Commentary Trump Taps Project 2025 Author to Head FCC

 

Commentary

Trump Taps Project 2025 Author to Head FCC

• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, Yesterday

President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr, a Republican who opposes regulating broadband providers but wants to police social media companies, to lead the agency.

Among his most significant anti-regulatory stances, Carr dissented from the FCC's April decision to restore the Obama-era net neutrality rules, which prohibit broadband providers from blocking traffic and from charging higher fees for prioritized delivery.

He argued at the time that the “real abusers of gatekeeper power” weren't broadband providers, but “Big Tech companies at the application layer” -- meaning companies like YouTube and Facebook. (Net neutrality advocates have long countered that people have choices when it comes to social media; for instance, people who don't like X's algorithms can join Bluesky.)

Carr also dissented from other moves championed by the FCC's Democrats -- including decisions to fine wireless carriers for sharing users' geolocation data, redefine broadband as connections of at least 100 Mbps, and impose new data breach rules on telecocms.

Carr, an author of the conservative Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, also has famously blasted tech companies for supposedly suppressing right-wing views.

“We must dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans,” he tweeted on Sunday.

How would Carr go about this? He floated several ideas in Project 2025 -- including that the FCC should encourage Congress to follow Texas's lead by passing a law prohibiting social media platforms from removing or suppressing lawful posts based on viewpoint.

After Project 2025 was published, the Supreme Court addressed Texas's law -- and left little doubt that the content moderation provisions are unconstitutional.

The First Amendment “does not go on leave when social media are involved,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in an opinion issued this summer.

“This Court has many times held, in many contexts, that it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression -- to 'un-bias' what it thinks biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences,” she wrote. “That principle works for social-media platforms as it does for others.”

Yet, Carr continues to criticize tech companies for exercising their First Amendment right to moderate content.

On Friday, he said in a letter to the CEOs of Google, Meta, Apple and Microsoft that their companies had “played significant roles” in what he deemed an “unprecedented surge in censorship.”

He went on accuse the companies of participating in a “censorship cartel” that included advertising and fact-checking organizations. (While Carr didn't name any specific advertising groups, the claims seem reminiscent of ones made by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee against the World Federation of Advertisers' now-shuttered Global Alliance for Responsible Media.)

This letter is already alarming digital rights advocates who rightly point out that the government would itself engage in censorship by controlling content moderation policies.

“Far from defending the First Amendment, this is what censorship looks like: a regulator implicitly threatening private companies for their speech,” Senator Ed Markey said Sunday night in a post on X. “The FCC under Trump is prepared to become the Federal Censorship Commission. We can't let that happen.”

On Monday, the digital rights group Public Knowledge separately raised concerns that some of Carr's views -- including ones expressed in Project 2025 -- bring a “threat of arbitrariness and political motivations” into the agency.

“For almost a century, the FCC has been the expert agency on communications networks, mostly dealing with the wires and public airwaves – not online speech,” Chris Lewis, President and CEO, stated.