FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr Still Doesn’t Understand That Banning TikTok Doesn’t Fix The Actual Problem

We’ve noted repeatedly how FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr doesn’t have the authority to regulate social media. And over in the sector he does actually regulate, telecom, Carr is routinely a no show. He’s been a consistent opponent of holding telecom monopolies like AT&T accountable for pretty much anything, and generally doesn’t believe government has any real role telling telecom monopolies what to do.

Those principles routinely get thrown out of the window when Carr discusses TikTok and social media. Carr’s face has been peppered across news outlets for much of the year calling for a ban of the popular social media app, and once again was rewarded with headlines via a new interview with Axios. Again, Carr calls for a complete and total ban of TikTok:

Carr highlighted concerns about U.S. data flowing back to China and the risk of a state actor using TikTok to covertly influence political processes in the United States. There simply isn’t “a world in which you could come up with sufficient protection on the data that you could have sufficient confidence that it’s not finding its way back into the hands of the [Chinese Communist Party],” Carr said.

Here’s the thing: Carr has actively opposed any and all efforts to create any meaningful privacy safeguards over the telecom, adtech, or app sectors. As a result, you could ban TikTok immediately with a giant, patriotic hammer, and the Chinese government could simply buy comparable data from a rotating array of equally dodgy adtech middlemen with zero ethical restraint and little to no oversight.

The sector Carr actually regulates, telecom, has been plagued with a parade of location data scandals showcasing how cellular carriers have repeatedly failed to protect user location data, often to devastating effect. Carr’s been largely a no show on the subject, despite its increased life and death relevance post Roe.

So again, the fixation on “banning TikTok” sounds great until you realize it’s mostly a distraction from our corruption-fueled failure on privacy legislation and consumer protection. Carr again is an absolute no show on this issue in the sector he actually regulates, and his belief (widely shared!) that banning TikTok actually fixes anything indicates he doesn’t understand how any of this works.

For literally twenty-five years we’ve ignored privacy advocates’ call for stricter consumer data safeguards and increased penalties for companies that repeatedly fail to secure data. At almost every turn we prioritized profit over security and privacy. Even when the check came due and we were bombarded with a steady parade of hacks, breaches, and various privacy scandals our solutions were largely performative.

Like most of Trumpland, Carr opposes meaningful privacy laws. Carr also opposes ensuring that privacy regulators at the FTC have the staff and resources to actually do their jobs. The entire policy approach by folks like Carr has been to generally let the biggest corporations do whatever they want, especially when it comes to the over-collection and monetization of user location, browsing, and other data.

Of course, the same broken-ass system routinely exploited by corporations was also going to be exploited by authoritarian governments. Actual privacy proponents made this point for decades.

Now, many of the same folks who helped build this greed-based, zero-accountability paradigm from the ground up want you to believe banning TikTok somehow fixes everything. But the endless hyperventilation about TikTok specifically (which is fueled in no small part by covert Facebook lobbying and in some instances just ignorant bigotry) is a distraction from our corruption-fueled failures on privacy and consumer protection more generally.

If you’re a politician professing you’re serious about consumer privacy and security, support the passage of a meaningful privacy law for the internet era, or shut up and get out of the way.