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- [00:00]
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Stephen Overlee
Hey, welcome back to Politico Tech. I'm your host, Stephen Overlee. I have to admit that telecom policy can get pretty wonky even for a long time tech journalist like me. But what's happening at the Federal Communications Commission right now is a story really worth dialing into. FCC chair Brendan Carr has laid out an aggressive agenda targeting both legacy media and social media over concerns that they've been buying biased against conservatives and specifically against President Donald Trump. Carr's ability to act on that agenda just got a big boost with a newly confirmed Republican commissioner joining the FCC deus. My political colleague John Hendel has been tracking the latest moves at the agency and what they mean for its independents and for tech companies and broadcasters. He's on the show today to break it all down. Here's our conversation. John, welcome back to the podcast.
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John Hendel
Yeah, good to be back. Hey Stephen.
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Stephen Overlee
So there's an FCC meeting today and there's a new commissioner, Olivia Trustee. What do we need to know about her?
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John Hendel
Yeah, Olivia Trustee is a very familiar figure, I think to many people, at least within telecom circles in Washington, D.C. she had been a congressional staffer for a number of years, most recently for the last several years in the Senate where working for both the Commerce Committee, the Armed Services Committee. Definitely someone who knows telecom. She's worked on issues related to broadband mapping, some of the kind of Chinese telecom security issues involving Huawei and zte. And yeah, she is now the new Republican commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission. She, I think was pretty popular choice, got a lot of Democratic votes in committee in addition to Republican votes. So this will probably be her first real appearance in public as commissioner in this new role.
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Stephen Overlee
Got it. And the real significant change here is that the FCC now has a Republican majority. The agency's chair, Brendan Carr, he hasn't exactly been sitting idle for the past six months, but how does having partisan control now change the game for him?
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John Hendel
Yeah, this will be interesting to see. I think it's going to be a really different era for the FCC under Brendan Carr. He so Far this year has always kind of contended with some version of a partisan tie, you know, no matter what month it is. You know, the FCC's historically, you know, been a five member agency. They've been down a member all year most of those months, and so had just two Republican commissioners and two Democratic commissioners. And that's meant that, like the meetings themselves that the FCC holds every month typically are a little more boring. You know, they're getting things done, but they are items of consensus. They are not deeply controversial. Brendan Carr, however, has still managed to make a lot of headlines and get a lot done even in that environment, partly because he's a master of the bully pulpit, happy to open investigations, and is able to use staff really effectively to do things where he doesn't really need Democratic or Republican votes, for that matter. But the fact that he now does have a Republican majority means he can put more things to these votes. I think the meeting agendas will get probably a little spicier in the months ahead. And it also means that there's going to be some bigger policy areas that he just hasn't touched yet as chair that he probably might look to in the next few months.
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Stephen Overlee
Well, and Corey himself is kind of an interesting character. You know, you wrote this great profile about his personal embrace of President Trump and how he seems to have been kind of abandoned some of the precedent that the FCC had as an agency that operates independently from the White House.
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John Hendel
Yeah, it's so different to see the environment we're in now compared to a few years ago, because the FCC historically has been an agency we'd consider an independent agency. And I think chairs, for the most part over the last several decades, took pains to distance themselves from the White House, from the political party in control. Politics have always been part of the FCC in one way or another, but they've really tried to, you know, do a little dance to stay apart from that. Brendan Carr is not participating in that same dance. He is happy to go to Mar a Lago. He's happy to cheer on President Trump and his golf championships. He is very actively an enthusiast for President Trump and for a lot of Republican policies in a way we just haven't seen. I think he's tried to be careful not to really violate the Hatch Act. I mean, it's not like he's campaigned for, you know, the president or anything like that. But he is attuned very carefully to what the White House wants. He's not afraid to say that. And, you know, that's come up in so many different ways and different investigations that he's launched over the few months he's been chair.
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Stephen Overlee
The other thing I find interesting about him is that traditionally Republicans sort of look at the authority of federal government with a narrow scope and they often want to limit that authority, and that includes the FCC in past iterations. It seems now, though, that Carr wants to broaden some of the FCC's authority or at least look to get involved in different policy debates where the agency has not traditionally had a voice. I wonder now the fact that there's going to be a Republican controlled commission, will that be a test of how far he's willing to push the FCC's authority?
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John Hendel
Absolutely. I mean, I think a part of the bombastic side of Carr has been to kind of test these limits a little bit and to also go into terrain that we really haven't seen the FCC go into for the most part. I think the biggest example, at least in what the FCC has traditionally regulated to some extent or at least has oversight on, is some of the content debates for media.
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Stephen Overlee
Right.
