President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, Chairman Brendan Carr, recently launched his own proceeding he calls “IN RE: DELETE, DELETE, DELETE.” Carr says he’s following Trump’s orders to deregulate the telecommunications industry to spur economic prosperity. But based on Carr’s own words and actions over the past few months, maybe instead of DELETE, DELETE, DELETE, we need to “Control-Alt-Delete” and reboot before he does any more harm. 

Carr claims he is alleviating unnecessary regulatory burdens on industry, but these claims ring hollow when we take even the most cursory look at his recent public pronouncements and reports of behind-the-scenes deals. He has demanded top executives explain themselves in private meetings, warned media companies against prioritizing the hiring or promotion of diverse candidates, criticized editorial choices, threatened public hearings, and, in general, tried to intimidate executives with the specter of potentially costly reviews of their dealings. He’s even gone after the radio and TV stations that bring you Morning Edition and All Things Considered, Antiques Roadshow, and Big Bird. All under pretenses that at least one U.S. Senator calls “arbitrary and capricious.”

Even in this proceeding, Carr is exercising power as if he is the only decision-maker at the FCC. Disregarding an 80-year-old law that governs how federal agencies develop, issue, and “delete” regulations, he launched this affair without the support of his fellow commissioners or FCC staff.

Carr, in the tradition of Republican-appointed commissioners, has long said the FCC should rely on competition and innovation to deliver optimal outcomes for the American people. Yet his agenda for the agency, which he laid out in Project 2025, reaches far beyond its Congressional authority. He plans to:

• Go outside the FCC’s legal jurisdiction and interpret telecommunications laws for U.S. courts instead of the other way around.
• Regulate—and tax—social media companies, although Congress hasn’t given the Commission the power to do that.
• Ban TikTok.
• Limit local and state policymakers’ input on infrastructure projects impacting their citizens.

These measures are hardly “market-friendly,” nor do they comport to someone who has long railed against “government control” of telecommunications. In fact, if he were to implement this agenda, he would be the MOST regulatory chair in FCC history.

While Chairman Carr is busy engaging in his extracurricular bullying and threatening of private and public media companies, what he is not doing is what we need the FCC to do, ensure all Americans have access to affordable communications, including broadband internet.

The FCC is organized to deliver on five overarching goals:

1. Promoting competition, innovation, and investment in broadband services and facilities.
2. Supporting the nation's economy by ensuring an appropriate competitive framework for the telecommunications marketplace.
3. Encouraging the highest and best use of spectrum.
4. Allowing new communications technologies to flourish alongside diversity and localism.
5. Providing leadership in strengthening the defense of the nation's communications infrastructure.

These complex goals demand that the FCC balance a number of perspectives to serve the public interest.

Carr has been consistently critical of the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program’s approach to addressing the digital divide, but his preferred approach has demonstrably failed its mission. Carr backed the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund in 2020, a program aimed at deploying broadband to the millions of rural Americans who lack access. But RDOF bidders that won deployment contracts have now defaulted on over one-third of the locations they were to build, leaving millions on the wrong side of the digital divide, and leaving states scrambling to use BEAD dollars to address these failures.

DELETE, DELETE, DELETE won’t deliver fast, affordable, reliable, 21st-century communications networks to everyone in the U.S. The FCC can’t just deregulate to attain universal, affordable broadband, to secure national defense, and to strengthen emergency communications. 

We need to hit Control-Alt-Delete before Chairman Carr does any more damage.

Adrianne B. Furniss is the Executive Director of the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. 

Dr. Revati Prasad is the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society's Vice President of Programs. 

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring that all people in the U.S. have access to competitive, High-Performance Broadband regardless of where they live or who they are. We believe communication policy - rooted in the values of access, equity, and diversity - has the power to deliver new opportunities and strengthen communities.

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