Brendan Carr, CUA Law graduate, tapped to lead Federal Communications Commission

CNA Staff, Nov 18, 2024 / 17:15 pm

President-elect Donald Trump over the weekend nominated Brendan Carr, currently serving as the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), to be the commission’s next chairman. 

The FCC is an independent agency overseen by Congress that governs, among other things, radio stations transmitting on AM or FM frequencies, satellite radio and TV stations, cable networks, and broadcast TV stations. Its top leadership includes five presidentially-appointed and Senate-confirmed commissioners, by law a mix of Republicans and Democrats, who serve five-year terms.

A graduate of Georgetown University and The Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law, Carr has enjoyed bipartisan support during his tenure at the FCC, having been first nominated to sit on the commission during Trump’s first term and renominated twice under current Democratic President Joe Biden. The Senate unanimously confirmed him as a commissioner after each nomination. 

Before being named a commissioner, Carr was a legal adviser for the FCC and then served as its general counsel. He has generally favored the cutting of regulations on smaller broadcasters and increased regulation on Big Tech. The FCC does not currently have regulatory oversight over tech giants such as Google and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, the New York Times noted. 

As a commissioner, Carr strongly opposed requirements rolled out under the Biden administration that would have mandated that all U.S. radio and television stations publish information about the race and gender of their employees. 

A group of Catholic radio stations, including several affiliated with EWTN, CNA’s parent company, filed suit earlier this year against the requirements, arguing that the new regulations would “adversely affect them as well as all religious broadcasters generally.”

Carr said in a statement dissenting from the FCC’s February ruling introducing the mandate that he would not have opposed such a requirement if the filings remained confidential. The fact that such filings will be made public, however, means that the FCC will soon “post a race and gender scorecard for each and every TV and radio broadcast station in the country.”

“This is no benign disclosure regime. The record makes clear that the FCC is choosing to publish these scorecards for one and only one reason: to ensure that individual businesses are targeted and pressured into making decisions based on race and gender,” Carr asserted at the time. 

Carr is a critic of “net neutrality,” a policy previously endorsed by U.S. Catholic leaders that bars internet service providers like Comcast or AT&T from blocking or slowing down content from particular websites or web-based services, treating the internet more as a public utility than a commodity. Trump’s first administration under FCC commissioner Ajit Pai rolled back net neutrality rules, while Biden’s administration reinstated them earlier this year. 

The National Religious Broadcasters (NRB), a trade association for Christian communicators, offered its endorsement of Carr for FCC chairman on Nov. 15, saying Carr has “comprehensively supported policies that allow smaller, independent, and religious broadcasters to conduct their business without burdensome government interference.”

How Carr might lead the FCC

Carr authored a chapter of “Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise,” also known as Project 2025, expounding on the qualities he says will be crucial in the next FCC commissioner. 

In the chapter, Carr wrote that the FCC ought to address the issue of Big Tech corporations abusing their dominant market positions and attempting to stifle diverse political viewpoints online. 

He also recommended that the FCC demand more transparency from Big Tech, suggesting that the FCC issue an order clarifying Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which has generally been interpreted to protect the operators of websites such as Facebook and Instagram from legal liability for content posted by third parties, unless those sites knowingly promote sex trafficking and prostitution. 

Carr suggested the FCC should clarify the liability protections afforded to online platforms when it comes to censoring users’ speech, saying Section 230 has thus far been interpreted to “confer on some of the world’s largest companies a sweeping immunity that is found nowhere in the text of the statute.” 

The FCC should work to safeguard U.S. communications networks from foreign adversaries like the Chinese Communist Party, Carr urged, expressing skepticism about Chinese telecom operators as well as TikTok. 

Carr has for several years strongly backed the building out of the U.S. network of 5G coverage and suggested that the FCC should work to modernize its infrastructure regulations to encourage the expansion of fiber networks and streamline the permitting process for new infrastructure projects. 

He also wrote that the agency should prioritize transparency and accountability in its operations, proposing that the FCC eliminate unnecessary regulations and ensure its rules are grounded in sound data and analysis.