Mike M. – Page 14

Google seems to have called it quits on making its own Android tablets—again

android, android tablets, Google, ipad, pixel slate, pixel tablet, pixel tablet 2, pixel tablet 3, Tech / Mike M. / November 23, 2024

Depending on which Android-focused site you believe, either a third Pixel Tablet was apparently in the works at Google and canceled, as Android Headlines reported, or the second one, as Android Authority has it. Either way, there was reportedly a team at Google working on the next flagship Pixel-branded tablet, and now, seemingly due to profitability concerns, that work is over. At least until, maybe, a third Pixel Tablet in the future.

The Pixel Tablet, released last fall, was generally regarded as Google’s second re-entry into the tablet market that the iPad all but owns, at least at the consumer level. As such, it sought to distinguish itself from Apple’s slab by launching with a home-friendly dock and speaker cradle, taking on the appearance of a big smart home display when docked to it.

While there are no public sales figures, the device has not kick-started a resurgence of interest in Android tablets beyond the baseline sales of Amazon’s Kindle Fire devices (based on a Google-less fork of Android). Google will likely continue to support and promote Android tablets for other manufacturers and now has its own Pixel Fold devices occupying that middle space between phone and tablet forms.

Ars has contacted Google for comment and confirmation and will update this post with its response.

Google seems to have called it quits on making its own Android tablets—again Read More »

The good, the bad, and the ugly behind the push for more smart displays

Amazon, Apple, Google, Monitors, Smart Home, Tech / Mike M. / November 22, 2024

After a couple of years without much happening, smart displays are in the news again. Aside from smart TVs, consumer screens that connect to the Internet have never reached a mainstream audience. However, there seems to be a resurgence to make smart displays more popular. The approaches that some companies are taking are better than those of others, revealing a good, bad, and ugly side behind the push.

Note that for this article, we’ll exclude smart TVs when discussing smart displays. Unlike the majority of smart displays, smart TVs are mainstream tech. So for this piece, we’ll mostly focus on devices like the Google Next Hub Max or Amazon Echo Show (as pictured above).

The good

When it comes to emerging technology, a great gauge for whether innovation is happening is by measuring how much a product solves a real user problem. Products seeking a problem to solve or that are glorified vehicles for ads and tracking don’t qualify.

If reports that Apple is working on its first smart display are true, there may be potential for it to solve the problem of managing multiple smart home devices from different companies.

Apple has declined to comment on reports from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman of an Apple smart display under development. But Gurman recently claimed that the display will be able to be mounted on walls and “use AI to navigate apps.” Gurman said that it would incorporate Apple’s smart home framework HomeKit, which supports “hundreds of accessories” and can control third-party devices, like smart security cameras, thermostats, and lights. Per the November 12 report:

The product will be marketed as a way to control home appliances, chat with Siri, and hold intercom sessions via Apple’s FaceTime software. It will also be loaded with Apple apps, including ones for web browsing, listening to news updates and playing music. Users will be able to access their notes and calendar information, and the device can turn into a slideshow display for their photos.

If released, the device—said to be shaped like a 6-inch iPhone—would compete with the Nest Hub and Echo Show. Apple entering the smart display business could bring a heightened focus on privacy and push other companies to make privacy a bigger focus, too. Apple has already given us a peek at how it might handle smart home privacy with the HomePod. “All communication between HomePod and Apple servers is encrypted, and anonymous IDs protect your identity,” Apple’s HomePod privacy policy states.

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Our Universe is not fine-tuned for life, but it’s still kind of OK

astronomy, cosmology, dark energy, Dark Matter, drake equation, Science, Star formation / Mike M. / November 22, 2024

Inspired by the Drake equation, researchers optimize a model universe for life.

Physicists including Robert H. Dickle and Fred Hoyle have argued that we are living in a universe that is perfectly fine-tuned for life. Following the anthropic principle, they claimed that the only reason fundamental physical constants have the values we measure is because we wouldn’t exist if those values were any different. There would simply have been no one to measure them.

