Brendan Carr, whom President-elect Donald Trump has nominated to chair the Federal Communications Commission, has already laid out his plan for the agency.
As a contributor to the controversial Project 2025 policy playbook, Carr said he intends to investigate and regulate Big Tech; ban TikTok and expand the Cover List — communications equipment and services the FCC believes pose a national security risk; revise Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (1996), a law that provides internet platforms like Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google legal protection from third-party content; roll back net neutrality rules; and force Big Tech to pay for rural broadband expansion. (The FCC would require an act of Congress to impose changes to tech platforms.)
A particular hot-button issue for Carr and other conservatives has been claims of censorship by content moderators at Facebook and Twitter (before Elon Musk acquired it, changed its rules, and renamed it X).
In a recent letter to the CEOs of Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc., Carr predicted the incoming Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Congress will “take broad ranging actions to restore” Americans’ First Amendment rights, “and those actions can include both a review of your companies’ activities as well as third-party organizations and groups that have acted to curtail those rights.”
“Congress should do so by ensuring that Internet companies no longer have carte blanche to censor protected speech while maintaining their Section 230 protections,” Carr wrote in Project 2025.
As FCC chair, Carr could also grant billions of dollars in federal subsidies to ally Musk’s Starlink satellite-internet service, as Politico reported last month. He contends the agency should quicken the pace it reviews and approves satellite launch applications for Starlink and Amazon.com Inc.’s Kuiper to ensure American companies control the future of space-based internet. Still, Carr told Politico he would handle such funding situations even handedly.
“Under Carr, the FCC will likely drop its net neutrality push and deprioritize some of the consumer-related issues the FCC was working on,” Armand Musey, president and founder of consultancy Summit Ridge Group, said in an email. “Expect the satellite industry, especially SpaceX, to benefit at least from faster approvals of matters currently before the FCC.”
Robert Hawthorne, president of Hawthorne Search, said Carr is “big” on building 5G networks and beefing up community college programs to bolster the labor market.
In naming Carr, Trump called the commissioner a “warrior for Free Speech [who] has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that has stifled America’s freedoms, and held back our Economy. He will end the regulatory onslaught that has been crippling America’s Job Creators and Innovators, and ensure that the FCC delivers for rural America,” Trump said in a statement. Trump appointed Carr to the FCC in 2017.
During the presidential campaign, Trump pressed the FCC to strip the broadcasting licenses of TV networks for various reasons. Carr agreed with Trump, for example, that NBC violated the “equal time rule” when it allowed his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, to make an appearance on SNL.
“This is a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule,” Carr said in a post on X. “The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct — a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election.”
