Brendan Carr is the author of the chapter in The Mandate for Leadership concerning the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). He is described on the FCC’s website as the senior Republican commissioner of the FCC and as “having served previously as the FCC’s General Counsel.” Further, he has been “nominated by both President Trump and President Biden” and “has been confirmed unanimously by the Senate three times.” He has previously worked as an attorney.
In the chapter on the FCC, Carr points out that by tradition the FCC commission has a majority of commissioners who belong to the same political party as the president. If Project 2025 comes to pass, therefore, it would be reasonable to expect that control of the FCC would pass to conservative Republicans. In order to understand what may result from that, a review of some of the issues at stake is in order.
Two items of immediate concern in such an instance would be 1) interpretation and enforcement of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and 2) net neutrality. Both of these items have been matters of contention. Another area of contention is rate setting for internet service providers (ISPs), including government programs that subsidize or enforce lower rates for rural and low-income customers. One last area of contention has been the building of infrastructure to allow for greater internet access in rural areas. While funds have been approved for this, as of this writing the building has not yet started.
As access to the internet has gone from “nice” to “necessary” for such things as interacting with the government to applying for jobs, partisanship has unfortunately taken hold of debates concerning these issues. It should come as no surprise that a Project 2025 backer such as Carr has been quite partisan.
Section 230
As the internet society puts it: “Since the 1990s, Section 230 has protected [ISPs]—and individuals—from significant legal liability for illegal content posted online by other people.” Given how the internet works, this is quite reasonable. Anyone can create a website and use it to publish content, and many websites allow people to publish content on those sites. It therefore seems unreasonable to hold an ISP responsible for the actions of someone else.
The electronic frontier foundation (EFF) puts it this way: “When harmful speech takes place, it’s the speaker that should be held responsible, not the service that hosts the speech.”
There are caveats, however. ISPs are expected to police themselves regarding some content, for example child sex abuse material and content that facilitates sex trafficking. The EFF writes: “Section 230’s protections are not absolute. It does not protect companies that violate federal criminal law. It does not protect companies that create illegal or harmful content. Nor does Section 230 protect companies from intellectual property claims.”
In addition to liability protections, Section 230 allows for content moderation by site operators. The EFF observes: “Section 230 allows for web operators, large and small, to moderate user speech and content as they see fit.”
This all may seem like a reasonable balance of freedom and censorship. After all, a newspaper or publisher is not obliged to print whatever someone wants it to print, and while Section 230 gives freedom of speech considerable deference, some speech is illegal. Nonetheless, both liberals and conservatives have found problems with Section 230. As the Columbia Journalism Review puts it: “Conservative politicians say the law—which shields online services from liability for the content they host—allows social networks like Twitter and Facebook to censor right-wing voices, while liberals say Section 230 gives the social platforms an excuse not to remove offensive speech and disinformation.”
For example, for a time Twitter famously banned Donald Trump from its platform for violations of its terms of service, which prohibited, among other things, incitement of violence.
Since Carr is a conservative, an examination of the issues that conservatives have with Section 230 enforcement is in order. In an opinion piece in Newsweek titled “A Conservative Path Forward on Big Tech”, Carr writes: “As to Big Tech, there are some on the Right who see no problems worth addressing or believe that any form of government-imposed accountability would do more harm than good. We must accept the status quo, they say, or reject the limited government, free market principles that conservatives stand for. This is a false choice, of course.”
Is it really a false choice, or does Carr simply not want to admit that he favors abandoning the limited government principle and allowing the government to put its thumb on the scale to pressure ISPs to think twice about censoring, for example, conservative calls for violence, conservative hate speech, or conservative disinformation?
Carr continues: “Right now, Facebook and Twitter bring in outside “fact checkers” (read: political actors) to provide their takes on your posts. Why not let the consumer decide? If you want MSNBC, Fox News or any other entity to filter your feed, click that box. If you want an unfiltered, Wild West timeline, choose that option.” This argument conveniently ignores the fact that internet hosts, including Twitter and Facebook, have shown considerable willingness to tolerate highly questionable content posted by conservatives. Also, of course, conservatives have entire sections of the internet that moderates (aka censors) content to their liking. In short, conservative complaints about being censored by big tech are highly disingenuous at best and overblown.