But now a team of British and Swiss astrophysicists have put that idea to test. “The short answer is no, we are not in the most likely of the universes,” said Daniele Sorini, an astrophysicist at Durham University. “And we are not in the most life-friendly universe, either.” Sorini led a study aimed at establishing how different amounts of the dark energy present in a universe would affect its ability to produce stars. Stars, he assumed, are a necessary condition for intelligent life to appear.

But worry not. While our Universe may not be the best for life, the team says it’s still pretty OK-ish.

Expanding the Drake equation

Back in the 1960s, Frank Drake, an American astrophysicist and astrobiologist, proposed an equation aimed at estimating the number of intelligent civilizations in our Universe. The equation started with stars as a precondition for life and worked its way down in scale from there. How many new stars appear in the Universe per year? How many of the stars are orbited by planets? How many of those planets are habitable? How many of those habitable planets can develop life? Eventually, you’re left with the fraction of planets that host intelligent civilizations.

The problem with the Drake equation was that it wasn’t really supposed to yield a definite number. We couldn’t—and still can’t—know the values for most of its variables, like the fraction of the planets that developed life. So far, we know of only one such planet, and you can’t infer any statistical probabilities when you only have one sample. The equation was meant more as a guide for future researchers, giving them ideas of what to look for in their search for extraterrestrial life.

But even without knowing the actual values of all those variables present in the Drake equation, one thing was certain: The more stars you had at the beginning, the better the odds for life were. So Sorini’s team focused on stars.

“Our work is connected to the Drake equation in that it relies on the same logic,” Sorini said. “The difference is we are not adding to the life side of the equation. We’re adding to the stars’ side of the equation.” His team attempted to identify the basic constituents of a universe that’s good at producing stars.

“By ‘constituents,’ I mean ordinary matter, the stuff we are made of—the dark matter, which is a weirder, invisible type of matter, and the dark energy, which is what is making the expansion of a universe proceed faster and faster,” Sorinin explained. Of all those constituents, his team found that dark energy has a key influence on the star formation rate.

Into the multiverse

Dark energy accelerates the expansion of the Universe, counteracting gravity and pushing matter further apart. If there’s enough dark energy, it would be difficult to form the dark matter web that structures galaxies. “The idea is ‘more dark energy, fewer galaxies—so fewer stars,’” Sorini said.

The effect of dark energy in a universe can be modeled by a number called the cosmological constant. “You could reinterpret it as a form of energy that can make your universe expand faster,” Sorinin said.

(The cosmological constant was originally a number Albert Einstein came up with to fix the fact that his theory of general relativity caused the expansion of what was thought to be a static universe. Einstein later learned that the Universe actually was expanding and declared the cosmological constant his greatest blunder. But the idea eventually managed to make a comeback after it was discovered that the Universe’s expansion is accelerating.)

The cosmological constant was one of the variables Sorini’s team manipulated to determine if we are living in a universe that is maximally efficient at producing stars. Sorini based this work on an idea put forward by Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, back in 1989. “Weinberg proposed that there could be a multiverse of all possible universes, each with a different value of dark energy,” Sorini explained. Sorini’s team modeled that multiverse composed of thousands upon thousands of possible universes, each complete with a past and future.

Cosmological fluke

To simulate the history of all those universes, Sorini used a slightly modified version of a star formation model he developed back in 2021 with John A. Peacock, a British astronomer at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and co-author of the study. It wasn’t the most precise model, but the approximations it suggested produced a universe that was reasonably close to our own. The team validated the results by predicting the stellar mass fraction in the total mass of the Milky Way Galaxy, which we know stands somewhere between 2.2 and 6.6 percent. The model came up with 6.7 percent, which was deemed good enough for the job.

In the next step, Sorini and his colleagues defined a large set of possible universes in which the value of the cosmological constant ranged from a very tiny fraction of the one we observe in our Universe all the way to the value 100,000 times higher than our own.