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John Hendel
You know, that's, that's an area where the FCC is overseen broadcasters, cable companies, other folks, but really has limited how much they have focused on the content that these companies do. For Chairman Carr, you know, I think he is very ready to again cast open some of these bigger bouts of scrutiny for, you know, a program like 60 Minutes on CBS. I mean, that's the most high profile example I talked about in my story where he, he opened a bigger investigation early on this year into whether 60 Minutes, which is on CBS, whether they had engaged in news distortion essentially by editing an interview that featured Kamala Harris last fall. This is something that's also caught up in lots of other debates that the FCC is involved in over cbs. I mean, CBS is also subject to a lawsuit from President Trump over this. There's also a merger that their parent company is trying to get approved. And, and I think Brendan Carr is aware of all of this on some level. He's kind of said they're separate things, but it's a very, very unusual level of entanglement that is, I think, something that's, I think, attracted a lot of attention in that space. I think a lot of people wonder whether the majority that he has now, whether that's going to see him getting into whole new areas of policy. I mean, I think the biggest example there is tech companies and section230. Section 230 is the part of the law that shields these tech platforms from liability over the content that their Users post. That's something that Chairman Carr has talked about wanting to get involved in for years, and that goes back to the first Trump term when he was just a commissioner. And we're not totally sure what that's going to look like under his chairmanship. We're also in a slightly different legal environment than we were a few years ago. So is he even going to have authority to do that? If he tries, is that going to just get shot down in court? That's still a big question right now. But I do think that having a reliable Republican vote by his side in a 2:1 Republican majority environment, that could allow him to start holding votes on this, to launch, you know, a whole new regulatory direction. And again, the FCC has never overseen tech companies or issues like that. But, you know, the moment that Donald Trump picked him as his FCC chair, all of his supporters were really quick to say, look, this is our free speech champion. He's gone after big tech. We want to see him assert some sort of role in that way. So I think he knows he has that call to do something, and I would be surprised if we don't see him try to answer it.
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Stephen Overlee
Yeah, I want to go a little bit more in depth on each of those issues because I do think they're so fascinating. They're also very mired in politics. And so I'm curious what we might see the commission do now that there is a Republican majority. You know, starting with the fact that Carr has been such a vocal critic of legacy news broadcasters, most specifically, you know, their coverage of President Trump and of the 2024 election. With this new GOP majority, what could he actually do on that front?
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John Hendel
Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing, you know, I mentioned him using the bully pulpit so far to open these investigations. What we really haven't known is where he's going to land on a lot of them. How far is he really going to go? He has pretty bluntly acknowledged that, you know, things like broadcast license revocation is on the table with some of these. I mean, you know, broadcast networks don't hold licenses. But again, many of their affiliate stations do, you know, for a broadcaster or like cbs. And he's called that the regulatory death penalty. So that's hanging out there in these proceedings. And while he as chair can open investigations kind of unilaterally, I think it's generally seen as much harder for chairs to kind of follow through on some big investigatory matters, you know, purely on the Bureau of Staff level. I mean, there's a lot that could rise up to being commission votes now that he has a majority that he might be more ready to put to vote. So I would be watching for that, for next steps where you see votes at the full commission level potentially on some of these things that. That strikes me as relevant. The other side of this is we've really seen Chairman Carr embrace kind of a Trumpian sense of deal making. As FCC chair, he is not afraid to directly take his concerns, whether they're about Di or some of these coverage issues to companies, you know, and make that at the forefront of essentially regulatory negotiations. And so I would be watching for what that back and forth kind of looks like, the interplay between him, on the one hand, dialing up a lot of scrutiny of these companies, while on the other now suddenly being in a position to really help them on a lot of fundamental levels. In a way that's probably a little bit more in line with where a lot of traditional Republicans would be on this. I think that's not as unusual at all for a Republican chair of the FCC to be looking to do, but he has very much named that as a priority. And I could see that being something he now sees a Runway to kind of go at.
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Stephen Overlee
Yeah, it'll be interesting what he actually kind of sinks his teeth into and also puts real teeth behind. A lot of this stuff heretofore has been rhetoric. It's been letters to companies, it's been interviews on Fox and other media. And so now that he has votes, how does he actually use those? I think is such an interesting question. You mentioned section 230, which is sort of a very sore subject sensitive spot for the tech industry. It's also a law that was passed by Congress. It's really not clear to me what authority, if any, the FCC has to reinterpret Section 230 in a new way. I'm curious if Carr has indicated what actual action he might put into kind of that idea that this is actually in the FCC's domain.
