Yeah, this reminds me a little bit of when I was in elementary school. Everyone's like packed in the back rows. Everyone's afraid to be up front. Maybe they might get called on.
Well, the ones in the back are the ones who make trouble. Is there a lesson to remember from that? Um, well, thank you so much, Commissioner Carr, for being here. Um, we try to have some fun at these events. I do want to start on a pretty dead serious subject.
You're obviously one of the big voices in the country on questions of content moderation and media platforms and social media platforms. That conversation has exploded in a whole new way since the murder last week of Charlie Kirk. Um, Utah Governor Spencer Cox described social media as a cancer and said that social media had played a, quote, direct role in every single assassination and assassination attempt over the last five or six years. I wonder what you make of that statement, whether you see any truth in that.
Well, obviously to start, you know, my thoughts and prayers with, you know, Charlie Kirk and his family. And I think, you know, it's really sort of a heavy loss for so many of us that knew Charlie personally. You know, Charlie was somebody that, you know, always looked out for people that were starting out in their career, always encouraged people. You know, I can't really add to some of the great things that people have said about him, but a real tragic, shocking loss for the country, and clearly we need a change of direction on some of these issues.
When it comes to social media, I think you can look at it through a couple of different phases. You know, we had sort of this early phase of social media where it was sort of very libertarian, very much towards free speech. And I think we saw a really dangerous bent towards censorship, particularly during COVID. You know, anytime you have a situation in which there's an increase in government control, you necessarily see a decrease in free speech because the two of those are counterweights.
And I've been really pleased, frankly, over the last couple of years where a lot of social media companies have embraced or re-embraced the idea of free speech online. I think Elon Musk and X had a great deal to do with that. I was pleased to see Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook join him. But clearly there's more we can do. I think my view at the end of the day is we need to empower individual users to be making their own content moderation decisions. Who to follow, who not to follow, give them the tools to curate their online experience.
And can I push you a little bit further on that? You know, last week, immediately after the assassination, this ultra-graphic, ultraviolent video of a 31-year-old man being killed was basically impossible to escape on X, is the platform that I use the most. Right? It was just in your face all the time. That's true for adult users, that's true for minors. Is there a role for content moderation on that kind of material where it's not ideological content, it's not left-right bias? It is just, do you want to see a man lose his life in the most appalling way?
Well, look, I don't think it's so much that the video was horrific and violent. I think it was the act itself that was horrific and violent. And again, I think we should be giving people, individuals, the tools to curate their own feeds and be in control of what it is that they want to see. But obviously it was a, you know, very, very significant event. And there was a lot of, you know, focus and attention on it.
There's been conversation in the last couple of days, including from the attorney general, the notion of hate speech, the notion of extremist speech in online platforms. Do you think there are any guardrails that should be put up around content that's by nature incitement to violence? Not ideological in a sort of conventional left-right sense, but by any measure radical and extreme? Is there a way to do that that doesn't then get into the kind of thought policing that you worry about?
Yeah, I think you can draw a pretty clear line, and the Supreme Court has done this for decades, that, you know, our First Amendment, our free speech tradition protects, you know, almost all speech, but there are certain categories of posts, of content that are unprotected by the First Amendment. Those are things like incitement to violence. There are things like fighting words.
I think what the attorney general said today, including a post I saw this morning, is that when you have speech, whatever broad category it is, that is itself incitement to violence or fighting words, that is speech that's not protected by the First Amendment. In fact, there's, you know, existing laws on the books that deal with that. And so I think that's, you know, potentially a relatively small category of speech, but yeah, you know, incitement to violence is not protected.
You've in the past called for, in the recent past, talked about revisiting Section 230 and the responsibility of these platforms. I wonder whether that strikes you as any more urgent today in view of what happened last week.
Well, at the end of the day, I think Section 230 does a couple of things. Some things it does very well. Some things there's a lot more question marks about it. If you step back, there's two main components of Section 230. Section 230(c)(1) effectively, in my view, says if you leave someone else's speech up, you're not liable for that content if it happens to be libelous or tortious in any way. I think that's generally a good provision. It's what I call a pro-speech provision. It encourages people to post and to express themselves.