It turned out our Universe was not the best at producing stars. But it was decent.

“The value of the cosmological constant in the most life-friendly universe would be measured at roughly one-tenth of the value we observe in our own,” Sorini said.

In a universe like that, the fraction of the matter that gets turned into stars would stand at 27 percent. “But we don’t seem to be that far from the optimal value. In our Universe, stars are formed with around 23 percent of the matter,” Sorini said.

The last question the team addressed was how lucky we are to even be here. According to Sorini’s calculations, if all universes in the multiverse are equally likely, the chances of having a cosmological constant at or lower than the value present in our Universe is just 0.5 percent. In other words, we rolled the dice and got a pretty good score, although it could have been a bit better. The odds of getting a cosmological constant at one-tenth of our own or lower were just 0.2 percent.

Things also could have been much worse. The flip side of these odds is that the number of possible universes that are worse than our own vastly exceeds the number of universes that are better.

“That is of course all subject to the assumptions of our model, and the only assumption about life we made was that more stars lead to higher chances for life to appear,” Sorini said. In the future, his team plans to go beyond that idea and make the model more sophisticated by considering more parameters. “For example, we could ask ourselves what the chances are of producing carbons in order to have life as we know it or something like that,” Sorini said.

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stae2236

Jacek Krywko is a freelance science and technology writer who covers space exploration, artificial intelligence research, computer science, and all sorts of engineering wizardry.

Our Universe is not fine-tuned for life, but it’s still kind of OK Read More »

Surgeons remove 2.5-inch hairball from teen with rare Rapunzel syndrome

abdominal pain, hair, health, NEJM, rapunzel syndrome, Science, stomach / Mike M. / November 21, 2024

Hair is resistant to digestion and isn’t easily moved through the digestive system. As such, it often gets lodged in folds of the gastric lining, denatures, and then traps food and gunk to form a mass. Over time, it will continue to collect material, growing into a thick, matted wad.

Of all the bezoars, trichobezoars are the most common. But none of them are particularly easy to spot. On CT scans, bezoars can be indistinguishable from food in the stomach unless there’s an oral contrast material. To look for a possible bezoar in the teen, her doctors ordered an esophagogastroduodenoscopy, in which a scope is put down into the stomach through the mouth. With that, they got a clear shot of the problem: a trichobezoar. (The image is here, but a warning: it’s graphic).

Tangled tail

But this trichobezoar was particularly rare; hair from the mottled mat had dangled down from the stomach and into the small bowel, which is an extremely uncommon condition called Rapunzel syndrome, named after the fairy-tale character who lets down her long hair. It carries a host of complications beyond acute abdominal pain, including perforation of the stomach and intestines, and acute pancreatitis. The only resolution is surgical removal. In the teen’s case, the trichobezoar came out during surgery using a gastrostomy tube. Surgeons recovered a hairball about 2.5 inches wide, along with the dangling hair that reached into the small intestine.

For any patient with a trichobezoar, the most important next step is to address any psychiatric disorders that might underlie hair-eating behavior. Hair eating is often linked to a condition called trichotillomania, a repetitive behavior disorder marked by hair pulling. Sometimes, the disorder can be diagnosed by signs of hair loss—bald patches, irritated scalp areas, or hair at different growth stages. But, for the most part, it’s an extremely difficult condition to diagnose as patients have substantial shame and embarrassment about the condition and will often go to great lengths to hide it.

Another possibility is that the teen had pica, a disorder marked by persistent eating of nonfood, nonnutritive substances. Intriguingly, the teen noted that she had pica as a toddler. But doctors were skeptical that pica could explain her condition given that hair was the only nonfood material in the bezoar.

The teen’s doctors would have liked to get to the bottom of her condition and referred her to a psychiatrist after she successfully recovered from surgery. But unfortunately, she did not return for follow-up care and told her doctors she would instead see a hypnotherapist that her friends recommended.