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John Hendel
Yeah, it's a really fascinating debate and one that I think, you know, I've certainly been watching closely. I Think, Brent. Like, we're looking to a lot of isolated clues for what he wants to do specifically on this. He's laid out desires in the past. I mean, he was one of the biggest champions in 2020, during President Trump's first term for trying to make this happen. This was something that rose up right kind of near the end of President Trump's presidency. At that time, it was in the middle of, you know, his fights with Twitter when Twitter was trying to fact check different tweets from the president. And what happened ultimately was the Trump administration petition the FTC to start a rulemaking to get involved in Section 230 to actually reinterpret these protections. And many saw that as a direct response to the president's frustrations with Twitter and wanting to have a different kind of form of control over that. We know at the time, Brendan Carr absolutely wanted to do this. This was seen a little bit as part of his campaigning for FCC chair at the time, you know, to quickly become, you know, such a big champion in that way. So we know that he was very much on board with those ideas, which would have been limiting the protections to some extent then. And he's kept bringing it up here and there over the years, but not been that specific lately. I mean, it was part of his chapter for Project 2025. I think he might have been the only sitting regulator to actually write a chapter for Project 2025. And that was something he talked about actively in that, you know, that he thought that that's a role he defended that, you know, he points back to a blog post pretty frequently that the general counsel for the FCC back in 2020 wrote, defending the fact that, hey, section 230 ultimately falls within the Communications act, which is key telecom law. And this is why they should have purview to at least give some sort of guidance. The other big thing that I would say is really relevant and I would encourage everyone to kind of consider in this debate, you know, the general counsel, the FCC right now happens to be.
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Stephen Overlee
A man named Adam Kandiyoub, also Project 2025.
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John Hendel
Adam Kandiyoub was one of the key Trump administration leaders back in 2020 who helped kind of try to push this Section 230 petition forward to the FCC, really cared about these issues, has studied this as a law professor for years and thought actively about this. So I think the fact that Brendan Carr pretty early on brought Adam Kandiyoub into the FCC as a general counsel, that shows he's thinking about these issues. That shows that he wants someone at his side who is a legal expert and really cares about this and is going to try to find the most durable way to craft, whether it is rules, whether it's just advisory guidance. I mean, I think there's a lot of versions this could take. I think they're going to be engaged in a careful game of expectation setting probably on that. And my guess right now, just offhand would be that they're going to point to Congress a lot of and say, well, we're ultimately going to look to Capitol Hill for, like a bigger rewrite of section 230. We can be supportive. We can do a little bit of guidance where we can. But is it really going to be binding? To what degree is that going to stand up in court? I think that, you know, that's going to be a very fair set of considerations to have, and I suspect they have them behind the scenes now, too, and are trying to figure that out in their strategies for this.
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Stephen Overlee
You know, you were talking about sort of the folks Carr has at his side. I mean, going back to this new commissioner, Olivia Trustee, do we know if she fully sees eye to eye with Carr in all of this? I mean, is she a guaranteed vote for him just because she's a Republican, or are there issues where she might break?
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John Hendel
I think it's an incredibly good question. She has been, you know, very much an active part of every major telecom debate, you know, for the last decade or so in a lot of ways. And so I think a lot of people suspect that she will be a reliable vote on a lot of issues. But the reality is we also don't fully know where her personal views are. I mean, this is something that's been brought up to me in interviews. It's hard to know what Hill staffers really think. You know, like, they are people who are experts on these policy matters, but they ultimately are serving their bosses and are kind of like staying in the realms of what those are. I mean, there's, there's her confirmation hearing from a few months ago that I think a lot of people look to. And the questions for the record, like the written questions lawmakers submit after a lot of people are trying to read the tea leaves looking at that and try to see like, okay, what did she say about issue X, Y or Z here? You know, is there any way that, you know, we can glean her exact views on this, that or the other from that? And so, you know, I think nine times out of 10, there's a strong chance he's going to be a very reliable vote for Chairman Carr. I think she went into this knowing who Chairman Carr is, what Donald Trump generally wants out of the fcc. I think she has that awareness and I think Senate Republicans have that awareness in confirming her. But I do think there's going to be those isolated instances where maybe she does have a strong view on agency process or authority or other issues. And right now, especially because it's just a 2:1 environment, there's still two vacancies at the FCC. If she has any difference of opinion from Carr on this, that could be a deal breaker. I mean, like every minority commissioner, whether it's her or even in some cases maybe Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez on some kind of like less partisan issues, but still maybe contentious ones, they are going to have a lot of sway in being able to stop a proposal or acquire some sort of negotiation on this. So I'd be watching closely for that. I mean, she's come from a world on Capitol Hill where she's been deep in Republican circles, but they are also slightly more traditional Republican circles. They're not seen as that norm busting in any sort of way. So I think that's going to be an important thing to watch. I think everyone is going to be curious how far that goes.
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Stephen Overlee
Well, the FCC is getting more and more interesting, it sounds like, which will keep you busy. John, thanks for being here on Politico Tech.
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John Hendel
Thank you. It's going to be interesting. I would say everyone should watch the July meeting because that's going to be the first one where the majority really makes a difference. We'll see it today, but it's next month where we're going to actually see like, okay, what is Chairman Carr really going to look to get up to with that? So it's going to be fun.
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Stephen Overlee
That's all for this week's Politico Tech. If you enjoy Politico Tech, be sure to subscribe, rate a review and recommend the show to a friend or colleague. And for more tech news, subscribe to our newsletters, Digital Future Daily and morning Tech. Music in our show comes from the mysterious brake Master Cylinder. This week's show was produced by Philip Frobos. I'm Stephen Overle. See you back here next week.