Why Tech Is Bending the Knee
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Hey everyone, I want to talk about something important today, because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. It has been a bit of a week on the internet. You might have noticed that Mark Zuckerberg, in his new MAGA-friendly incarnation, announced that his companies are pulling back from content moderation. They are getting out of the fact-checking business. Later, in this same video, he said something very telling.

The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. On Friday, news broke that Meta was reportedly ending its DEI programs. It's not that often that a chief executive just lays it all out like that, acknowledges that new people are coming to power, and the company is changing how it acts, showing a remarkable degree of fealty.

There's the obvious stuff, like donating a million dollars to the Trump inauguration, which Meta, Google, OpenAI, Apple and Microsoft are all doing. Then there are the quieter things, like taking cues from the incoming key players. Drew, do you think most Americans have any idea who Brendan Carr is? No, no way.

Should they? If anyone wants to be engaged in policy and the way that federal laws affect our everyday lives, they should probably pay attention to Brendan Carr. That's Drew Fitzgerald from The Wall Street Journal.

And Brenton Carr is the incoming head of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the Internet, TV, radio, basically the information ecosystem. He is the tip of the spear of a broad effort under the Trump administration to put the screws on media companies that are considered unfavorable to him and also the social media companies that they would like to influence.

Trust me that Mark Zuckerberg and every other tech CEO is paying close attention to Brendan Carr. Based on your reporting and on watching Brendan Carr, like if he had an unofficial motto, what would it be?

I think Carr's motto would probably be he's sometimes business friendly and always Trump friendly. He's been clearer than anybody in his chair ever has been that he's said explicitly his agenda is going to be President-elect Trump's agenda. Today on the show, there's a new internet sheriff in town and he's got big plans.

I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around. This episode is brought to you by Grammarly. Grammarly is designed to fit your unique professional needs and works right away. It can also help contribute to your business's overall success. With over 15 years experience in secure, private, responsible, enterprise-grade AI, it's trusted by teams at one-third of the Fortune 500.

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But every so often, the FCC will be the center of some massive fight. For about 15 years, one of those fights has been over net neutrality. The idea that internet providers need to treat all content equally and not play favorites. Last week, an appeals court struck down net neutrality rules from the Biden administration. When he posted on X, Brendan Carr celebrated, saying, this is a good win.

He, like many Republicans, opposed net neutrality rules at the FCC from the get-go. And specifically, he said the effort to pass new rules under the Biden administration, this is over the past three or four years, he called it a waste of time. He was opposed to

politically and philosophically to the rules, but he also said they wouldn't withstand court challenges. And it turned out he was right, even before the Supreme Court got rid of this Chevron deference. Chevron deference gave federal agencies broad power to interpret and apply the law. The Roberts Court got rid of it in June. There was a lot of debate about whether these rules as passed would

Managed to go into effect when they were opposed by a lot of telecom industry lobbying groups and also had some recent federal court precedents running against them. And then the Supreme Court obviously put the nail in the coffin. It's so interesting to have someone coming in to run an agency who is...

In one sense, saying like, no, my agency shouldn't have that power. That is that is not how people traditionally throw their weight around in Washington by saying like, no, no, that's that's OK. We'll leave that one to the market.

Yeah, well, Brendan Carr is a Republican, and in general, Republicans, especially in tech and telecom regulation, have tended in the past to be more laissez-faire, to want fewer restrictions on business. That said, Carr doesn't feel that way about every type of regulation at the FCC. Even compared with other Republicans, he's painted a picture of an agency that

that could be a lot more aggressive, a lot more combative in enforcing some of the rules it makes, including a lot of rules and challenges that could cause some heartburn for media companies. They're really in Brennan Carr's sights of late and...

some of the rules that he's proposed, but also just letters and inquiries that he's made, um,

kind of trying to provoke the big media companies, including big TV broadcasters, has caused a lot of heartburn on Wall Street. Tell me about what he wants to do. Well, there's a lot of debate about what he wants to do, but when it comes to the media companies, Carr has been very aggressive and raised a lot of eyebrows in some of the messages that he's sent to major media companies. He's sent letters or made posts on X that have...