Surgeons remove 2.5-inch hairball from teen with rare Rapunzel syndrome Read More »

An ad giant wants to run your next TV’s operating system

ads, Software, Sonos, Tech, TVs / Mike M. / November 21, 2024

Per The Trade Desk, Ventura’s other top “benefits” will include a “cleaner supply chain for streaming TV advertising, minimizing supply chain hops and costs—ensuring maximum ROI for every advertising dollar and optimized yield for publishers” and improved ad targeting.

TVs sold at a loss in order to bolster ad businesses

The Trade Desk plans to sell Ventura to TV manufacturers and distributors, plus other types of companies, like airlines, hotel chains, and “gaming companies,” Axios reported.

The ad tech firm says it isn’t looking to make money off of the OS directly and doesn’t plan to make hardware.

Instead, Ventura is supposed to benefit The Trade Desk by helping its advertiser customers reach more people. Differing from how TV owners traditionally view TV software’s purpose, Ventura will prioritize the ability to show TV owners the most appealing type of ads. Green will consider Ventura a success “if it drives more pricing transparency and stronger measurement for the CTV advertising ecosystem writ large,” per Axios.

Ventura has reportedly garnered interest from Sonos already, CEO Patrick Spence told Axios. Sonos is rumored to be developing a streaming set-top box. The audio company’s serious and public consideration of something like Ventura hints at the type of business approach it may take with streaming hardware.

The Trade Desk’s interest in creating a TV OS centered on being helpful to advertisers indicates how important ads have become to TVs and/or TV software companies. Some, like Vizio and Roku, have embraced this shift so much that they’re selling TVs “at somewhere between -3 and -7 percent margin” in a scramble to attract users, Paul Gray, Omdia’s research director of consumer electronics and devices, said at a CTV industry conference earlier this month, per Broadband TV News. Then there’s Telly, a startup that has given TVs away for free so it can sell and track ads. (Telly TVs also have a secondary screen that can show ads when the TV is off.)

As companies continue to leverage TV software to sell ads and gather user data, TV owners will likely continue seeing fewer options for an ad-free TV viewing experience.

An ad giant wants to run your next TV’s operating system Read More »

Fitness app Strava is tightening third-party access to user data

#running, AI, API, cycling, fitness, hiking, sports, strava, Tech / Mike M. / November 20, 2024

AI, while having potential, “must be handled responsibly and with a firm focus on user control,” and third-party developers may not take “such a deliberate approach,” Strava wrote. And the firm expects the API changes will “affect only a small fraction (less than 0.1 percent) of the applications on the Strava platform” and that “the overwhelming majority of existing use cases are still allowed,” including coaching platforms “focused on providing feedback to users.”

Ars has contacted Strava and will update this post if we receive a response.

DC Rainmaker’s post about Strava’s changes points out that while the simplest workaround for apps would be to take fitness data directly from users, that’s not how fitness devices work. Other than “a Garmin or other big-name device with a proper and well-documented” API, most devices default to Strava as a way to get training data to other apps, wrote Ray Maker, the blogger behind the DC Rainmaker alias.

Beyond day-to-day fitness data, Strava’s API agreement now states more precisely that an app cannot process a user’s Strava data “in an aggregated or de-identified manner” for the purposes of “analytics, analyses, customer insights generation,” or similar uses. Maker writes that the training apps he contacted had been “completely broadsided” by the API shift, having been given 30 days’ notice to change their apps.

Strava notes in a post on its forum in the Developers & API section that, per its guidelines, “posts requesting or attempting to have Strava revert business decisions will not be permitted.”

Fitness app Strava is tightening third-party access to user data Read More »

niantic-uses-pokemon-go-player-data-to-build-ai-navigation-system

Niantic uses Pokémon Go player data to build AI navigation system

AI, AI ethics, Biz & IT, chatgpt, chatgtp, large geospatial model, large language model, machine learning, mobile games, niantic, Pokémon, Pokemon GO, smartphones, video games, Visual Positioning System / Mike M. / November 19, 2024

Last week, Niantic announced plans to create an AI model for navigating the physical world using scans collected from players of its mobile games, such as Pokémon Go, and from users of its Scaniverse app, reports 404 Media.

