Cecilia Kang

Apparently, President Trump plans to nominate a tech critic and telecommunications lawyer, Adam Candeub, to lead the antitrust division at the Department of Justice. Candeub, the general counsel at the Federal Communications Commission, was an author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a road map of policy conservative proposals created for the Trump administration. In his chapter for Project 2025 on the FTC, Candeub criticized big tech companies for impeding free speech online, listing “the interference of larg

Days after the U.S. presidential election in November 2024, then-Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr posted a photo of himself with Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump at a SpaceX rocket launch. “A historic day at Starbase,” Commissioner Carr wrote in the post, referring to the Texas headquarters of Mr. Musk’s rocket and satellite company. “Another giant leap forward.” Around the same time, Mr. Musk recommended Commissioner Carr to President Trump as an ideal leader for the agency.

Before President Trump returned to the White House in January, the titans of the tech industry went all out to win him over with inauguration donations and pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago.

President Trump said in a social media post that he would issue an executive order to curb state laws on artificial intelligence, the latest win for a tech industry lobbying for deregulation. President Trump said he would create a federal order for rules and approvals for A.I. to eliminate a patchwork of state laws that have emerged in recent years. “We are beating ALL COUNTRIES at this point in the race, but that won’t last long if we are going to have 50 States, many of them bad actors, involved in RULES and the APPROVAL PROCESS,” he said on Truth Social.

Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which is the nation’s top watchdog over the broadcast industry, was at the center of a media storm on Sept 17. In an interview on a right-wing podcast, Chairman Carr criticized comments that late night host Jimmy Kimmel had made about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

The Trump administration will overhaul a $42 billion federal grant program aimed at expanding high-speed internet to the nation, including easing some rules that could benefit Elon Musk’s satellite internet service, Starlink. The program will be revamped to “take a tech-neutral approach” in its distribution of funds to states, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said.

President-elect Donald J. Trump and his allies have vowed to squash an online “censorship cartel” of social media firms that they say targets conservatives. Already, the president-elect’s newly chosen regulators at the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission have outlined plans to stop social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube from removing content the companies deem offensive — and punish advertisers that leave less restrictive platforms like X in protest of the lack of moderation. In Europe, social media companies face the opposite problem.

President-elect Donald Trump on November 17 chose Brendan Carr to be chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, naming a veteran Republican regulator who has publicly agreed with the incoming administration’s promises to slash regulation, go after Big Tech and punish TV networks for political bias.

More than a week after the remnants of Hurricane Helene unleashed catastrophic flooding in much of western North Carolina, cell service remains spotty—or, in many cases, nonexistent. Not being able to text or call has complicated relief efforts, made previously straightforward daily tasks difficult and even kept people in the dark about whether or not their loved ones perished in the storm. Relief workers said the lack of cell service is making them less efficient.

Ahead of a recent vote in Congress on a child safety bill, a powerful tech lobby representing Google, Meta and other major tech firms sent a forceful warning to lawmakers. The Kids Online Safety Act was “bad on policy and bad on the law,” the lobby, NetChoice, said in a statement, adding, “Courts across the country repeatedly halted these types of provisions.” The child safety bill, which would require social media platforms and other sites to limit features that can promote cyberbullying, har