Trump’s FCC Head Warns EU Content Rules ‘Incompatible’ With Free Speech

The European Union wants social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, and X to do more to crack down on illegal content like hate speech and child sexual abuse material. The Trump administration apparently isn’t all that into it. Brendon Carr, a Republican who Trump appointed to lead the Federal Communications Commission, spoke at Mobile World Congress on Monday and told the world that content moderation isn’t in the Constitution, or something like that.

Carr, who referred to the rules established by the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) as a form of censorship, said those new moderation requirements are “something that is incompatible with both our free speech tradition in America and the commitments that these technology companies have made to a diversity of opinions.”

It’s a continuation of Carr ringing the internet liberty bell, which included sending a letter to tech executives last week asking them for their input on how they want to navigate the new rules—with a pretty clear indication that Trump will back them if they decide to ignore it. “If there is an urge in Europe to engage in protectionist regulations, to give disparate treatment to U.S. technology companies, the Trump administration has been clear that we are going to speak up and defend the interests of U.S. businesses,” Carr wrote to the company heads.

Since Trump took office, the federal government has really been making a point to hammer the EU over its ongoing scrutiny of American-headquartered tech companies—and those companies have increasingly sucked up to Trump for protection.

Last month, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan demanded the EU’s antitrust chief, Teresa Ribera, explain how she plans to enforce the DSA and other regulations. He asked her to clarify how she enforces the European Union’s rules reining in Big Tech, saying they appear to target U.S. companies, and President Trump signed a memorandum stating his administration will scrutinize any rule that tries to “dictate how American companies interact with consumers in the European Union.”

With those regulations, including the DSA fully coming into effect this year, Big Tech is already hiding behind the Trump shield. Last month, Meta chief of global affairs Joel Kaplan warned that the company “won’t shy away” from calling upon President Donald Trump if it continues to face penalties in the EU. He also claimed that the ongoing crackdowns against Big tech amounted to “discriminatory” action.

There are a couple of things Big Tech could try other than crying to Daddy. For one, it could just follow the rules. Wild concept, but it’d probably help cut down on all those fines. Plus, even if the companies think the EU is asking for “censorship,” it’s not like they don’t actively comply with censorious requests elsewhere, like when Meta and Google complied with requests from the Vietnamese government to crack down on anti-state content—or did the exact same thing at behest of the Turkish government.

Another thing they could try is to stop being monopolies. If you want to be the global facilitators of communication, it comes with the responsibility of complying with global laws. They, of course, could choose not to operate in a region that they view as being too burdensome to work with, but that’d require forgoing a significant amount of data and profit, so obviously, they’re not going to do that. But the reality is these are international corporations that just happened to have been founded in the US, and they really only drape themselves in the flag when it’s most convenient to their bottom line, not out of some sort of true commitment to “American values.”