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Adam Candeub hopes to finish tech battles Trump started

BY: JOHN HENDEL | 08/14/2024 01:44 PM EDT

Adam Candeub was a top tech player during the Trump administration, and he hopes for a second chance to carry out Republican priorities on tech in Washington.

Candeub led the National Telecommunications and Information Administration as its acting head during former President Donald Trump’s final social media fights, although he’s also had stints at Trump’s Justice Department and previously at the Federal Communications Commission.

In 2020, while at NTIA, Candeub took a lead role in drafting an administration petition asking the FCC to step into the debates around online content moderation. Republicans including Trump claimed tech companies censored conservative viewpoints and asked to open a rulemaking to rethink the liability shield known as Section 230 for online companies. They aimed to restrict tech platforms’ abilities to moderate or label content after Twitter attached fact-check notes to tweets that made false claims about election fraud and mail-in voting.

Democrats and the tech industry balked at those efforts. Jessica Rosenworcel, now the FCC chair and at the time a senior Democrat at the agency, said the proposal would turn the panel “into the President’s speech police.”

Republicans ultimately ran out of time to complete the rulemaking. One open question now: If re-elected, would Trump reignite this quest?

“I’m certainly hoping,” Candeub told POLITICO in a recent interview. “That would be great.”

In the last four years, the tech landscape has changed. Elon Musk bought Twitter, renamed it X, endorsed Trump for president and hosted the Republican standard bearer Monday for a two-hour interview.

Candeub returned to teaching law at Michigan State University during the Biden administration, but said he is still closely following court cases involving Section 230. And he’s stayed connected with former Trump officials as a contributor to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — he authored a chapter on the Federal Trade Commission — and as a senior fellow in the conservative think tank The Center for Renewing America. He’s also teamed up with Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), now Trump’s running mate, on a legal brief supporting heavier regulation for Google.

Candeub said the effort to overhaul Section 230 could face a “speed bump” after the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron doctrine that ended the courts’ longstanding deference to agency expertise.

Still, he said he hopes to see FCC “policy statements and guidelines that could move the ball forward” — especially as justices struggle to decipher online liability questions.

Candeub spoke to POLITICO about how changes in the social media landscape have reflected in politics, how he thinks about the backlash to his earlier efforts and how he’s thinking about a second Trump term — and his own possible role in it.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

I think about how the landscape has shifted from 2020 in the social media world. There was a lot of concern then about what was then Twitter, and now we see figures like Elon Musk in the middle of the social media space rather than Jack Dorsey. We see former President Trump himself being in the middle of social media operations, given his efforts with Truth Social. Do you see any of that changing how things might proceed when it comes to former President Trump?

I think it has changed a lot of the pressure and the anger. The fact that X is out there — from my perspective, it does a fair job of moderating. I think most people are able to get on and express themselves and talk to the people they want to talk to. So the push for reform, I think, is somewhat muted, because there’s an outlet.

From my dorky communications lawyer perspective, I guess the line would be from Psalms: “Put not your faith in princes, for then there’s no salvation.” I kind of want a protected marketplace of ideas outside of the whims of billionaires.

Politically, you’re absolutely right. It’s changed. I think there’s a lot less push for this reform because people feel they can express themselves. But I think this should be a matter of law and principle, First Amendment law and communications regulation — not what some billionaire feels at this particular moment.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has been enthusiastic about these ideas around overhauling Section 230 for years. Is he someone you would expect to see as FCC chair in a Trump term?

I don’t know if he will be picked, I will only say that I think he has been a great leader in this area. I think he’s been an inspiration for a lot of people. And I think he would do a great job in forwarding this agenda.

Would you be interested in serving in a new Trump term in any capacity?

If asked, I would be honored to serve in a second Trump administration, of course. But I haven’t been asked, and it’s not something on my radar at this point. But I’ve always been supportive of the president and his agenda, and I’d be honored to play whatever role I could.

Have you been advising the campaign at all in any way?

I’m out there a lot, and then I talk a lot on these issues. So when you say, helping the campaign, what does that really mean on some level? But I have no formal relationship with the campaign.

When thinking about the Section 230 debates, I think back to strong characterizations in 2020. Jessica Rosenworcel, then an FCC commissioner and now its chair, said she worried the rulemaking would turn the FCC into “the president’s speech police.” What’s your reaction thinking back to that?

I thought a lot of that was really, to be honest, a little unhelpful. If you actually look at the NTIA petition, it was a very legal document, and it was getting at the problem that courts have over-read the protection to essentially make it into a “Get Out of Jail Free” card.

It has nothing to do with being anyone’s censor. It’s about establishing normal rules of liability that every other business in the world has to deal with.

It seemed so political at the time and so intense.

When I first came to D.C., I was sort of expecting people would have mature and substantive discussions about these legal issues. And then, you know, it quickly becomes, you’re Donald Trump’s speech police. And well, I’m like, no. There’s this thing called carrier liability, which we’ve had for centuries, and that’s what this is really about.

But I’m in my 50s, I’m a big boy. And you realize, “Oh well, this is D.C.”

At one level, as you so rightly pointed out, there are these incredibly detailed, regulatory, technical — often scientific or engineering — questions. And yet, on top of it, like a glazed doughnut, is this bright pink political craziness with sprinkles and all these nuts on top of it.

You wrote a chapter for Project 2025, and former President Trump has distanced himself from this effort. Is that something you see as having much bearing around the prospects for you or other Republicans like Commissioner Brendan Carr who contributed?

It’s profoundly ironic, from my perspective. I wrote the FTC section, and I’m somewhat populist. I believe in law and economics. I believe in the consumer welfare standard. But I also like to point out that the courts’ obsession with focusing on price to the exclusion of other factors like privacy or other non-monetary values has been very limiting and bad for antitrust. I thought the FTC should take a very pro-children, “protecting kids against Big Tech” role, particularly in the role of contracts where I think it’s terrible that Big Tech forms contracts with our kids in those stupid terms of service and they don’t get parental consent. I think they should.

So things like that — I think a lot of Democrats would be very on board with. And now it’s sort of castigated as like the doctrine of the Spanish Inquisition.

You described openness to returning to government in a second Trump term. You’ve worked at NTIA, DOJ, previously the FCC and you wrote on the FTC. Is there a natural area you’d be more interested in?

What I tell my students when they ask me, “What sort of law should I practice, professor?” — well, you shouldn’t think about the content of what you’re doing, you should be thinking about what you’re doing, whether it’s writing briefs, organizing discovery, whether it’s being in court, whether it’s advising rich people. What do you want to do?

If they were to offer me a position where I would have some independence to get a project done, that would be very attractive. I’m not a good courtier.

Are there any particular issues you would hope to focus on?

Pretty much everything that we’ve talked about — Big Tech, antitrust, protecting kids, cutting back on the administrative state are all issues that I was and am very dedicated to.

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