Brendan Carr’s nomination for Federal Communications Commission chair by President-elect Donald Trump resurfaces old fights over speech, regulation of communications providers, and net neutrality, but with a catch. Carr says he will take the fight to its proper battlefield: Silicon Valley.
The intangible nature of the FCC’s regulation of broadcast airwaves and other means by which Americans communicate — the internet chief among them — obscures from debates over such issues as net neutrality the more serious threats Americans have faced in exercising their rights to free speech.
That threat has come in the form of censorship from major tech platforms such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and before Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, that platform as well.
Those platforms enjoy, functionally, monopolistic dominance, and both massive license and protection from the government that shield platforms from liability for content users publish. That dynamic has crystallized over the past four years as it became apparent major tech platforms also served as its de facto censorship arm.
Carr has already notified tech companies the fight is coming to their door.
Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft & others have played central roles in the censorship cartel.
The Orwellian named NewsGuard along with “fact checking” groups & ad agencies helped enforce one-sided narratives.
The censorship cartel must be dismantled. pic.twitter.com/Xf0sEYOUfv
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) November 15, 2024
Left media has latched on to Carr’s association with Project 2025, for which he penned a chapter on the FCC. But in Carr’s case, the left media apparatus’ kvetching over his being a Trump appointee is a panic over the likely loss of cover Google, Twitter (under previous ownership), and Facebook, and others provided through censorship.
Net neutrality has dominated policy see-saws over the previous 15 years, primarily over whether ISPs could throttle traffic to some content, a debate on which Big Tech companies made their voice known. But the question of whether ISPs are regulated, which has its own implications, has kept the heat off Silicon Valley.
As for tech platforms, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the aegis under which they enjoy protection from liability of content users publish. Should tech platforms enjoy such protections if they also curtail Americans’ exercising their right to free speech? And, if they themselves edit, ban, censor, or qualify users’ content, should they continue to be immune from liability, especially if censorship might prohibit users from making fully informed choices?
The litany of banned content and users being booted from major tech platforms have had grave downstream implications: Facebook’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story likely changed the outcome of the 2020 election.
The Covid pandemic spawned a new era of censorship as platforms quelled dissent over lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
Spotify very nearly stands alone among major streaming and publishing platforms in the COVID era for allowing dissenting views on both the origins of the virus and safety of mRNA vaccines in continuing to stream Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, which now dwarfs cable news audiences. Rogan interviewed leading doctors and scientists who questioned dominant Covid narratives.
The Covid censorship push saw platforms publish qualifying statements lauding the safety of vaccines and importance of relying on official sources for information about the virus. Their censorship and offering “context” came as the Biden-Harris administration spent a billion taxpayer dollars flooding platforms and airwaves with vaccine misinformation.
Today, on X, formerly known as Twitter, the free speech environment to which Elon Musk has remained committed, has seen an exodus of leftwing and Democrat figures. An alternative platform, Bluesky has collected many X expatriates, though the app has been flooded with demands for censorship from its own users, highlighting the leftist ecosystem’s reliance on stifling speech.
Google’s politicization of search does a lot of heavy-lifting, staking firm boundaries of users’ search results, but also makes the web virtually unusable.
States did their part during Covid: Michigan joined the censorship push, and neighboring Ohio waded into the misinformation game with the Biden-Harris administration.
What Carr called a “censorship cartel” in Big Tech has had pressure from Biden’s White House, too.
The sanitized information environment, which has contributed little to users’ actually being informed, also provides cover for local and state media’s gloss over the prevailing issues.
In other words, if major tech platforms, local media in the form of cover from an otherwise compromised information environment, and state and federal government entities are all in on the game, Carr’s FCC will have its work cut out for it.
