Project 2025 Whines About the Federal Communications Commission

Free Speech is, apparently, in the eye of the beholder

Aug 22, 2024

I doubt that the legislators who drew up the Federal Communications Commission had any idea just how far reaching their agency would be when it came to the future of the First Amendment.

A large part of the incentive for establishing the agency came from technical limitations on how information was distributed. While earlier legislation had begun to establish some order out of chaos, electronic transmission was viewed as a public resource. As part of New Deal legislation, the agency was tasked with preventing monopolization, motivated by the National Broadcasting Company’s directives to affiliates on the airing of content.

Jump forward nine decades, and although the varieties and types of transmission have expanded, monopolization is still an issue. Monopolization is no longer about ownership per se of facilities and hardware; it’s about software, algorithms, and corporate control over what users can access.

The FCC is just one agency with jurisdiction on this subject; the Justice Department is also pursuing legal remedies.

Technology in many ways has been subjugated to its corporate overlords needs as they move through the process of “enshittification,” starting with offering users valuable data, making that access a commodity, and then degrading its worth by manipulating its availability in unhelpful and unethical manners once dominance has been established.

The bottom line for people as consumers and citizens is that a public resource is divided into fiefdoms and manipulated for the benefit of a wealthy few. Amazon searches don’t give users the best answer until all the pathways to internal profitability have been exhausted. Xitter has become a window into virtual schizophrenia.

Google searches are often just garbage, as I found out recently in Minneapolis when searching for places to eat. Facebook won’t work the way users want and has become the Hotel California of platforms; you can check out but you’ll never leave. (My brother, who quit FB long ago, is still regularly offered up to me as somebody I should “befriend.”)

Federal Communications Commission. Author: Brendan Carr*

Conservatives hate the FCC as part of their culture wars strategy. Crying at what little moderation exists because of the exclusion of misinformation and hate language is a tactic used to make those expressions socially acceptable. The overlords of information distribution are largely conservative, which is just one of the inconvenient facts.

They apparently have no problem with the Salem Network dictating what local news broadcasts are required to read, truth be damned.

The primary goal for P2025’s view on the FCC of “reining in big tech” is about being able to direct the few dominant corporations to drive political viewpoints not in line with the right wing agenda from the digital town square.”

Section 230 of the FCC act allows websites, including social media companies, that host or moderate content generated by others to have immunity from liability. This immunity should be limited, the author states, with exceptions prohibiting “discrimination against core political viewpoints.”

Presently, the Supreme Court’s stance that the government may not condition enjoyment of a government benefit upon giving up a constitutionally protected right stands in the way of making this right wing nightmare a reality. Things, of course, could change, conditional on how many more seats on that bench come up for sale.

As Justice Clarence Thomas has made clear, courts have construed Section 230 broadly to confer on some of the world’s largest companies a sweeping immunity that is found nowhere in the text of the statute. They have done so in a way that nullifies the limits Congress placed on the types of actions that Internet companies can take while continuing to benefit from Section 230. One way to start correcting this error is for the FCC to remind courts how the various portions of Section 230 operate.

Also, P2025 would like to see an expansion of what’s considered “illegal” content, including “indecent, profane, or similar categories of speech” (thinly veiled references to transgender, LGBTQ, and gender topics), and potentially outlawing discussions of a wide range of topics.’

The game plan calls for the elimination of many “heavy-handed FCC regulations,” including many of the FCC’s media ownership rules that restrict investment and competition

Of course, the FCC would be expected to step up to the plate when it comes to the cold war on China. Now that a major Trump donor has ties to TikTok, we’ll see if the right wing move to eliminate that app dies a quiet death.

Since Chinese development of Artificial Intelligence is scraping the world-wide web (just as all the US companies are) P2025 would have companies build “walls” around their Cloud Computing entities. I’m sure this would be just as effective, ridden with fraud, and wasteful as Trump’s wall building against Mexico.

There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills. Bandwidth is regularly sold by the FCC as it is deemed available; they’d like to speed up the process by setting aside all those pesky technical questions.

