FCC Commissioners Carr, O'Rielly Raise Big Tech Red Flags at CPAC

Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr, addressing allegations of conservative bias on online platforms, said he did not think the answer was "to do nothing." He cited what he said was a leaked document from Twitter "that it would soon be able to allow political ideologues to stamp tweets as misinformation based on their perspective," saying: "I don't think that's the right thing." "If you don't want MSNBC fact-checking the information you see on Twitter," he said, "I think you should be empowered to make that decision and turn those types of bias filters off." Asked to weigh in on the charge that Google is helping China spy on its own people, Commissioner Carr conceded there was litte the FCC could do from a jurisdiction standpoint, but he weighed in regardless. "I'll say this. The hypocrasy here is stunning. Those in Silicon Valley have no problem telling the rest of the country what we should think; what we should believe; what our values are. The second it comes to getting into a country with nearly two billion people, all of a sudden those values they preach to us kind of go by the wayside." 

Federal Communications Commissioner Michael O'Rielly said he was sympathetic to the arguments that have been made "in terms of the harms high-tech companies present in terms of their censoring of American conservatives, the work they are trying to do internationally in the most harmful countries in the world and how that has built up those networks to cause harm to people throughout the world. So we are mindful of that. We use our voice to help amplify the need to address those matters but there is only so much we can do directly." Commissioner O'Rielly said moving to cloud-based networks would be a US sweetspot. "In a virtualized world we are talking about moving most of the software to the cloud where the U.S. companies are dominating and will continue to dominate for decades to come." He said that will allow the country to move away from the end-to-end architecture Huawei has been pushing. Commisioner O'Rielly said that move was not something the government was not having to force on companies because they were moving to virtualized networks on their own. "It is in their best interests to gain the efficiencies of the cloud. So it is not about forcing anyone, he said, but instead about market forces meeting the demand for networks that are better protected from the "harmful things" the Chinese network is trying to do.