FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks has reviewed the President's executive order that attempts to incite the FCC to take action against social media companies and found it insufficient. "There are good reasons for the FCC to stay out of this debate," he said. "The decision is ours."
The order targets section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which ensures that platforms like Facebook and YouTube are not responsible for illegal content posted to them, as long as they strive to remove it in accordance with the law.
Some members of the government believe that these protections go too far and have led social media companies to suppress freedom of expression. Trump himself clearly felt suppressed when Twitter placed a fact-checking warning on unsupported allegations of fraud in the postal vote, leading directly to the Order.
Starks gave his perspective on the subject in an interview with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a left-wing think tank that examines technology-related issues. Although he is only one of five commissioners and the FCC has not yet reviewed the order in an official sense, his words carry weight because they indicate serious legal and procedural objections against him.
"The executive decree is absolutely right, and that is that the president cannot ask the FCC to do this or anything else," he said. "We are an independent agency."
He was careful to make it clear that he doesn't think the law is perfect - just that this method of changing it is completely unwarranted.
"The broader debate on section 230 predates President Trump's conflict with Twitter in particular, and there are so many smart people who believe that the law here should be updated," he said. . "But ultimately, this debate belongs to Congress. The fact that the President may deem it more appropriate to influence a 5-member commission than a 538-member congress is not sufficient reason, much less a good reason, to circumvent the constitutional function of our democratically elected representatives. "
The Department of Justice has also come on the scene, offering its own recommendations for changing section 230 today - although like the White House, justice does not have the power to directly change or invent responsibilities for the FCC.
Some lawmakers have also started to float potential bills, but none is far from being signed.
Brother Jessica Rosenworcel echoed her concerns, paraphrasing an earlier statement on the order: "Social media can be frustrating, but turning the FCC into a president's speech, the police are not the answer."
After detailing some of the FCC's statutory limitations, section 230, and the difficulty and unnecessaryness of narrowly defining "good faith" actions, Starks concluded that the order simply does not make much sense in their context.
"The first amendment allows social media companies to freely censor content in a way that the government could never have done, and it prohibits the government from responding to them for the speech," he said. "So much of - so much - of what the president is proposing here seems inconsistent with these basic principles, making FCC regulation even less desirable.
"The worst case, the one that hinders the proper functioning of our democracy, would be to allow laxity here to give some type of credibility to the executive decree, a scenario that certainly threatens a new regulatory regime for Internet service providers without credibility. legal support, "he continued.
That said, he recognized that the order meant that certain actions should take place at the FCC - this may not be the type of resolution Trump wants.
"I'm calling to press [the National Telecommunications Industry Association] send the petition as soon as possible. I see no reason why they should need more than 30 days from the publication of the order so that we can continue, ask the FCC to review it and vote, "he said. "And if, as I suspect, the petition fails a legal question of authority, I think we should say it loud and clear and close the book on this unfortunate detour. Let us avoid that a future electoral season could use an ongoing procedure to, in my opinion, intimidate private parties. "
Much of this is left to President Ajit Pai, who has complied with the administration's wishes quite regularly. And if Commissioner Carr's eagerness is an indicator, Republican Commission members are happy to respond to the president's "call to the president".
So far, there have been no official announcements from the FCC about the decree, but if the NTIA is moving fast, we may hear about it as early as next month's open meeting.