Finally, there is concern about the flatlining of new construction of 5G towers. As is true with oil wells (but not windmills) there are certainly federal lands administered by BLM and US Forest Service available. How this will jive with the 5G conspiracy set would be interesting.

(*) Brendan Carr is the senior Republican on FCC. A former FCC General Counsel; Former clerk, Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.

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Tomorrow: The Federal Elections Commission
(We’re almost done)

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Previously:

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News You Should Know About

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Anatomy of a Smear: "Tampon Tim" to "Tiananmen Tim" by Aaron Rupar and Liz Dye at Public Notice

After a two weeks of pearl-clutching about JD Vance couch jokes and whining that “weird” is a slur, Republicans seamlessly shifted to photoshopping Gov. Walz’s head onto menstrual products and swiftboating his military career. Now “Tampon Tim” has morphed into “Tiananmen Tim,” with Republican leaders calling the Democratic vice presidential nominee a literal sleeper agent. Next week they’ll accuse him of being trans and crown him “Tutu Tim.” Or “Tiara Tim,” or “Tacky Tim,” or whatever ridiculous nickname comes after that.
So far, none of it has mattered. An AP-NORC poll out yesterday showed Walz with +11 favorability, which puts him a whopping 28 points ahead of Vance, who clocked in at a dire -17. Those numbers track with a new Blueprint poll finding that “Walz is currently the most popular member of either presidential ticket. Voters frequently associate him with the words ‘veteran’ ‘teacher’ ‘experienced’ and ‘friendly.’ While voters see him as liberal on most issues, crucially, voters perceive him as more moderate than JD Vance.”
MAGA’s attempts to smear a midwestern governor who hunts and coaches football and loves his family and tells dad jokes have gone nowhere. Turns out’s pretty hard to make fun of a decent guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously.

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Right-Wing Cruelty Targets Tim Walz's Son Gus After Heartwarming DNC Moment by Parker Malloy at The Present Age

The cruelty directed at Gus Walz is not an isolated incident, but a disturbing pattern in right-wing political media. For all the conservative rhetoric about "family values" and pleas to "leave the kids out of it," we consistently see figures on the right finding excuses to attack minors for political gain.
We've witnessed it in the actions of accounts like Libs of TikTok, which regularly targets LGBTQ+ youth, potentially exposing them to harassment and danger. We've seen it in attacks on climate activist Greta Thunberg, the survivors of school shootings, and now in the vitriol aimed at Gus Walz. The right seems to have no qualms about weaponizing children and teenagers in their culture war, all while claiming to be the protectors of youth.
Even if Gus Walz wasn’t neurodivergent, even if he didn’t have a non-verbal learning disorder, these attacks should have been off-limits. And yet, as expected, here they are. Shame on them.

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Anti-LGBTQ+ Policies Across American Schools Are Seriously Impacting Queer Youth

Via Time Magazine

Many anti-LGBTQ+ rules in schools target students’ access to support services and affirmative spaces, though others were much broader—limiting conversations about LGBTQ+ topics both during classroom instruction and out of it. Schools with at least one anti-LGBTQ policy were also less likely to have a gay-straight alliance—a student-led club that is intended to be a safe space for queer individuals—or a gender-neutral bathroom, according to the survey. Seven percent of respondents also said that their school used to have a gay-straight alliance but stopped offering it.
The new survey adds to another Trevor Project survey published in May that found 40% of LGBTQ+ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the last year. The latest study didn’t re-measure suicidal ideation, but found that LGBTQ+ students attending more supportive school environments had lower suicide risk rates and reported fewer depressive symptoms compared to queer youth attending schools that were less supportive. Attending a school with anti-LGBTQ+ policies also meant students were more likely to be exposed to verbal and physical attacks, as well as unwanted sexual contact, because of their gender identity or sexual orientation.
“These alarming findings signal that anti-LGBTQ+ school policies have real-life consequences on the mental health, well-being, and overall safety of LGBTQ+ youth,” Ronita Nath, Vice President of Research at The Trevor Project, told TIME. “Young people learn harmful and discriminatory behavior from the adults, communities, and institutions that raise them…When anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment is normalized in school environments, it is then internalized by students and creates a culture of intolerance and hostility towards LGBTQ+ people in general.”

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