Wheeler Blasts 'Carr Doctrine' of Bypassing Standard Procedures

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s warning letters to media companies are “a new and coercive technique” for agency action “without needing to follow the niceties of commission votes and judicial review,” and an agency opinion on tech platform liability would likely follow the same pattern, wrote former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in a post Tuesday for the Brookings Institution. Rather than aiming at the deregulation often emphasized by conservatives, Carr is increasing the regulatory reach of the FCC “to attack corporate decisions he and [President] Donald Trump do not like,” Wheeler said. “Acting through coercion rather than regulation appears to be a workaround of the limits placed on agency authority by recent Supreme Court decisions sought by conservatives.” Rather than using agency processes to investigate matters and build a record, Carr is “unilaterally reaching a conclusion” and initiating enforcement proceedings, Wheeler said. “While this may be possible under the agency’s procedures, the result is anything but procedural and transparent.”