gone after ABC, the owners of ABC, CBS, NBC, warning them that they could be subject to either vague FCC oversight or even in the case of CBS's parent company, Paramount, he's gone on the record and saying that

the type of news that they produce could play a role into the parent company's merger review with Skydance. That's the type of thing that used to be insinuated as improper political meddling but would be hard to prove. He's come out and said that the type of news content that a network like CBS carries could be subject to the public interest standard and that he has every right to take a look at

what type of news those companies are carrying and have that factor into merger reviews. That's something that you didn't used to see so overtly in past years. Yeah, that I think would have been very eyebrow-raising in the Washington of 20 years ago. 20 years ago or even five years ago, just to put a finer point on it, when AT&T was buying Time Warner...

you might remember that merger, like most mergers, went under a very detailed review. And the FCC ultimately didn't have a lot to say about it because Time Warner at the time and still isn't a major TV broadcaster. So the FCC has a lot of control over, you know, old-fashioned TV broadcasts. It doesn't have as much control over cable channels like HBO. But the

The first Trump administration's DOJ, Department of Justice, did have a say and ultimately sued to block the deal. And one of the things that AT&T alleged when it was successfully defending that antitrust challenge was that this was all being done for political reasons because President Trump didn't like what was being said about him on CNN, not because there were relevant concerns about competition and the cost of

of TV programming and how much you pay your cable bill. That was something that AT&T alleged. The Trump administration at the time denied it. But there was ample evidence at the time that

that was at least involved in the antitrust review. But the key point is that at the time that the Trump administration in court, the Trump Department of Justice denied that there was any political role or anything to do with CNN's news content playing a part in the department's decision to sue.

You fast forward now and Carr is just coming out and saying it. He's saying that what CBS does with its news content plays a role in how the FCC, once he takes the helm, is going to review mergers. And that's going to be a really interesting area to watch. When we come back, Carr wrote the chapter on telecom for Project 2025. Will he see it through?

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One place Carr has already laid out his vision for telecom policy is in Project 2025, a kind of policy wishlist for a conservative presidency from the Heritage Foundation. Carr wrote the section on the FCC, the internet, TV, urging changes to a key law that shields tech platforms from liability for third-party content. He called for using the FCC to rein in big tech. And it seems like just talking about that

is working for him. Yeah, it's really interesting if you read Carr's contribution to the Project 2025 policy paper when it comes to telecom law. He devotes a lot of space and a lot of words to big tech regulation. So first of all, there is an open question over how much authority his agency, the one he runs, will have over interpretation of Section 230.

the Communications Decency Act. But the main thing that he's asserting is that the agency does have power, that it does have a say over how that law is interpreted, and that it can play a role in either peeling back some of the protections that tech companies enjoy or spurring them to take less of a role in moderating the content that they have. I mean, he's

He's critiqued tech companies in both respects, both for the way that they allegedly over-moderate and don't allow conservative viewpoints, but also he's accused big tech companies of forming a censorship cartel. But again, all of this is, it's an open question about how much of a

the FCC's authority will come to bear in this situation. But he's used the platform that he has, like some others close to Trump have, to really put the screws to tech companies. And before Trump or Carr have even taken office as president and as chair of the FCC, you've already seen some responses. You just look at Facebook and its decision to

Stop fact-checking. Mark Zuckerberg said that this was a decision that they made on their own, but as everyone knows, Facebook has been in the crosshairs for a long time.

under President Trump, under President-elect Trump. And Brendan Carr himself sent letters to a lot of tech companies accusing them of using a third-party fact-checking service to censor views. That's something that the third-party service has denied. But without using the power of government at all, you've already seen these letters and these public statements force big tech companies to toe the line.

And that's the thing about soft power. You don't need Congress. You don't always need an FCC rule. You can influence the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world just with a quiet flex and having the ear of the president. By using the bully pulpit, this new incoming chairman of the FCC could affect a lot of changes. And I think there will be a few things to watch in the next administration.

One is it doesn't have to do with the Internet at all. A lot of people still get their news, get their weather, definitely watch sports on broadcast TV channels, whether they're using old-fashioned rabbit ears or watching it through the cable connection.

And there's going to be a lot of change in that sector because there are very old rules that limit the ownership of different TV stations and radio stations.

to prevent consolidation. And a lot of companies have complained that the rules are outdated and they want to bulk up and they want to merge. And over time, you might see a lot more station owners. These aren't necessarily the ABCs and CBSs of the world, but the companies that own the broadcast towers themselves. You can see them bulking up and becoming more powerful. And that's important because they actually own the local networks

newscasts in a lot of cities and towns. And there are a lot of local TV newscasts that are considered nonpartisan. And then there are some local TV newscasts that have been accused of

White House press releases as if they're real news. Specifically, Sinclair Broadcast Group is its founder and owner is majority owner is an outspoken conservative. As those companies bulk up, if they're allowed to bulk up, you could see some changes in the resources available to local broadcast, news broadcast stations, and also the content of what they carry. So,

But I would also say watch the national broadcasters because all of the national TV broadcasters are coming under pressure from the Trump administration and from the next FCC chair.

