Making waves: Questions about NM media and internet up in the air with FCC chair pick

In one week, President-elect Donald Trump will return to the Oval Office. With him comes a slew of advisers announced in recent months, some of whom have raised more than a few eyebrows.

While New Mexico’s Democratic administration often touts its ability to create protective state laws to combat a conservative federal agenda with very different priorities, it seems that at least one of Trump’s appointees could agree with issues New Mexico leaders are determined to confront.

Trump in November announced his pick for the chair of the Federal Communications Commission: Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the FCC. The pick immediately grabbed headlines — particularly because Carr was a Project 2025 co-author — and raised some concerns from New Mexico experts.

Carr was in charge of the FCC chapter in Project 2025, a controversial policy blueprint published by conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. Several of Trump’s other adviser picks are also associated with Project 2025.

Trump has maintained that he has nothing to do with Project 2025, which he also said when he visited Albuquerque in October.

“I have no idea what Project 2025 is,” Trump said at the rally held on Halloween. “I never read it, and I never will.”

With Carr’s promotion, the FCC could take “a bit of a different turn,” according to Sonia Gipson Rankin, a professor at the University of New Mexico’s School of Law, where she teaches torts and technology focusing on innovation and legal implications.

Public airways’ regulation

As the entity that acts as a nonpartisan commission overseeing media — typically airwaves, television and home internet access — something to watch out for with Carr as the head of the FCC is federal oversight of public access networks, “which have been cornerstones of the community,” said Gipson Rankin.

“What happens to their ability to tell stories about issues that matter to New Mexicans with changes in federal policy?” Gipson Rankin asked.

Part of the FCC’s regulatory powers includes issuing, renewing and transferring television broadcast licenses. For instance, the commission will oversee Skydance Media’s multibillion dollar purchase of Paramount, including the transfer of CBS’ national news division and broadcast licenses for more than two dozen local CBS stations.

With local television, broadcast licenses renew on an eight-year cycle that won’t begin until 2028, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. The renewals aren’t subject to politically motivated reviews by the commission.

“We’ll need to all be very, very conscious and mindful about what happens through what information is permitted or not permitted to be shared through public airways," Gipson Rankin said.

What’s allowed on the internet?

It’s no secret that Carr wants to hold big tech accountable. In a statement to Fox News last month, he said “combating tech censorship” was a priority.

“Across agencies, across Congress, we need to work together to, frankly, smash the censorship cartel and restore free speech in the country because it’s actually a straight line from there to economic growth as well,” Carr said on Fox.

That raises questions about what will be “permissible on the internet and what isn’t,” Gipson Rankin said.

In his chapter in Project 2025, Carr discussed reinterpreting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to eliminate immunity for social media companies that censor free speech.

“As part of those reforms, the FCC should work with Congress to ensure that anti-discrimination provisions are applied to big tech — including ‘back-end’ companies that provide hosting services and DDoS protection,” he wrote.

Social media companies, in particular, are already preparing for Trump’s second term. Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, calls freedom of expression “one of our core values.” This month, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Meta, said his company would end fact-checking and remove restrictions on speech on Facebook and Instagram — a turnaround from Meta’s content moderation efforts during Trump’s first term.

While differences might exist in how Republicans and Democrats want to reinterpret Section 230, the 20-plus-year-old law is “ripe for a review,” said Gipson Rankin.

“This will be a really important area for us for the next four or five years, as it relates to First Amendment (rights), as it relates to freedom of speech, as it relates to the right to free press and so many other principles that really matter to us as citizens in the United States,” Gipson Rankin said.

Carr also noted in Project 2025 that he would urge the FCC to work with Congress to ensure stronger protections for young children accessing social media sites.

More pointedly, he wrote about working with Congress to create legislation that prohibits social media platforms from hosting illegal content like “child pornography; terrorist speech; and indecent, profane or similar categories of speech that Congress has previously carved out.”

In New Mexico, Carr’s sentiments overlap with efforts by the state attorney general, Raúl Torrez.

The attorney general in 2023 sued Meta, alleging child exploitation following an investigation by the New Mexico Department of Justice. And late last year, Torrez filed suit against Snap Inc., the parent company of the popular social media app Snapchat, “to protect children from sextortion, sexual exploitation and harm,” his office said.

“Our attorney general is very proactive about this, as are many attorneys general across the country,” Gipson Rankin said.

With Carr, she said, “there can be lots of concerns about it, right? Is the point to really protect children, or is it to also, in addition, and under the guise of protecting children, limit others’ right to free speech and other mechanisms?”

She said both things can be concerning.

“Children having never-ending, unprotected access to the internet, and that there’s an effort to curtail free speech of adults who do have certain legal, constitutional protections,” she said. “We have to find a smarter way to balance those two very important principles.”

Relatively low risk for broadband

Under the Biden administration, the federal government committed $90 billion to internet connectivity and accessibility efforts, including fiber installation. Carr wants to see an overhaul of how the U.S. spends money on broadband.

He believes in pairing money with “reforms that free more airwaves for wireless connectivity or streamline the permitting processes for broadband builds,” according to his FCC chapter in Project 2025.

“That failure is holding back America’s hardworking telecommunications crews and leaving Americans stuck waiting on the wrong side of the digital divide,” Carr wrote.

He outlined four specific policy plans:

• Developing a national spectrum strategy identifying airwaves the FCC can free for commercial wireless services and setting a timeline for agency action.
• Ensuring Congress and the White House work together to establish a spectrum coordinator process that works for commercial and federal users.
• Modernizing infrastructure rules.
• Reviewing and approving low-earth orbit satellite technology.

New Mexico broadband office Director Drew Lovelace told the Journal entities that work with federal government programs are watching what policies will be enacted, not just the appointees themselves.

“We’re thinking about what positions they’ve taken publicly in the past and how that impacts the programs that we have,” he said.

While the FCC oversees broadband, the primary funding for it — $42 billion across the nation through the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment, or BEAD, program. New Mexico got $675 million of the pot.

OBAE is also looking cautiously at that pick — billionaire Howard Lutnick — but Lovelace said New Mexico already has federal approval to run its broadband program.

“We are at this place where we’re so far down the line of the programs, … which makes it pretty hard to claw back that funding and take it back to Congress,” he said. “So we don’t really see major risks to these programs.”

Like Carr outlined in Project 2025, the federal administration could prioritize satellite broadband technology, Lovelace pointed out. The New Mexico broadband office is seeking $70 million from the Legislature to help deploy satellite technology.

Satellite technology is also part of the federal BEAD program, but it’s one of the final pieces. While it’s immediately deployable, Lovelace said, it doesn’t benefit unserved and underserved people.

“It’s not the perfect solution to make sure that New Mexicans don’t have a digital divide in the future,” Lovelace said.

There’s still a lot of misinformation about broadband. Lovelace said he’s seen posts on social media from expected incoming administration members who are frustrated with how long it’s taking to deploy the BEAD program, but internet setup and roll out is a long-term project.

The state would need $2 billion more to build the infrastructure needed to get all New Mexico households connected to reliable, high-speed internet, Lovelace said.

“There may be some disagreements about how things get deployed or how fast things get deployed, but at the end of the day, we all want to have deployment,” he said.