All AI models require training data. So far, companies have collected data from websites, YouTube videos, books, audio sources, and more, but this is perhaps the first we’ve heard of AI training data collected through a mobile gaming app.

“Over the past five years, Niantic has focused on building our Visual Positioning System (VPS), which uses a single image from a phone to determine its position and orientation using a 3D map built from people scanning interesting locations in our games and Scaniverse,” Niantic wrote in a company blog post.

The company calls its creation a “large geospatial model” (LGM), drawing parallels to large language models (LLMs) like the kind that power ChatGPT. Whereas language models process text, Niantic’s model will process physical spaces using geolocated images collected through its apps.

The scale of Niantic’s data collection reveals the company’s sizable presence in the AR space. The model draws from over 10 million scanned locations worldwide, with users capturing roughly 1 million new scans weekly through Pokémon Go and Scaniverse. These scans come from a pedestrian perspective, capturing areas inaccessible to cars and street-view cameras.

First-person scans

The company reports it has trained more than 50 million neural networks, each representing a specific location or viewing angle. These networks compress thousands of mapping images into digital representations of physical spaces. Together, they contain over 150 trillion parameters—adjustable values that help the networks recognize and understand locations. Multiple networks can contribute to mapping a single location, and Niantic plans to combine its knowledge into one comprehensive model that can understand any location, even from unfamiliar angles.

Niantic uses Pokémon Go player data to build AI navigation system Read More »

“Windows 365 Link” is Microsoft’s $349 thin client for Windows in the cloud

Tech / Mike M. / November 19, 2024

Microsoft is announcing some new hardware today, but it’s a bit different from a typical Surface device. The Windows 365 Link, which launches in April for $349, is a mini desktop PC that exists exclusively to connect to the Windows 365 cloud service rather than running Windows locally.

The Windows 365 Link is a plain black plastic box with a Windows logo imprinted on the top—it looks like a smaller, squarer version of the Windows Dev Kit 2023, an Arm desktop that Microsoft released for developers a couple of years ago. The box has one USB-A port on the front for easy access. On the back, you get a single USB-C 3.2 port, two more USB-A ports, a full-size DisplayPort, a full-size HDMI port, an Ethernet port, and a power jack.

Windows Central reports that the device is fanless, uses an unspecified Intel processor, and includes 8GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. It runs a cut-down Windows variant that exists only to connect to local peripherals and make contact with Microsoft’s Windows 365 service. When not connected to the Internet, the PC is mostly non-functional, though there is presumably some kind of basic UI available for connecting to networks and accessories locally.

Windows 365 Link’s hardware is fairly capable as thin clients go—the local hardware doesn’t need to be able to run high-end apps, but it does need to connect to all of your desktop peripherals and your network. Microsoft says the box supports two 4K displays simultaneously and supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 for connecting to wireless networks and keyboards, mice, headsets, and other accessories. Microsoft also says the device’s local hardware will handle video encoding and decoding for videoconferencing.

“Windows 365 Link” is Microsoft’s $349 thin client for Windows in the cloud Read More »

The ISS has been leaking air for 5 years, and engineers still don’t know why

human spaceflight, international space station, NASA, roscosmos, russia, Science, Space / Mike M. / November 18, 2024

“The station is not young,” said Michael Barratt, a NASA astronaut who returned from the space station last month. “It’s been up there for quite a while, and you expect some wear and tear, and we’re seeing that.”

“The Russians believe that continued operations are safe, but they can’t prove to our satisfaction that they are,” said Cabana, who was the senior civil servant at NASA until his retirement in 2023. “And the US believes that it’s not safe, but we can’t prove that to the Russian satisfaction that that’s the case.

“So while the Russian team continues to search for and seal the leaks, it does not believe catastrophic disintegration of the PrK is realistic,” Cabana said. “And NASA has expressed concerns about the structural integrity of the PrK and the possibility of a catastrophic failure.”

