By David Shepardson and Timothy Gardner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President-elect Donald Trump will tap Brendan Carr, a critic of the Biden administration’s telecom policies and Big Tech, as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, he said in a statement on Sunday.
Carr, 45, is currently the top Republican at the FCC, the independent agency that regulates telecommunications.
He has sharply criticized the FCC’s decision not to finalize nearly $900 million in broadband subsidies for Elon Musk’s SpaceX satellite internet unit Starlink, as well as the Commerce Department’s $42 billion broadband infrastructure program and President Joe Biden’s spectrum policy .
Last week, Carr wrote to Meta’s Facebook, Alphabet’s Google, Apple and Microsoft saying they had taken steps to censor Americans. Carr said Sunday that the FCC must “restore the right to free speech to everyday Americans.”
The president-elect has disparaged the actions of Disney’s ABC, Comcast’s NBC and Paramount Global’s CBS, suggesting they could lose their FCC licenses for various actions. Trump also sued CBS over his “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Carr criticized NBC for having Harris appear on “Saturday Night Live” just before the election.
Trump in his first term called for the FCC to revoke broadcast licenses, prompting then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to reject the idea, saying “the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a broadcast station’s license based on the content.”
The FCC issues eight-year licenses to individual broadcast stations, not broadcast networks.
In 2022, Carr, a strong critic of China, became the first FCC commissioner to visit Taiwan. He was a supporter of the FCC’s hard line on Chinese telecom companies.
Carr was a strong opponent of the FCC’s decision in April to reinstate landmark net neutrality rules that were repealed during the first Trump administration. The Biden FCC rules were suspended by a federal appeals court.
Trump nominated Carr to the FCC during his first administration in January 2017, after serving as the FCC’s general counsel.
The new administration will have to nominate a Republican to fill a seat on the five-member commission before it can take full control of the agency.
Carr “is a fighter for free speech and has fought against regulations that have suppressed American freedoms and held back our economy,” Trump said in a statement.
(Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Himani Sarkar, Kim Coghill and Sonali Paul)