On the other hand, you have this provision (c)(2) that's been read by the courts as giving, you know, broad immunity to all sorts of content moderation and censorship. And I think that's where over the years we saw a lot of abuses. You saw individual Americans participating in the digital town square that were getting censored purely for protected First Amendment speech, for diversity of viewpoints on, you know, religious or medical issues.
And so what I'm pleased to see is that to some extent there's been a course correction within the social media community, and I think you're seeing a lot less of that type of speech. And so I think the debate around Section 230 is still live, but I think, you know, given the changes that we're seeing on social media, I think right now, for my part, I'm in more of a trust-but-verify posture.
And so when you just to come back to Governor Cox for a second, the notion that these companies bear responsibility for violent acts towards political figures and other public figures. Do you agree with that?
Well, again, I think that is a conversation that is wrapped up into the scope of Section 230 in terms of whether ultimately be liable. I mean, again, when you step back and look at the different sort of categories of speakers that are out there, one way to think about it is, you know, we have broadcasters at the FCC, and broadcasters are very uniquely positioned when it comes to speech because they have a license by the federal government, and that license to the broadcaster means no one else. We are excluding other people from being able to use that microphone by licensing that speaker, and as a result of that, they are in a different position because they have a public interest obligation and they have to serve the needs of their local communities.
And I think over the years the FCC has stepped back from enforcing the public interest standard on broadcasters. And I don't think we're better off for it. And I certainly don't think we're hewing to the intent of Congress when it passed the law. And so one thing we're trying to do at the FCC is to reinvigorate the public interest standard and make sure that broadcast is responsive.
I think one way that that's gone off the rails is you have individual local TV stations. They're the ones with the license. And then over top of them, you have this category we call national programmers. So Disney, ABC, Comcast, NBC. Increasingly over the years, those national programmers are effectively exercising more and more control over the local TV station. I don't think that's good.
So, we're running an agenda at the FCC, and there's very specific things we're doing that's designed to empower local broadcasters and, to some extent, constrain the power of the national programmers. And then you have cable companies and cable channels. And then you ultimately get to your question about social media, and the FCC's regulatory authority, you know, declines. And so when you get to social media, it's largely, other than Section 230, outside the FCC.
I'm curious, and I will get to AI in just a second, but because you...
I thought this was an AI. We'll get there.
It's all AI. It's all AI and tech. This is the tech part.
Because we are, because you're, you know, you mentioned broadcasters. Do you worry at all that the tools that you are asserting now in terms of the public interest standard and broadcast licenses, that a future commissioner who's, I hate to break it to you, will not be FCC chair forever.
You know, there's no term limit on FCC chairs. You know, I could get renominated again.
But do you worry that in a future, a future where you have a President Gavin Newsom, that that standard would then be used in a way that would make you deeply uncomfortable?
Look, what we're doing right now at the FCC is we are applying the agency's case law and precedent. We're a place that operates by this body of law that's created by the agency. If you look back over the last four years, we are simply following the lines that have been created back a couple of years ago during the Biden years.
There was a local Fox TV station that had their license renewal coming up. It was a fairly routine renewal in that circumstance. But the Biden FCC decided to take that off of the renewal track, put out for public comment to revoke, potentially not renew that license, and then sort of held that renewal outstanding all the way through the election, and then it was in January of '25 that they finally dismissed that and renewed it.
Similarly, you had complaints against CBS for news distortion, complaints against ABC, complaints against NBC, and they were all just summarily dismissed without going through that process. And so, I think some of the work that we're doing at the FCC right now to hold broadcasters accountable would have been much more difficult from a presidential standpoint, but for the activity of the FCC during the prior years. So I'm not really worried about it. The law is what it is. I think we should be enforcing it.
I think a lot of people get confused between these silos of broadcast and cable. So Fox News, which we get plenty of complaints at, at least on social media when people at me, is not licensed by the FCC. Similarly, CNN and NBC are not licensed by the FCC. But when it comes to that broadcast TV, that's where there's a public interest obligation, and I do think we should be enforcing it.
