How Trump’s appointment of Brendan Carr as FCC chairman will affect enterprises

Reining in big tech

This is less about regulation per se than liking some regulations and interventions more than others. Reading Carr’s public statements as FCC commissioner — he also authored the new administration’s ‘Project 2025’ section on the FCC — a variety of attention-grabbing opinions stand out. He’s a critic of what he claims are attacks on free speech by big tech platforms. As he put it on X (formerly Twitter) last week in the same context, “the censorship cartel must be dismantled.”

An obvious counter to that view is that consumers can choose to go elsewhere if they dislike a platform’s content moderation policy. This, of course, includes Trump’s Truth Social or Musk’s Twitter, with the latter recently losing users to its smaller rival Bluesky, in part for precisely this reason.

His other positions include supporting a recent new law banning TikTok unless its Chinese parent sells the US business, and supporting the expansion of broadband access through Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink satellite network.