Carr, another win to Musk, and gut punch to Big Tech

President-elect Donald Trump said he would appoint Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Brendan Carr as chair, delivering another win to ally Elon Musk and a gut punch to Big Tech.

Carr has frequently gone to bat for Musk, asserting in 2023 that the FCC and six other agencies were participating in “regulatory harassment” under President Joe Biden.

So far this year, Carr has repeatedly criticized his fellow commissioners for rejecting Starlink’s application for $855 million in rural broadband subsidies, slammed Brazil for its crackdown on Musk’s X, and accused a Ukrainian nonprofit group of trying to weaponize the government against Musk. That group had asked the FCC to investigate revoking Starlink’s licensing over Musk’s behavior, pointing to his track record in the Russia-Ukraine War and drug use.

“I understand the focus on Musk is on a lot of people’s minds in the media space and otherwise,” Carr told Politico in October, pushing back against the idea he overly favors Musk. “But I feel like my own conduct and my amount of posting on social media and the style and the type is pretty consistent with what I’ve done for the last four years.”

Carr told Politico that he wants the government to be more present in fostering the expansion of Starlink as well as its satellite broadband rivals; Amazon for one, is spending as much as $20 billion on its own network of satellites. He also said he thinks “it would be fair” to get Starlink back into the FCC’s broadband program, which was allocated $42 billion by the Biden administration.

“Commissioner Carr is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that has stifled Americans’ Freedoms, and held back our Economy,” Trump said in a statement, adding that he will “ensure that the FCC delivers for rural America.”

Carr, who was appointed to the FCC by Trump in 2017, has been a frequent critic of large tech companies and their influence. On Sunday, he called for the dismantling of the “censorship cartel,” referring to tech companies like Meta that rely on third-party fact-checkers. Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts replied by naming it an implicit threat against private companies.

Carr was a contributor to the conservative Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” an initiative that developed a blueprint for the next Republican president to overhaul the federal government, and wrote the section discussing the FCC. In it, Carr listed four priorities, including “reining in Big Tech” and ensuring that the FCC is held accountable.

“These corporate behemoths are not merely exercising market power; they are abusing dominant positions,” Carr wrote. “They are not simply prevailing in the free market; they are taking advantage of a landscape that has been skewed — in many cases by the government — to favor their business models over those of their competitors.”

Carr outlined a series of steps for the FCC to take, including reforms of Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, which protects online service providers and consumers from being legally treated as publishers of users’ posts. He would update the provision to limit Big Tech’s immunity and prevent companies from censoring posts as long as they don’t include illegal content.

Carr wants to allow consumers to choose their own fact-checkers and content filters. He also proposed that social media companies should make their process for taking down content transparent, pointing to YouTube’s decisions to demonetize creators, which has become a lightning rod for conservative criticism online.

One area where he and Trump likely differ is what they want to do about TikTok, the social media company owned by China’s ByteDance. Carr wants to ban the app, writing that it gives the Chinese government the means to run a foreign influence campaign. Although Trump initially favored a ban during his first term in office, he joined the platform in June, and his campaign used it as a tool to reach younger audiences.

GOP megadonor and ByteDance investor Jeff Yass has courted Trump and Congressional Republicans, meeting with Trump in March. That same month, Trump said he still believed TikTok to be a national security risk but didn’t want to ban it since that would help Meta’s Facebook and “Zuckerschmuck,” referring to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Trump has claimed he and Yass didn’t discuss ByteDance. Quartz