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Communications United States

Brendan Carr is Officially in Charge of the FCC (theverge.com) 68

Posted by msmash from the beginning-of-a-new-era dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Brendan Carr is now formally the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, giving him the power to set the agency's agenda and usher through a host of regulations with major implications for the tech and media industries as soon as he has a Republican majority. In a statement, Carr named a few areas of focus: "issues ranging from tech and media regulation to unleashing new opportunities for jobs and growth through agency actions on spectrum, infrastructure, and the space economy."

Carr's priorities might also be gleaned from a document you might have already heard about: Project 2025. That's because he authored the FCC chapter of the Heritage Foundation's wishlist for a Donald Trump presidency. In that chapter, Carr proposes actions including: limiting immunity for tech companies under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, requiring disclosures about how platforms prioritize content, requiring tech companies to pay into a program that funds broadband access in rural areas, and more, quickly approving applications to launch satellites from companies like Elon Musk's Starlink.

Brendan Carr is Officially in Charge of the FCC More | Reply

Brendan Carr is Officially in Charge of the FCC

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  • Unpossible! (Score:4, Informative)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @09:51AM (#65105863)

    I was assured by Trump apologists that Project 2025 has no influence at all on any part of this presidency, so this must be fake news.

    For the record this post is a joke. No one apologises for Trump.

    • Outrage news (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Okian Warrior ( 537106 )

      I was assured by Trump apologists that Project 2025 has no influence at all on any part of this presidency, so this must be fake news.

      For the record this post is a joke. No one apologises for Trump.

      Your post is only relevant in a binary world, where things can only be (completely) good or bad. And then only when the future can accurately be predicted by random journalists on the internet that need clicks to get salary.

      While Project 2025 is too extreme for many people, there are probably some good ideas in there. We shouldn't just unanimously do the opposite of everything said in that document just because it's *in* that document. People have complained about the CDA generally, and section 230 specific

      • Re: Outrage news (Score:4, Interesting)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @10:26AM (#65105943) Homepage Journal

        "While Project 2025 is too extreme for many people, there are probably some good ideas in there"

        Name one.

        • Replying for visibility.

        • Re: Outrage news (Score:4, Interesting)

          by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @10:41AM (#65105993)

          "While Project 2025 is too extreme for many people, there are probably some good ideas in there"

          Name one.

          If this is actually in the document (don't know as I haven't read the whole thing yet, this was in the summary above):

          . . . requiring tech companies to pay into a program that funds broadband access in rural areas. . .

          This actually sounds like a net positive. Though I want to add something about blind squirrels and acorns here.

          These companies are MASSIVELY profitable, and can afford to shed a few coins to help our less fortunate folks that still don't have good broadband access in their area. We're supposed to be a first world country. Perhaps the pushers of this lie can help us actually make small strides towards attempting to achieve it?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jythie ( 914043 )
            Sounds like a gift to telecoms and cable providers, who were already capable of billing tech companies for network access in order to cover such funding.

        • Re: Outrage news (Score:5, Informative)

          by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @01:56PM (#65106687)
          I doubt that most posters have read it or know a damned thing about it (the Heritage Foundation has been releasing similar Mandate for Leadership publications for over four decades now) but I would be incredibly surprised if you couldn't look over it yourself and find at least one policy or point you agreed with.

          I pulled it up on the document on the Heritage Foundations website and restricted myself to their section on the FCC which was written by Brenden Carr. Here are some of the points put forward that I think posters here may find agreeable which I generally find agreeable policy wise:
          • - Tech companies must be more transparent about traffic shaping and can be held accountable to their published standards by users.
          • - Prohibition from doing business with Chinese telecom companies already banned by the FCC through a loophole in existing law.
          • - Additional funding for replacement of equipment removed that was supplied from Chinese telecom companies since banned from operating in the U.S.
          • - Speed up the review and approval process to launch satellites offering services similar to Kuiper/StarLink.