Closing the PrK hatch permanently would eliminate the use of one of the space station’s four Russian docking ports.

NASA has chartered a team of independent experts to assess the cracks and leaks and help determine the root cause, Cabana said. “This is an engineering problem, and good engineers should be able to agree on it.”

As a precaution, Barratt said space station crews are also closing the hatch separating the US and Russian sections of the space station when cosmonauts are working in the PrK.

“The way it’s affected us, mostly, is as they go in and open that to unload a cargo vehicle that’s docked to it, they’ve also taken time to inspect and try to repair when they can,” Barratt said. “We’ve taken a very conservative approach to closing the hatch between the US side and the Russian side for those time periods.

“It’s not a comfortable thing, but it is the best agreement between all the smart people on both sides, and it’s something that we as a crew live with and adapt.”

The ISS has been leaking air for 5 years, and engineers still don’t know why Read More »

Trust in scientists hasn’t recovered from COVID. Some humility could help.

Covid, health, humility, intellectual humility, public perception, public perception of science, research, Science, Trust / Mike M. / November 18, 2024

Study 3 essentially replicated study 2, but with the tweak that the articles varied whether the fictional scientist was male or female, in case gendered expectations affected how people perceived humility and trustworthiness. The results from 369 participants indicated that gender didn’t affect the link between IH and trust. Similarly, in study 4, with 371 participants, the researchers varied the race/ethnicity of the scientist, finding again that the link between IH and trust remained.

“Together, these four studies offer compelling evidence that perceptions of scientists’ IH play an important role in both trust in scientists and willingness to follow their research-based recommendations,” the authors concluded.

Next steps

In the final study involving 679 participants, researchers examined different ways that scientists might express IH, including whether the IH was expressed as a personal trait, limitations of research methods, or as limitations of research results. Unexpectedly, the strategies to express IH by highlighting limitations in the methods and results of research both increased perceptions of IH, but shook trust in the research. Only personal IH successfully boosted perceptions of IH without backfiring, the authors report.

The finding suggests that more research is needed to guide scientists on how best to express high IH. But, it’s clear that low IH is not good. “[W]e encourage scientists to be particularly mindful of displaying low IH, such as by expressing overconfidence, being unwilling to course correct or disrespecting others’ views,” the researchers caution.

Overall, Schumann said she was encouraged by the team’s findings. “They suggest that the public understands that science isn’t about having all the answers; it’s about asking the right questions, admitting what we don’t yet understand, and learning as we go. Although we still have much to discover about how scientists can authentically convey intellectual humility, we now know people sense that a lack of intellectual humility undermines the very aspects of science that make it valuable and rigorous. This is a great place to build from.”

Trust in scientists hasn’t recovered from COVID. Some humility could help. Read More »

To invent the wheel, did people first have to invent the spindle?

ancient people did stuff, Archaeology, flywheel, Science, textiles / Mike M. / November 18, 2024

It’s not so much that the spindle whorl was the direct evolutionary ancestor of the wheel, the way wolves were the ancestors of modern dogs. Instead, it was one of the first ways that people got really familiar, in a hands-on way, with the idea that you can attach something round to a stick and use it to turn one kind of motion into another. Pottery wheels, which emerged a bit later, work on the same general principle.

“I don’t jump to saying, ‘Okay, spindle whorls are [cart] wheels,” Yashuv tells Ars. “In many studies of the invention of the wheel, they’re talking about sledges and all sorts of things that are focused on the function of transportation—which is correct. I’m just adding another layer: the foundation of the mechanical principle.”