Another issue to consider is what might happen if Project 2025 comes to pass. The Mandate for Leadership, for example, implicitly labels LGBT content, and especially content concerning transgender people, as illegally obscene. If Project 2025 moves from a plan to reality, would whole swaths of content be deemed illegal and thus not subject to Section 230’s protection from liability? If the wave of book bans and library censorship laws in the 2020s–spearheaded by conservatives–is any indication, the answer to that question is yes.
Net neutrality
A definition of net neutrality may be found here: It is “a national standard by which we ensure that broadband internet service is treated as an essential service. It prohibits internet service providers from blocking, throttling, or engaging in paid prioritization of lawful content.”
The Verge observes: “FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, a Republican who staunchly opposes the agency taking up net neutrality through Title II reclassification, argued during the agency’s open meeting that the move is a symptom of a larger issue. He said the maneuver is an example of how judicial deference to federal agency authority in cases where the law is ambiguous has incentivized the executive branch to engage in ‘pressure campaigns’ to have agencies do their bidding.” (Project 2025 is all about fostering conservative pressure campaigns to make agencies do the bidding of conservatives.)
Net neutrality is widely popular with consumers. Nevertheless, the FCC under Trump, led by Ajit Pai, took steps to rescind net neutrality, with Carr’s support. While the two did not frame their arguments in this way, it may be stated plainly that conservatives generally favor corporate interests over those of consumers. Frankly, Carr’s statement that ending net neutrality marked “a great day for consumers” is dubious indeed.
When the FCC reversed the Trump administration’s decision and restored net neutrality, consumers’ advocates were pleased. As CBS news writes: “Consumer advocates cheered the reversal, with advocacy group Fight for the Future calling it a win for activists and civil rights groups who have argued that the regulation is needed to ensure telecom companies treat customers equally…..Republican commissioners at the FCC also derided the new rules, with one, Brendan Carr, declaring ‘the internet in America has thrived in the absence of 1930s command-and-control regulation by the government.’”
Broadband
Carr’s partisanship has not only put him at odds with consumer advocates of net neutrality. He has also spoken critically of Biden administration efforts to expand the reach of broadband internet to rural and poor communities.
As the Hill recounts in an article titled “Republicans rip Biden’s broadband policy at FCC hearing:” “’The Biden administration has chosen partisan ideology over smart policy,’ Commissioner Brendan Carr (R) said. ‘Indeed, almost three years into this administration, a clear pattern has emerged. The Biden administration’s entire approach to the Internet — its broadband agenda, if you will — can be boiled down to one word: control.’”
Rural Internet
Carr has also been critical of the slow implementation of a Biden administration program of building up rural internet infrastructure. (Many of Carr’s tweets harp on this issue.) Higher Ground Times writes: “The slow pace of funding allocation and compliance will push the project start dates for modernizing rural internet access to 2025 and 2026, according to a timeline officials outlined in a House budget hearing. Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr said the program’s goal of providing high-speed internet to most underserved areas will not be fully realized until 2030, nine years after its enactment….’There hasn’t been a single shovel’s worth of dirt that has even been turned towards connecting people,’ Mr. Carr said.” Carr has cited various reasons for the slow rollout, including some that may be directly attributable to Biden administration policy regarding implementation. For example, a preference for hiring union workers, who are scarce in rural areas and consideration of climate-related risks.
Whether the construction of rural internet infrastructure could be facilitated by cooperation and compromise rather than finger pointing, as is also the case with immigration and border security, seems to have escaped consideration of conservatives—at least sometimes. It is safe to say that the public interest could better be served by cooperation and compromise between conservatives and liberals. Project 2025, however, views the government as overcome by an institutional liberal bias and in need of a radical, uncompromising shift toward its version of conservatism. This does not bode well at all for fair-minded, equitable governance.