          There are many others listed, but I stuck to those that I personally found agreeable and thought that others may also agree with as well. A lot of the points seem like standard Republican/conservative policy that would come as little surprise to anyone. The whole document is just shy of 900 pages though and I doubt anyone here that's been treating it like a boogie man has even read a page of it let alone any full section. Anyone categorically rejecting it outright would find themselves disagreeing with points such as this for example:

          EPA should build earnest relationships with state and local officials and assume a more supportive role by charging resources and expertise, recognizing that the primary role in making choices about the environment belongs to the people who live in it.

          Or maybe I grabbed that from a different set of policy recommendations promulgated by a political organization more closely aligned with the U.S. Democrat party to trick people who make up their minds about things based on the messenger instead of the policy recommendation itself. I suspect that if I picked a few of these documents and pulled policy points from each and had people take a quiz almost everyone would find themselves agreeing with at least one point from each of the policy documents. If I altered the quiz to attribute a policy point to some document at random I have a feeling that I'd get a lot of responses that blindly follow the supposed ideological lines.

          • Anyone categorically rejecting it outright would find themselves disagreeing with points such as this for example:

            EPA should build earnest relationships with state and local officials and assume a more supportive role by charging resources and expertise, recognizing that the primary role in making choices about the environment belongs to the people who live in it.

            Um, I disagree with that point. It completely undermines the EPA. In essence it says that the EPA should shut up and defer to the people who liv

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by jythie ( 914043 )
              The problem is : the pre-EPA state of things was working for the kind of people who support the heritage foundation.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by IWantMoreSpamPlease ( 571972 )

        We don't have to accurately predict the future, because we can look to the past and see how trump's first run at things, along with his cabinet, etc, went.
        I'll give you a hint, it went rather badly for a lot of people, dead people for starters. So I can say with a fair amount of certainty that this go 'round won't be better and one only has to look at the news from the past day to see what's happening.

      • This is a story about US politics. It is a binary world. You're either Red or Blue. No in between.

        People have complained about the CDA generally, and section 230 specifically, on this very website for many years, with much discussion and insight about where the problems lie and how to resolve them. We now have an opportunity to fix those issues, let's not let that opportunity go by.

        And that's the problem now isn't it. The issue with Project 2025 isn't about the ideas, it's about the process and achieving them. The benefits and shortcomings of Section 230 should not be at the whims of whatever moron gets put in a seat. You've said it yourself, there's debate around the issue, so put the issue to debate in the place the government designated to have debates.

  • Don't blame the rest of us, we voted for Harris (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @10:20AM (#65105929)
    Daily reminder that all the hate and destruction that will now follow are the fault of you fascist pigs who voted for a convicted career criminal, rapist, pedophile, and traitor.
    You're all traitors to your country and deserve all the hate you get from the rest of us for what you've done.

    • Do you think saying that will advance your goals? (Score:4)

      by twocows ( 1216842 ) on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @02:47PM (#65106929)
      Presumably you do not want the country to vote for someone like Trump based on the content of your post. So, let me ask: do you think sentiments like yours advance that goal? What exactly are you hoping to accomplish by throwing insult soup at Republicans on a website where most commenters skew left anyway?

      For the record, I voted for Harris. I'm one of the only people in my extended friend and family group that did. Do I think 95% of my family and friends are "fascist traitors to their country?" No, and even if I did, saying so wouldn't serve any useful purpose besides antagonizing them. Like it or not, you live in a country where essentially half of the voting public supports Trump. You can either insult and antagonize them and accomplish no useful purpose while shit (often literally) burn down around you, safe in your cloak of "at least I was on the right side," or you can try to find common ground as individuals who share the same space and many of the same problems.

      Part of living in a democratic society is occasionally being on the losing side and being ruled over by people who, at the very least, you do not believe to have your best interests at heart. Part of being an adult is learning to get past your differences with people you disagree with and getting useful work done anyway. If you want to improve the situation of the country, then have discussions, make friends, find common ground, and break down walls. Trump voters aren't martians, it's inevitable you will have SOME common ground with them. So focus on what you CAN fix and while you're doing so, be patient and discuss the problems they don't see so that they may have sufficient context to come to a more sane conclusion next time. The difficult work of politics isn't being on the "right side," it's the slow work of building relationships and illuminating other people to your point of view so that something better can be built up over time.

      • "What exactly are you hoping to accomplish by throwing insult soup at Republicans on a website where most commenters skew left anyway?"

