Big Tech Opponent Candeub Rejoining FCC as GC; Section 230 Reforms Expected
Law professor Adam Candeub, who was an attorney in the FCC's Media and Common Carrier bureaus as well as acting NTIA head, is returning to the commission as general counsel. Candeub brings with him strong criticisms of Big Tech. In response to a post on X about Candeub not being the GC that Big Tech executives would have preferred, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr replied that the agency "will work to dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights to everyday Americans." He added: "I look forward to Adam Candeub serving as the FCC's General Counsel. He is going to do great things!"
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Candeub -- director of Michigan State's Intellectual Property, Information and Communications Law Program -- wrote a chapter on the FTC in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 blueprint. In it, he said the increasing power and scope of major corporations may be due in part to regulatory capture. He also urged reining in Big Tech. "The continued emergence of evidence documenting collusion -- between the Big Tech internet platforms and the Biden White House and administrative agencies -- to censor criticism, scientific fact, and uncomfortable political truths demonstrates this unfortunate development," he wrote.
In the chapter, he also mentioned folding the FTC into DOJ. He said more needs to be done to curtail the growing power of the administrative state. "Unless conservatives take a firm hand to the bureaucracy and marshal its power to defend a freedom-promoting agenda, nothing will stop the bureaucracy’s anti-free market, leftist march," he said. Candeub wrote that state attorneys general, through their Big Tech antitrust lawsuits, "are far more responsive to their constituents than is the FTC." That type of "'boots on the ground' approach would benefit the FTC enormously."
Candeub said in Project 2025 that the FTC should examine social media platforms' "advertising and contract-making with children as a deceptive or unfair trade practice" and potentially require written parental consent. In addition, the agency should start "unfair trade practices proceedings" against internet firms that "enter into contracts with children without parental consent."
Chamber of Progress CEO Adam Kovacevich wrote on X that Candeub was the author of the 2020 NTIA proposal trying to scale back Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. As FCC GC, Candeub is "likely to be a key driver of a 230 rollback once Carr has a majority at the FCC," Kovacevich said.