Commissioner of Federal Communications Commission Brendan Carr discusses how FCC funding has helped expand patient care at the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s Center for Telehealth, during a news conference at the telehealth center in Ridgeland, Miss., Thursday, April 1, 2021.
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President-elect Donald Trump has named Brendan Carr as his pick for chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the agency that oversees radio, television, and digital telecommunications. Carr could help further Trump’s goals of persecuting broadcasters who have been “unfair” to him and ending net neutrality.
Carr, who is one of the FCC’s five current commissioners, also authored the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan for Trump’s second administration. In it, Carr wrote that he wanted to ban the video-sharing app TikTok and other Chinese tech firms, prevent social media companies from censoring conservative content, allow billionaire transphobe Elon Musk and other U.S.-based investors to develop Earth- and space-based internet infrastructure, and eliminate “outdated” FCC regulations and spending policies involving private businesses.
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“[Carr] was the FCC’s General Counsel,” Trump wrote in his recent announcement. “I first nominated Commissioner Carr to the FCC in 2017, and he has been confirmed unanimously by the United States Senate three times. His current term runs through 2029… Carr is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that has stifled Americans’ Freedoms, and held back our Economy.”
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It’s worth noting that President Joe Biden also nominated Carr to continue serving on the commission in May 2023. “In his time on the Commission, Carr has focused on expanding affordable, high-speed Internet service to all Americans. Carr also leads a groundbreaking telehealth initiative at the FCC, the Connected Care Pilot Program, which supports the delivery of high-quality care to low-income Americans and veterans,” the White House wrote in an announcement about Carr’s nomination at the time.
Over the past year, Carr has expressed support for ending all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts at the FCC; targeting the Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft “censorship cartel” as well as fact-checking organizations like “the Orwellian named” NewsGuard; said that NBC should be disciplined for allowing then-presidential nominee Kamala Harris to appear in a Saturday Night Live comedy sketch in early November.
In a late October post, the tech policy blog Techdirtaccused Carr of deliberately mismanaging the FCC’s “Rural Digital Opportunity Fund,” a $20 billion fund to improve internet access in rural areas in order to reduce competition against large telecommunication companies. The blog said that Carr has since pinned the program’s failures on Biden rather than admitting his own fault.
The FCC just ordered every broadcaster to start posting a race & gender scorecard that breaks down the demographics of their workforce.
Activists lobbied for this b/c they want to see businesses pressured into hiring people based on their race & gender.
Right now, the FCC’s bipartisan five-member commission leans Democratic with a 3-2 majority under Biden. Next year, Trump will appoint a new commissioner, inevitably giving it a Republican majority.
The international law firm of Perkins Cole wrote that Trump will swiftly use the FCC to overturn Biden’s order to reinstate net neutrality, the principle that internet service providers must provide equal access to all websites and content providers without throttling connectivity or providing quicker traffic to those websites that pay for it.
Carr has voted to end net neutrality in 2017, saying the decision to end it marked a “great day for consumers, for innovation, and for freedom.”
Trump’s FCC could also seek to overturn a new rule that would require disclosure of the use of AI-generated content in political advertisements. Trump shared AI-generated content during his re-election campaign, including an image that falsely made it seem as if pop star and LGBTQ+ ally Taylor Swift supported his campaign. Swift endorsed Trump’s opponent during the campaign.
Criticizing Trump’s selection of Carr as FCC chair, Craig Aaron, the co-CEO of the media watchdog advocacy group Free Press Action, wrote, “Brendan Carr has been campaigning for this job with promises to do the bidding of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Carr doesn’t care about protecting the public interest; he got this job because he will carry out Trump and Musk’s personal vendettas.”
“While styling himself as a free-speech champion, Carr refused to stand up when Trump threatened to take away the broadcast licenses of TV stations for daring to fact check him during the campaign. This alone should be disqualifying,” Aaron added. “The public needs a watchdog looking out for them at this independent agency, not an attack dog for Trump and Musk.”
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