This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 20th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Should the FCC have a roving power to regulate speech on the airwaves in the name of the public interest?

Or should freedom of speech extend even to government-owned

airwaves.

Brendan Carr is a commissioner on the FCC.

He says he takes the view consistent with the First Amendment.

We talked about that dispute, the ongoing rollout of 5G capabilities,

and those infuriating robocalls yesterday.

Your colleague at the FCC, Jessica Rosen-Wersle, tweeted out recently.

Today you won't see cigarette ads on television, but nothing stops the ads for e-cigarettes even if they are targeted at

kids the FCC can help put a stop to this and I think it should and this that she

tweets out a column that she wrote for USA Today. The FCC has a mandate to manage the public airwaves in the

public interest. What's wrong with prohibiting ads for e-cigarettes the same way that the FCC long ago prohibited

ads for cigarettes on television?

Well I think it's actually a pretty dangerous new theory for censoring speech.

The background, as you indicated, is a 1970s era law that prohibits actual cigarette advertising on TV and radio, but that law does not apply to e-cigarettes.

And so in this circumstance, the proposal put forward by my colleague would be for the FCC to grab our general

public interest authority and based on the assessment of the public interest

to censor this particular form of speech.

So I think there's really two problems with it.

One is statutorily the agency has not been given authority by Congress to ban e-cigarette

...