President-elect Trump’s proposed Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair Brendan Carr will likely draw the most attention for his promised crackdown on what he calls a social media “censorship cartel”—but Carr is also likely to lead another deregulatory push at the agency.
On Nov. 17, Trump announced he would push for Carr (one of three Republicans on the five-member FCC board) to officially head the FCC. Carr is well known for his view that the FCC should assume a far larger role in regulating social media, but he also wrote a chapter outlining his plans for the agency in Project 2025, a series of controversial policy proposals by the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank.
In a recent letter to the CEOs of Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, according to CNN, Carr wrote the Trump administration and Congress may “take broad ranging actions to restore” free speech online, such as a “review of your companies’ activities, as well as third-party organizations and groups that have acted to curtail those rights.”
He’s also called for the revocation of Section 230, an oft-misunderstood law that shields online publishers from most liability over user-generated content and moderation choices. Trump and Republicans in Congress have often criticized Section 230, in part because it allegedly provides a fast-track method for social media sites to have suits brought by angry users dismissed.
But the FCC’s mainstay is telecommunications regulation, and on that front, here are some of the proposals that Carr has floated so far:
- Rolling back regulations that restrict media conglomerates from further consolidating TV stations.
- Requiring tech firms to help subsidize the Universal Service Fund, which funds broadband access across the US (which could be contentious in Congress).
- Rolling back net neutrality rules, which the FCC restored in April 2024 and are currently facing a court battle.
- “Eliminating many of the heavy-handed FCC regulations” and “creating a market-friendly regulatory environment,” per his Project 2025 chapter, which critics have interpreted as a prelude to the elimination of broadband consumer protection rules.
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As CIO.com noted, Republican administrations have also generally been more permissive of mergers throughout the telecommunications and communications sectors, which directly influences the cost and availability of services to enterprises.
Industry responses to Carr’s nomination have been mixed, to say the least. Kieren McCarthy, executive director of the International Foundation for Online Responsibility, told CIO.com that Trump nominated Carr for his “willingness to say black is white and up is down whenever required and an aggressive confidence in the face of logic and precedent.”
Gigi Sohn, co-founder of the nonprofit Public Knowledge and a onetime Democratic candidate for FCC chair under Joe Biden’s administration, tweeted that “We may not agree on everything (or much of anything!), but he is highly qualified and a good guy.”
Whatever impact Carr has at the agency will take some time to materialize, however. The FCC board is currently controlled by a 3–2 Democratic majority, and Trump won’t have the opportunity to appoint a new member until next year.