Brendan Carr hands Pete Hegseth the call on televised executions

The chair of the US Federal Communications Commission has declined to say whether television networks may broadcast a federal execution, saying he will let the defence secretary make the call. That single sentence, buried in a policy interview, is the most revealing thing said about American platform governance this year.

The choice now facing broadcasters, streaming platforms and the agencies that oversee them is not really about one execution. It is about which regulatory model applies to live state action: the discretionary licensing regime that governs broadcast television, or the conditional immunity regime that governs the internet. Those two models produce different answers, different legal risks and different corporate behaviour, and the industry has to pick a lane before the cameras roll.

The contenders

On one side sits the broadcast licensing model. The FCC grants licences to radio and television stations under the Communications Act, and those licences carry a public interest obligation. The commission can, in principle, consider whether a station's programming serves the public interest when a licence comes up for renewal, a power it has historically used sparingly and which courts have narrowed over decades. The leverage is real but blunt: it operates after the fact, at renewal, and it applies to a shrinking share of how people actually watch things.

On the other side sits the intermediary model built around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the 1996 law that shields online platforms from liability for most third-party content. That protection is conditional. It does not cover federal criminal law, it does not cover intellectual property, and it has been narrowed repeatedly by courts and legislators. Crucially, it rewards platforms for having published, consistent moderation rules, because those rules are what courts and regulators examine when immunity is challenged.

That is the comparison. Not television against the internet, but discretionary licensing against conditional immunity, and the question of which one the US government reaches for when it wants a livestream carried.

Head-to-head comparison

Where broadcast licensing wins

Broadcast licensing gives a regulator a single point of contact. If the FCC decides a station should not air something, it has a named licensee, a file number and a renewal date. There is no need to build a novel legal theory or persuade a court in another jurisdiction. In the United States, 1,700 full-power television stations still reach an enormous audience, and the evening news remains the most trusted single source of information for a large share of older viewers. A single decision at the commission can shape coverage across hundreds of outlets in a way that no platform policy can.

Licensing also has a long history of being used to shape coverage during moments of national consequence. The fairness doctrine, abolished in 1987, required broadcasters to present contrasting views on controversial issues. The commission's authority over indecency produced fines that stations factored into scheduling. None of that is directly analogous to an execution, but it demonstrates that the mechanism exists and has been used.

There is a further, subtler advantage. A licensing decision is visible. If the FCC says yes or no, the public can see who decided and on what grounds. That accountability is exactly what is missing from the platform side, where moderation decisions are made by trust and safety teams operating under policies that are rarely published in full. The recent reporting on an AI hacking tool that hit Korean banks showed how opaque decision-making inside security teams can leave institutions exposed for weeks before anyone outside learns what happened.

Where platform immunity wins

The intermediary model is faster and, in practice, harder to capture. Platforms do not need a licence to operate, so there is no renewal date for a regulator to exploit. They publish community guidelines and enforce them at scale, and those guidelines are the thing that courts examine when immunity is tested. When a platform applies its rules consistently, it is broadly protected. When it applies them inconsistently, it is exposed.

That structure has produced a striking pattern in the current case. YouTube, Meta and Twitch have all declined to say whether they would allow the US government to livestream an execution. That silence is not indecision. It is a deliberate legal posture. Publishing a rule creates a standard to be judged against; remaining silent preserves optionality. The same instinct showed up in the aftermath of the KillSec ransomware takedown, where platforms moved quickly once law enforcement acted but had said little beforehand.

The intermediary model also scales across borders in a way licensing never could. A licensing regime stops at the national frontier. A platform policy applies in every jurisdiction where the service operates, subject to local law. For a government that wants an execution seen worldwide, that reach is the whole point.

Critics of the model point out that it has been narrowed repeatedly, most notably by the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act in 2018, which created a carve-out for sex trafficking offences. That precedent matters. It shows that Section 230 is not untouchable, and that Congress will narrow it when there is sufficient political pressure. Anyone treating platform immunity as permanent is misreading the last eight years.

What this means

Three things follow from the current standoff. First, the decision has been passed upward rather than made, which is itself a signal. Agencies are unwilling to own a precedent this large. Second, the platforms have already answered by not answering: silence is the strategy, and it will hold until a court or a statute forces the issue. Third, the broadcast question is a distraction from the real contest, which is about live video distribution, where broadcast's share keeps shrinking and platform reach keeps growing.

The numbers underline the point. Broadcast television advertising revenue in the US has fallen from roughly $70 billion in 2018 to around $40 billion today, while digital video advertising has grown past $100 billion. The audience has moved. Any regulatory strategy aimed only at licensed stations is aimed at the past.

There is an uncomfortable parallel in how other jurisdictions have handled similar pressure. Denmark's data protection authority discovered an 8.8 million record breach from a single misdirected invoice, a case that showed how thin the line is between routine administration and catastrophic exposure. The lesson there, as here, is that the formal rules matter less than who is willing to act when the moment arrives.

Where the responsibility actually sits

Strip away the agency names and the legal doctrines and the question is simple. When a government wants something broadcast, who says no? In the licensing model, the regulator says no, and wears the consequence. In the immunity model, the platform says nothing, and the consequence is deferred until a court rules or a legislature acts.

That deferral is not a bug. It is the design. Section 230 was written to let platforms make moderation decisions without becoming the arbiter of every dispute, and the cost of that design is that some decisions get pushed to a later date. The trade-off has held for three decades because the alternative, platform liability for everything users post, would have killed the services outright.

The trouble is that live state action is not ordinary user content. An execution streamed by a government is not a post to be moderated; it is an act of state transmitted through private infrastructure. The intermediary model was never built for that. Neither was broadcast licensing, which assumed a world of a handful of channels and a shared public square. Both frameworks are being stretched past their design limits at the same time.

The verdict

For broadcasters, the practical answer is that the licensing route offers clarity but little protection. A station that airs an execution will face licence challenges, advertiser withdrawal and years of litigation, regardless of what any agency says in advance. For platforms, the immunity route offers protection but no predictability: the rules can be rewritten by Congress in a single session, and the 2018 sex trafficking carve-out proved it.

The recommendation depends on what is actually at stake. A broadcaster considering carriage should assume that any advance assurance from a regulator is worth less than the paper it is printed on, because licence renewal is an eight-year cycle and political appointees change. A platform considering a livestream should publish a written policy before the question is asked. Silence preserves optionality in the short term and guarantees that the decision will be made by someone else in the long term.

The thing to watch is not the FCC. It is whether any platform breaks ranks and publishes a rule. The first one to do so will set the standard the others are judged against, and that standard will outlast every commissioner, secretary and chief executive involved in this particular argument.