HERSHEY, Pa. -- FCC General Counsel Adam Candeub said Friday that Section 230 reform isn’t “on the back burner” at the agency, but the administration’s current focus on online speech limits is now overseas. “The administration's dedication to free speech on the internet is unchanged,” but “the hot spots have sort of shifted a little bit,” Candeub said during a Q&A at the annual FCBA seminar. As examples, he pointed to Europe’s Digital Services Act, online safety laws in the U.K. and actions against X in France and Brazil. “Given the fact that I think our threats have moved beyond our borders, that's sort of taken administration concern as well,” he said.
House Communications Subcommittee leaders see a strong chance that any revamp of the 1996 Telecommunications Act may need to happen over multiple bills, rather than a single legislative package, because of the breadth of items that could be included. Former Republican FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly, who was a House Commerce Committee aide when Congress passed the statute, urged lawmakers during a March 26 hearing to consider such a multi-bill approach (see 2603260072).
House Communications Subcommittee leaders said in interviews that they expect work on any legislative revamp of the 1996 Telecommunications Act to extend into the next Congress and potentially beyond. Chairman Richard Hudson, R-N.C., and ranking member Doris Matsui, D-Calif., told us they intended the subpanel’s Thursday hearing, which reexamined the 1996 statute 30 years after its enactment, as a new starting point in those discussions.
A proposed private right of action will be removed from a New Hampshire age-verification bill that seeks to restrict children’s access to porn, said its sponsor, Sen. Tara Reardon (D), at a livestreamed state Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday. Reardon said her planned amendment to SB-648 would also allow companies to assert rights under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Noting that many judges aren't technology experts, 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Patrick Higginbotham expressed concern Monday that many legal issues are decided using court documents instead of jury trials. “One of the frustrations” that stems from long-running litigation is that “a trial judge … never got to hear the full evidence,” he said during oral argument in CCIA v. Paxton.
The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts should block the state’s lawsuit against Meta and its social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, said TechFreedom in an amicus brief filed Tuesday (docket SJC-13747). The state’s lawsuit targeting “addictive” features of the social media platforms violates Section 230 of the Communications Act, TechFreedom said. “The supposedly ‘addictive’ features the Commonwealth challenges are nothing more than publishing decisions: the cadence of content delivery (autoplay), the quantity of content delivered (infinite scroll), and the choice of what content to highlight (notifications),” said the filing. Those features are “classic editorial decisions” about displaying third-party material and “fall squarely” within Section 230’s protections for platforms from litigation over content posted by users, the group said.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s use of agency threats against Disney, ABC and local broadcasters on Wednesday led to Jimmy Kimmel Live! being pulled from the air within hours, and Carr is widely expected to keep repeating the tactic, academics and attorneys said in interviews Thursday.
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.
The U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling Friday that likely means less certainty for FCC actions and those of other federal agencies under the Hobbs Act. The decision comes a year after SCOTUS overruled the Chevron doctrine, which had required courts to give deference to agency decisions, in the Loper Bright case (see 2406280043). The latest from the court was Friday's 6-3 decision in McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates v. McKesson, a much-watched case on the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (see 2506200011).
The Phoenix Center said Tuesday that President Donald Trump's administration is proving to be more focused on regulating industry than he promised during his campaign last year. “A disturbing number” of Trump appointees “are refusing to heed his message, targeting technology firms with aggressive antitrust enforcements, regulations, and even the sorts of jawboning coercion used during the Biden Administration to curtail constitutionally protected private speech,” the center's new report said.