So let me ask you, I, you know, I obviously work in an industry where we spend a lot of time worrying about whether AI is going to completely annihilate us. You spend a lot of time regulating, well, not our industry, Politico specifically, but the, you know, media and broadcasters generally. Does any part of you feel like the guy who's working through the most sophisticated regulation possible for like the horse and buggy, that like everything that you're working in is about to be kind of overturned and made obsolete?
Yeah, there's certainly a lot of disruption right now. When you look at the, again, the broadcast media side in particular, there's a lot of disruption taking place. What does that industry look like five years, 10 years, 15 years? I do a lot of thinking about that. When it comes to AI and all the changes, it's actually relatively simple for me. Because, you know, there's the nerds that are going to figure out like all the nerd stuff on AI. And at the FCC...
They're listening and they're here. They're here. I mean that in a very nice way.
But at the FCC, we're sort of like the pipes and tubes people. You know, my job is to make sure that when the nerds cook, that we have the most modern, high-speed networks anywhere in the world so that that technology can work and can thrive. And we're doing that.
We're running a Build America agenda at the FCC to make sure we have more spectrum so we can have mobile AI, which I think is going to be really important. You don't just want AI when you're sitting there at your desktop with a wired connection. You want AI to work with you wherever you are, whether it's for a smartphone or connected glasses or whatever type of device the AI revolution unleashes.
We're also working to boost America's space economy. We've got this entirely new generation of low Earth orbit satellites that are up there that are bringing new high-speed connections. There's a new trend there to direct-to-cell. So, you can go right from your smartphone to a high-speed connection to a satellite.
And we're seeing disruption. You know, just in the last week or so, Dish has proposed to sell a very large chunk of spectrum to Starlink, which they could potentially use for a range of things, including new direct-to-cell technology. So, I think it is an exciting time, but we're more, you know, the plumbing, the infrastructure side of it.
Well, let's talk more about the Build America agenda. What actually can the FCC do to speed up AI development in the way you're describing?
Yeah, there's a lot that we're doing. So again, one, we've got to get more spectrum out there, the airwaves to connect our devices. During the Biden years, in my view, and I think objectively, we really fell behind in terms of freeing up spectrum. And that, you know, is a problem because when you look at AI, we're just going through this hockey stick curve of demand for mobile data.
And so we've already helped move about 100 megahertz of spectrum through private sector transactions on the Dish side. President Trump in the One Big Beautiful Bill has set out that we get 800 megahertz total, including the first near-term auction is going to be an auction under that legislation for what we call the upper C band, which is a particular band of spectrum.
So spectrum is a big piece of it, but infrastructure is as well. We're doing permitting reform just this week at the FCC. We're going to be voting this month, we're going to be voting on two reforms. One to make it easier to build wireless infrastructure. A second to make it easier to build wireline infrastructure that involves preempting state laws.
In doing so, we're also going to take a look and see if there's state AI regulations that inhibit infrastructure builds and investment that we could potentially preempt. And then frankly, deregulation. There's just so many rules on the books that we have to get rid of. We launched the largest deregulatory initiative in FCC history. We call it In Re: Delete, Delete, Delete.
And so far we've deleted over 70,000 words from the Code of Federal Regulations, about 800 rules or requirements, and something like 158 pages from our Code of Federal Regulations, which is about the length of the Book of Mormon. So, we're trying to delete as much of that as we can, and we're going to keep at it.
So, you mentioned possibly preempting state AI regulations. I wonder where you are in the process of assessing what those regulations look like on the state level and where it might be appropriate for the FCC to get involved.
So, President Trump in his AI action plan calls for various agencies to take actions. One of them is for the FCC to look at whether there's state regulations that can be preempted. We do have some authorities, Section 253 and 332 of the Communications Act. Effectively, if a state or local law is effectively prohibiting the deployment of this modern infrastructure, then the FCC has authorities to step in there.
It's not sort of a sweeping set of authorities that would address all forms of AI, but we are seeking comment and going to be looking out for forms of AI regulation at the state level that could be inhibiting this type of infrastructure. And then we have some authority to step in.
And are there any particular states that you look at as like either they are already in your way or they're getting pretty close to the line?