        It's been a long time since that was true. The Reich wing low information boot lickers post here just as much as anyone now. I find that moderation is still slightly in favor of reality based comments, but only slightly.

  • ROFLMAO! Their a threat to America!

  • He's also in the camp that ABC should have lost their licenses when the other GOP lawmakers called for it. He said he also agrees with the revocation of FCC licenses as punishment against news organizations.

    Pai wasn't good either. Remember CableCARD? Pai and Carr were able to eliminate the laws that gave you CableCARD. Why? Can't be doing anything that harms the corporations, right? Amateur Radio Fees? They were going to be higher and I believe Carr was one of the few that disagreed with the current rates.

    H

    • You should be happy. I thought government subsidies were bad?

      But in reality you should read your own links.

      RDOF requirements include providing 100 megabits per second (Mbps) download speeds and 20 Mbps upload speeds.

      According to the latest Ookla speed tests, Starlink median download performance in the United States was 64.54 Mbps in the third quarter of 2023, which the research firm said was a slight decline quarter-on-quarter but up 22% on the 53 Mbps recorded for the period in 2022.

      Starlink didn't meet t

      • Great so they live with 768K DSL because they can only get 78M with Starlink.

        It appears with new leadership almost everybody rural will have high-speed Internet by year's end.

        And still people will complain about Carr and Trump.

        From their FIOS connection.

  • ", quickly approving applications to launch satellites from companies like Elon Musk's Starlink." will be the only one of those promises actioned\acted on,

  • Let the hicks turn their red states into 3rd-world Mad Max Talibanjelical dystopias, but hopefully blue states can work together to keep wealthy troglodytes from trogging our dytes.

  • "requiring tech companies to pay into a program that funds broadband access in rural areas"

    Sounds like socialism to me. I thought Republicans didn't like socialism...

  • His plan (Score:3)

    by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @02:12PM (#65106733) Homepage

    Can we stop the ad-hominem attacks long enough to talk actual tech policy?

    In that chapter, Carr proposes actions including: limiting immunity for tech companies under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, requiring disclosures about how platforms prioritize content, requiring tech companies to pay into a program that funds broadband access in rural areas, and more, quickly approving applications to launch satellites from companies like Elon Musk’s Starlink.

    Limiting immunity for tech, 230. Section 230 was meant to prevent forums from being liable when the users say crap. Trump and his friends want to use selectively disregard Section 230 so they can attack companies who post views they don't agree with.

    requiring disclosures about how platforms prioritize content: Sounds good to me.

    requiring tech companies to pay into a program that funds broadband access in rural areas: What a very liberal idea, and something that we have been doing for decades. Telecom operators pay into a fund specifically for this. Can anyone elaborate on what is changing here?

    quickly approving applications to launch satellites, Starlink: Is this not already happening?

    Also from the article:

    The new FCC chair has also indicated that he could use his power to revoke spectrum licenses for networks over their decisions to host speech when he deems it a violation of the equal time rule. This came up in a scuffle about NBC’s hosting of Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live before the election — though the network seemed to comply with the rules for giving candidates similar time and placement on public airwaves by offering Trump an appearance on air later on.

    FYI: The equal time rule [wikipedia.org] differs is similar to, but differs from the fairness doctrine [wikipedia.org].
    I hope the FCC chair is not going to spend much time making sure that all candidates are equally present on political comedy shows.

    • "requiring disclosures about how platforms prioritize content: Sounds good to me."

      That's because you forgot about selective enforcement

    • ... actual tech policy?

      These are all things the GOP hates. Especially limited immunity, because that can be used against billionaires, even the ones bribing Trump for immunity.

      Notice, other changes merely demand reporting, not enforcing any level of competence. Tech infrastructure companies already provide reports, that aren't audited, that aren't based on reality. The free market stops being "free" when the government excuses more dishonesty.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by NaCh0 ( 6124 )

      quickly approving applications to launch satellites, Starlink: Is this not already happening?

      No, it's not. NASA has been slow walking launch applications by waiting until the last statutory day to issue the approval.

      Many of the applications are copy/paste saying "we're doing the same exact thing on this new day" so there is no reason for the delay other bureaucracy/politics.

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