Carr: Section 230 Declaratory Ruling No Longer a Top Priority

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said Tuesday that he’s generally satisfied with how Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is playing out and raised doubts about whether the agency will plow further into the issue. The debate over Section 230 “is still alive,” but given changes by social media companies, Carr is in a “trust-but-verify posture,” he said at a Politico summit focused on AI.

During his first administration, President Donald Trump leaned on the FCC to issue a declaratory ruling on Section 230, a push sidestepped by the agency under former Chairman Ajit Pai (see 2012110055). Trump withdrew former Commissioner Mike O’Rielly’s nomination to another FCC term after he raised questions about its authority under that law (see 2008210055).

Section 230(c)(1) “says if you leave someone else’s speech up, you’re not liable for that content if it happens to be libelous or tortuous in some way,” Carr said.

“I think that’s generally a good provision," he added. "It’s what I call a pro-speech provision; it encourages people to post and express themselves."

But Section (c)(2) has been read by the courts “as giving broad immunity to all sorts of content moderation and censorship,” Carr said. “That’s where, over the years, we saw a lot of abuses.”

He said he's "pleased to see" that "to some extent, there’s been a course correction" among social media platforms. “We need to empower individual users to be making their own content-moderation decisions, who to follow, not to follow.”

Carr defended FCC actions against broadcasters that the administration disagrees with, saying they fall into a special category. “Broadcasters are uniquely positioned when it comes to speech because they are licensed by the federal government.” Having a license means “we are excluding other people from being able to use that microphone,” he said. “They are in a different position because they have a public interest obligation.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., told the conference that she supports repealing Section 230. “I was hoping for other solutions, and they just eluded us,” she said. “I’m not for censorship, but I do think that more has to be done.” Major internet players are now the biggest companies the world has ever seen, she added, but they resist having to follow any rules “because of how they were when they got started in a garage.”

Companies that manufacture washing machines face liability if one blows up, Klobuchar noted, while social media companies don’t have any liability when fentanyl is sold on their platforms, “and they use Section 230 as a protection.”

AI Concerns

As the election gets closer, the U.S. will see more AI-generated deep fakes that could affect the results, Klobuchar said. “You have to have rules,” she said. “It’s very clear that if we just keep letting it go,” the problem will get “worse and worse.” She said Senate Democrats are working with Republicans on “guardrails” ahead of the election.

On AI, Carr said the FCC has some authority to override state actions that block use of the technology under Sections 253 and 332 of the Communications Act. “It’s not a sweeping set of authorities that would address all forms of AI.” He mentioned California and New York as states that could get additional attention from the commission.

“We are not encouraging the development of ‘woke’ AI,” Carr said. “We don’t want ideological bias to seep into these systems.” Ideological bias could be an issue in European regulation of AI, he argued. California tends to be “much more heavy-handed” on telecom regulation in general, which is bad for investment.

Sriram Krishnan, the White House's senior policy adviser for AI, said he has no worries about the technology posing an existential threat and “becoming smarter than human beings.” There's “no evidence of that,” although AI models are becoming “a lot more useful,” he said, adding that the world is still in the very early stages of AI.

The U.S., not China, must lead on AI, Krishnan said. “We are in a race where we need to make sure that American AI -- our stack, our chips, our models -- are the ones that we use and the world uses and not Chinese models or Chinese chips.” Winning the “race” will be measured by market share, he said. “We are in a race, and our competition isn’t slowing down.”

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, discussed the “legislative framework” he introduced, working with the Trump administration, aimed at allowing AI deployers and developers to avoid regulations that would “impede their work.” Cruz said it’s critical that the U.S. beats China on AI, and the law wouldn’t mean there would be no regulation.

Legislation that would block states from enforcing their AI laws was taken out of the reconciliation package late in the process (see 2507020059), but “it’s not at all dead,” Cruz said. After Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., withdrew her support for the moratorium, “It was clear that we no longer had the votes,” he said, but Trump still wants a ban. “What sense does it make to have 50 states all issuing different and contradictory regulatory and legal frameworks for AI?”