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Carr Keynotes the Former FCC Chairs' Symposium, Jul. 25, 2025

July 25, 2025 · mmtconline · 2:05:46

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Brendan Carr was a keynote speaker on July 25, 2025, at the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council’s Former FCC Chairs’ Symposium at Hogan Lovells in Washington, D.C., published in full by MMTC. He shared the keynote billing with Commissioner Anna Gomez and Representative Glenn Ivey, on a program with former chairs and commissioners including Reed Hundt, Mignon Clyburn, and Michael O’Rielly, according to MMTC’s event record. The symposium was also carried by C-SPAN, though C-SPAN posted no standalone video of it to its YouTube channel.

In his remarks, Carr recounted the Build America agenda he had announced in Sioux Falls three weeks earlier and described the work under way to carry it out, with emphasis on permitting reform and retiring legacy copper networks. Rules on the books, he said, have forced providers to spend billions of dollars a year maintaining old copper-line networks even when they want to put that capital into fiber and other high-speed connections, as Broadband Breakfast reported from the event. He also pressed the spectrum case — warning that without freeing up more airwaves, data would slow and prices would rise — and tied his Delete, Delete, Delete initiative to space policy, saying it had taken longer to get government permits to launch a rocket than to build and launch one, a timeline he said the FCC is working to end.

Why it matters

Speaking to the room that holds his predecessors, Carr framed his agenda as a governing program already in motion rather than a proposal — the copper-retirement cost figure and the permitting complaint he stated here became recurring, checkable elements of his case in later oversight hearings. The symposium is also part of the record of how the current chairman presented himself to the institution’s living history: as its self-described caretaker, in the introduction’s word, with a mandate to build.

Scoreboard watch

This is a candidate item for the weekly scoreboard: Carr’s July 25, 2025 claims that existing rules force providers to spend billions of dollars annually maintaining legacy copper networks, and that FCC permitting for space launches would be accelerated under his agenda — each as stated at the symposium, to be checked against the commission’s copper-retirement and space-licensing actions.

Sources: MMTC, 2025 Former FCC Chairs’ Symposium, July 25, 2025 (full symposium, embedded above); Broadband Breakfast, July 25, 2025, “Carr Pushes Build America Agenda.” All figures and characterizations as stated by Mr. Carr.