And there's going to be some tension between the corporate owners of those news divisions and the news divisions themselves that want to cover the Trump administration and politics the way they always have. They're going to face pressure from those corporate owners that often are looking to merge with other companies or sell divisions to new owners. And that could create a lot of conflict over the coming years.

Then there is this other thing that we haven't talked about. Someone who I now think about so much that I literally had a dream about him. Elon Musk has a lot of business before the FCC. What does that business look like and what can the FCC do or undo for him?

Yeah. SpaceX, most of all, is very heavily regulated by the FCC. The FCC has control over the rockets that SpaceX launches, and most importantly, over the Starlink satellites that come out of SpaceX. Starlink's entire business depends on having a lot of

having a lot of radio spectrum to carry its broadband signals from satellites to its customers around the world. And it's a very expensive business to operate. Starlink's the most successful satellite information service ever made. It's still tremendously successful and it's still extremely expensive. And the FCC said,

has a tremendous amount of control over the rules of the road that could make Starlink insanely profitable or on the other hand, barely keeping its head above water.

Carr has been very public about the fact that he thinks Starlink is a success. Let them cook is what he posted on X, another Elon Musk company, a while back, just saying that the government shouldn't get in the way of allowing this company to succeed. Now, on the other hand, Starlink has run into a lot of controversy for...

its involvement. Starlink has run into a lot of trouble with other federal agencies from the FAA to OSHA. And these rules that come out of the FCC don't just have a lot of effect on Starlink, it has a lot of effect on Starlink's competitors. So far, no company has managed to put nearly as many satellites up in orbit as Starlink. And

The closest contender to compete with Starlink is Amazon's Kuiper service that really hasn't launched anything yet at all. That said, the next FCC may want to allow at least one other company like Amazon to get a foothold in the market to prevent Starlink from becoming a complete monopoly in space, which would be very profitable in the short term, but could paint a target on Elon's back.

Knowing what we know already, right? Like nobody's even in the White House yet. The inauguration hasn't happened. And yet we have seen a lot of deference from social media executives, from media executives. And what I think you accurately characterized as, you know, warnings from Brendan Carr about how telecom policy will be conducted in the next four years, right?

What does that mean for the future of the internet? Are we going to see an internet that feels like the one that we're used to? Or could it look very different in 2028? I think no matter what happens, we can expect the internet to look very different in 2028 because it's always changing. It may change in two ways. First of all, under the hood, the cable wireless companies that

deliver the internet to our phones, to our homes. They're already pretty consolidated, but you can expect even more consolidation, especially in rural areas where some smaller companies have operated independently for a while. You can just expect more consolidation and some of the biggest names, national names that bring the internet to you will most likely try to get bigger and could succeed. But when it comes to the content that's on the internet itself,

That's not under the FCC's purview, but that's not to say that the Trump administration writ large doesn't have a lot of levers to pull to push those companies in a direction that it wants to see. And we've talked about a lot of different ways in which social media companies and news companies are under pressure to...

their coverage or to take steps that are answering to MAGA demands. And that often means pulling back moderation policies to allow more posts. I mean, we can also expect that these large companies that have DEI policies to be under pressure to abandon those. That's already happened, even though

the administration hasn't turned over yet. It's impossible to predict what it'll look like four years from now. But one thing is definitely certain. Social media companies and news media companies are under a lot more pressure than they were four years ago. How they answer that pressure is really going to determine what the internet looks like for you and me at the end of the next term.

Drew Fitzgerald, thank you so much for your reporting and for talking with me. Thanks for having me. Drew Fitzgerald is a telecom reporter for The Wall Street Journal. And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Evan Campbell, Patrick Fort, and Shaina Roth. Our show is edited by Paige Osborne. Alicia Montgomery is vice president of audio for Slate. And TBD is part of the larger What Next family.

And if you like what you heard today, the number one best way to support our independent journalism is by joining Slate Plus. You get all your Slate podcasts like this one ad-free, plus no paywall on the Slate site. All right, we will be back next week. I am Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks for listening.