $49 billion of that. The FCC got $14.2 billion to help provide affordable internet access, and the Agriculture Department received $2 billion to extend the internet in rural areas.
Testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology in July, Carr said the broadband expansion program “puts partisan political goals ahead of smart policy.” He said the program is mired in red tape while it advances a wish list of progressive policy goals in areas of climate, diversity, price controls and preferences for government-run networks, noting that no one has been connected to the internet with those dollars.
The NTIA, which administers the program, has been evaluating and accepting proposals from states and territories for grants. The agency said on Nov. 15 that it had approved initial proposals from 55 out of 56 entities from states and territories, with Texas being the only state with a proposal still under evaluation.
The nonprofit executive noted, however, that the Biden administration broadband expansion benefits a lot of Republican constituents, “because the places that don’t have [internet] access are by and large rural areas that are Republican supporters.”
Carr has instead promoted Elon Musk’s satellite-based Starlink internet connection as an alternative to the Biden plan, and he has pushed the FCC to provide subsidies to the satellite company.
Net neutrality
Carr’s elevation to be chair of the FCC also would likely reopen the debate on net neutrality.
In April, the FCC under the current Democratic Chair Jessica Rosenworcel restored the principle of net neutrality, classifying broadband internet access service as a telecommunications service, arguing that is the best reading of U.S. law.
At the urging of Republican lawmakers, including Ohio Rep. Bob Latta, a contender to chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Carr testified in July that such a classification of broadband providers was unnecessary.
“This regulatory onslaught from Washington is only just further increasing costs in an already inflationary environment,” Carr said. “So we are a headwind right now to these efforts.”
Carr ought to focus his attention on improving high-speed internet access and restoring the FCC’s spectrum auction authority, the Information Technology Innovation Foundation, a technology policy think tank, said in a statement.
“As Chairman, Carr should be careful to keep the FCC in its lane,” the organization said. “An agenda of careful adherence to the limited jurisdiction of the FCC will be essential. Expanding the regulatory state to go after ‘big tech’ or other partisan political targets would be out of sync with the new administration’s mandate.”