Once that mechanical principle was firmly embedded in humanity’s collective stash of knowledge, it was a matter of time (a few thousand years) before people looked at animal-drawn sledges, then looked at their pottery wheels and spindles, and put two and two together and got a cart with wheels—or at least, that’s Yashuv’s hypothesis. She and Grosman aren’t the first to suggest something similar; early 20th-century archaeologist Gordon V. Childe suggested that most of the major inventions of the Industrial Revolution were just new applications of much older rotary devices.

on the left, a diagram of two hands using a drop spindle. On the right, a woman in a yellow shirt spins thread with a drop spindle. — Spinner Yonit Kristal tests a replica of a spindle from the 12,000-year-old village. Credit: Yashuv and Grosman 2024

A village of prehistoric innovators?

Exactly how long people have understood (and made use of) the whole circle-on-a-stick concept is still an open question. Nahal Ein-Gev II is the oldest site with evidence of drop spindles that archaeologists have found so far, but Yashuv says the villagers there probably weren’t the first to invent the concept. They just happened to make their spindle whorls out of rocks with holes drilled in them, leaving a clear trace in the archaeological record.

Modern spindle whorls are often made of wood—either a disc or an X-shaped pair of arms. The trouble with wood, especially in small pieces, is that it’s not very likely to survive thousands of years (although that’s not impossible), so wooden spindle whorls from a site as old as Nahal Ein-Gev II are invisible to archaeologists. In some cultures, spinners might even tie a rock (or even a potato—no joke) to the end of their fibers in lieu of a spindle. Those rocks lack the telltale drill holes that let Yashuv and Grosman recognize the stone spindle whorls at Nahal Ein-Gev II, so they’re also invisible to archaeologists; they just look like rocks. Nahal Ein-Gev II is just the oldest place that recognizable spindle whorls happen to have survived.

To invent the wheel, did people first have to invent the spindle? Read More »

Trump’s FCC chair is Brendan Carr, who wants to regulate everyone except ISPs

brendan carr, Donald Trump, FCC, fcc chairman, Policy / Mike M. / November 18, 2024

Trump makes FCC chair pick

Carr says he wants to punish broadcast media and dismantle “censorship cartel.”

Federal Communications Commission member Brendan Carr speaks during the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland on February 24, 2024. Credit: Getty Images | Anadolu

President-elect Donald Trump announced last night that he will make Brendan Carr the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Carr, who wrote a chapter about the FCC for the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, is a longtime opponent of net neutrality rules and other regulations imposed on Internet service providers.

Although Carr wants to deregulate telecom companies that the FCC has historically regulated, he wants the FCC to start regulating Big Tech and social media firms. He has also echoed Trump’s longtime complaints about the news media and proposed punishments for broadcast networks.

Trump’s statement on Carr said that “because of his great work, I will now be designating him as permanent Chairman.”

“Commissioner Carr is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that has stifled Americans’ Freedoms, and held back our Economy,” Trump wrote. “He will end the regulatory onslaught that has been crippling America’s Job Creators and Innovators, and ensure that the FCC delivers for rural America.”

Carr is a sitting FCC commissioner and therefore no Senate approval is needed to confirm the choice. The president can elevate any commissioner to the chair spot.

Carr wants to punish broadcasters

Carr thanked Trump in a post on his X account last night, then made several more posts describing some of the changes he plans to make at the FCC. One of Carr’s posts said the FCC will crack down on broadcast media.

“Broadcast media have had the privilege of using a scarce and valuable public resource—our airwaves. In turn, they are required by law to operate in the public interest. When the transition is complete, the FCC will enforce this public interest obligation,” Carr wrote.

We described Carr’s views on how the FCC should operate in an article on November 7, just after Trump’s election win. We wrote:

A Carr-led FCC could also try to punish news organizations that are perceived to be anti-Trump. Just before the election, Carr alleged that NBC putting Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live was “a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule” and that the FCC should consider issuing penalties. Despite Carr’s claim, NBC did provide equal time to the Trump campaign.

Previous chairs defended free speech

Previous FCC chairs from both major parties have avoided punishing news organizations because of free speech concerns. Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel, the current FCC chairwoman, last month criticized Trump’s calls for licenses to be revoked from TV news organizations whose coverage he dislikes.

