INTERVIEW: FCC Chairman Brendan Carr talks TikTok and Big Tech censorship: “a multi-vector effort to disrupt and jeopardize America's national security”

THE LOWDOWN:

• FCC Chairman Brendan Carr sat down with the Washington Reporter to discuss Huawei, TikTok, and more.

• Carr told the Reporter that the CCP is “engaged in a multi-front, multi-technology, multi-vector effort to disrupt and jeopardize America's national security” and that one of “the very first ways that they came into the country, from a technology perspective, was by getting Huawei gear placed in telecom networks all across the country.”

• When it comes to the sale of TikTok, Carr told the Reporter that he is “very confident that this administration and the relevant actors are going to find a path forward that, in [his] view, hopefully allows the application to continue working here, and does so in a way that safeguards national security.”

• On the subject of the deplatforming and silencing of Americans under the Biden administration, Carr told the Reporter that “censorship really hurt the country” and decried it as “downright un-American.”

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr was DOGE-ing his agency before the concept became mainstream.

During the Biden administration, Carr was a constant thorn in the side of the White House, exposing its multi-billion dollar boondoggles like its failed plan to expand rural broadband, which he likened to turning “the spigot on full blast and walk[ing] away from the hose” in an interview with the Washington Reporter.

Following President Donald Trump’s historic win, Commissioner Carr was promoted to Chairman Carr — now, atop the FCC he has a front-row seat to leading tech policy issues of the day. Two of those top issues deal with Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-owned companies: Huawei and TikTok.

Carr told the Reporter that the CCP is “engaged in a multi-front, multi-technology, multi-vector effort to disrupt and jeopardize America's national security” and that one of “the very first ways that they came into the country, from a technology perspective, was by getting Huawei gear placed in telecom networks all across the country.”

“A couple years ago, I was actually up in Maelstrom Air Force Base, which is in Great Falls, Montana,” Carr said. “It is a place that's basically in the middle of nowhere.”

“It's blue sky country. It's wheat fields for miles, except dotted throughout that area is the country's ICBM missile silos buried underground all across that part of the country, and there's not a lot going on up there,” he continued. “There's not a lot of people up there, except there happened to be a lot of high-powered Huawei gear strategically placed across that part of the country.”

“And we very clearly and early on saw a pattern of Huawei gear going into areas of the country where the dominant feature was sensitive military installations,” Carr added.

The FCC chairman noted that one “thing that President Trump did early on his first term is he very clearly saw the threat that the Communist Party of China posed in DC for decades on a bipartisan basis, politicians were sort of blind to the threat that China posed, and President Trump came in, took a tough stance on Huawei, and ever since then, we've been engaged in the process of identifying and removing that Huawei gear from the network.”

When it comes to the sale of TikTok, Carr told the Reporter that he is “very confident that this administration and the relevant actors are going to find a path forward that, in [his] view, hopefully allows the application to continue working here, and does so in a way that safeguards national security.”

“And I'm confident that that's, that's ultimately where this is going to land at this point, though, it's, it's not an FCC issue, given that Congress passed a law and there's negotiations ongoing, but I'm confident that this will land in a good spot,” he added.

On the subject of the deplatforming and silencing of Americans under the Biden administration, Carr told the Reporter that “censorship really hurt the country” and decried it as “downright un-American.” Carr also noted that “free speech is the people's check on authoritarian government actions.”

“Now the challenge is that this threat to free speech has now metastasized, and it's gone global, and you see places like Brazil, where this rogue Justice [Alexandre de Moraes] took action a few months ago to shut down X and impose punitive actions on their companies simply because they were enabling people to have robust political debates ahead of an election in Brazil,” Carr said.

“You see the same thing in Europe right now,” he continued. “Europe has this thing called the Digital Services Act, or DSA, that effectively is attempting to compel US technology companies to keep doing the type of censorship that they were doing at the height of COVID.”

“Now, some U.S. companies stood in the breach early on. Look at X for instance, they stood for free speech when it was very unpopular. More recently, you've got…Meta returning to an embrace of free speech. I welcome that. I wish they'd done it a little bit sooner,” he continued. “But you still have companies like Google that appear to be an outlier, that really haven't gotten the memo that you know this height of COVID-era censorship has passed.”

“And I would encourage them to join some of their peer companies in return to a view of free speech,” he added.