FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News that the Democratic-led FCC majority is moving to enact net neutrality instead of holding big tech companies like Google accountable. “It’s the biggest threat on the internet,” he said.
Carr explained to Breitbart News that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is likely to announce this week that it will vote to recreate net neutrality at the FCC’s month-end meeting.
With Democrats gaining a majority on the committee, the agency announced in September that it would seek to reinstate Obama-era net neutrality regulations. During President Donald Trump’s administration, then-Chairman Ajit Pai repealed net neutrality rules.
The left has long sought to use Title II regulations to seize more regulatory power over the internet.
Essentially, net neutrality regulations prevent Internet service providers (ISPs) like Comcast and Verizon from blocking or slowing down their speeds, or creating “paid preferences” where users pay for faster, more consistent service. The purpose is to allow or prohibit “ranking”.
Kerr called the net neutrality proposal an “administrative state power grab” and “illegal overreach” that could violate the “leading questions” principle. Forbidden Government agencies cannot enact policy if the issue is “of great economic and political importance.”
Former Breitbart News reporter Alam Bokhari explained:
The Common Carriage Act is mandated by Title II regulations demanded by Democrats and is one of the solutions recommended by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to address technology censorship. But Democrats want the rule to apply to service providers who aren’t in the habit of excluding internet users because of their political views, but also to companies that are actually responsible for suppressing online speech over the past five years. It does not recommend similar regulations for platforms. Companies like Google, YouTube, Twitter/X, and Facebook.
Progressives and Democrats lost their minds when the FCC repealed net neutrality under the Trump administration, predicting the end of the internet as we know it and various other disasters. As Breitbart News predicted at the time, none of these doomsaying predictions came true, and broadband speeds across the country actually improved.
Carr told Breitbart News that broadband prices have fallen and internet speeds have increased since authorities repealed net neutrality, so there is effectively no need to recreate it. Ta.he warned Net neutrality would be a “significant headwind” that could hinder President Joe Biden’s Internet for All policy of connecting Americans to high-speed internet.
But above all, Kerr emphasized that net neutrality regulations ignore the threat posed by edge providers and big tech platforms like Google and Facebook.
“Google — Back in 2005, Google was looking for ways to build a regulatory moat around its business model. And they came up with this catchy phrase, net neutrality. That means imposing heavy-handed regulation at the ISP level. And you know, we’re going to flash forward to today, largely ignoring the threats that come from Google at the edge. Looking back over the last few years, everyone asked what was the biggest threat on the Internet, and it wasn’t the rural ISPs. It was the edge,” Carr explained.
“The FCC is a little out of sync. We’re kind of working on 2005-era regulatory protections,” Kerr added, adding that Republicans believe the “real threat to a free and open internet” is He said that he noticed something like this: It comes from a major technology platform. He said this is why the government needs to take steps to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and other laws to rein in big technology platforms.
Carr acknowledged that some government agencies, including the Department of Justice (DOJ), have pursued Apple for obvious abuses as a monopoly.
Sean Moran is a policy reporter at Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