“While repeated attacks against broadcast stations by the former President may now be familiar, these threats against free speech are serious and should not be ignored,” Rosenworcel said at the time. “As I’ve said before, the First Amendment is a cornerstone of our democracy. The FCC does not and will not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage.”

Former Chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican, rejected the idea of revoking licenses in 2017 after similar calls from Trump. Pai said that the FCC “under my leadership will stand for the First Amendment” and that “the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast.”

Carr believes differently. After the Saturday Night Live incident, Carr told Fox News that “all remedies should be on the table,” including “license revocations” for NBC.

We’ve pointed out repeatedly that the FCC doesn’t actually license TV networks such as CBS or NBC. But the FCC could punish affiliates. The FCC’s licensing authority is over broadcast stations, many of which are affiliated with or owned by a big network.

Carr targets “censorship cartel”

Carr wrote last night that “we must dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.” This seems to be referring to making social media networks change how they moderate content. On November 15, Carr wrote that “Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft & others have played central roles in the censorship cartel,” along with fact-checking groups and ad agencies that “helped enforce one-sided narratives.”

During his first presidential term, Trump formally petitioned the FCC to reinterpret Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in a way that would limit social media platforms’ legal protections for hosting third-party content when the platforms take down content they consider objectionable.

Trump and Carr have claimed that such a step is necessary because of anti-conservative bias. In his Project 2025 chapter, Carr wrote that the FCC “should issue an order that interprets Section 230 in a way that eliminates the expansive, non-textual immunities that courts have read into the statute.”

Carr’s willingness to reinterpret Section 230 is likely a big plus in Trump’s eyes. In 2020, Trump pulled the re-nomination of FCC Republican member Michael O’Rielly after O’Rielly said that “we should all reject demands, in the name of the First Amendment, for private actors to curate or publish speech in a certain way. Like it or not, the First Amendment’s protections apply to corporate entities, especially when they engage in editorial decision making.”

Carr to end FCC diversity policies

Last night, Carr also said he would end the FCC’s embrace of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies. “The FCC’s most recent budget request said that promoting DEI was the agency’s second highest strategic goal. Starting next year, the FCC will end its promotion of DEI,” Carr wrote.

The FCC budget request said the agency “will pursue focused action and investments to eliminate historical, systemic, and structural barriers that perpetuate disadvantaged or underserved individuals and communities.” The Rosenworcel FCC said it aimed to create a diverse staff and to help “underserved individuals and communities” access “digital technologies, media, communication services, and next-generation networks.”

Carr dissented last year in the FCC’s 3-2 decision to impose rules that prohibit discrimination in access to broadband services, describing the rulemaking as “President Biden’s plan to give the administrative state effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the US.”

Another major goal for Carr is forcing Big Tech firms to help subsidize broadband network construction. Carr’s Project 2025 chapter said the FCC should “require that Big Tech begin to contribute a fair share” into “the FCC’s roughly $9 billion Universal Service Fund.”

Media advocacy group Free Press said yesterday that “Brendan Carr has been campaigning for this job with promises to do the bidding of Donald Trump and Elon Musk” and “got this job because he will carry out Trump and Musk’s personal vendettas. While styling himself as a free-speech champion, Carr refused to stand up when Trump threatened to take away the broadcast licenses of TV stations for daring to fact-check him during the campaign. This alone should be disqualifying.”

Lobby groups representing Internet service providers will be happy to have an FCC chair focused on eliminating broadband regulations. USTelecom CEO Jonathan Spalter issued a statement saying that “Brendan Carr has been a proven leader and an important partner in our shared goal to connect all Americans. With his deep experience and expertise, Commissioner Carr clearly understands the regulatory challenges and opportunities across the communications landscape.”

Pai, who teamed up with Carr and O’Rielly to eliminate net neutrality rules in 2017, wrote that Carr “was a brilliant advisor and General Counsel and has been a superb Commissioner, and I’m confident he will be a great FCC Chairman.”

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

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Author name: Mike M.