FCC Chair Wants to Dismantle Net Neutrality Set In Place By Obama’s FCC
Ajit Pai, the current FCC chair, wants to make it easy for Telecom Giants like AT&T an Comcast to control how consumers use the internet. Eliminating neutrality would allow telecom companies to throttle speeds, give favorable speeds to higher paying customers, block content and basically dice up the internet based on who your service provider is.
WASHINGTON ― When Ajit Pai, President Donald Trump’s pick to chair the Federal Communications Commission, announced his plan to roll back his own agency’s net neutrality rules on Wednesday, he sounded nervous.
“I am confident we will finish the job,” he said, in a somewhat stilted speech at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. “This is a fight we intend to wage, and this is a fight we are going to win.”
If Pai is nervous, he has good reason to be. Net neutrality is extremely popular with both Republicans and Democrats. The activists who support strong rules are loud and well-organized, and the organizations that oppose the rules — cable companies like Comcast and telecom providers like Verizon, HuffPost’s parent company — are not loved. When cable and telecom companies lost the fight against the Obama administration’s strong net neutrality rules in 2015, they lost badly. The fight this time could be even fiercer.
In 2014, then-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, a former cable and wireless industry lobbyist, said he was planning to avoid the strong net neutrality protections that activists were hoping for. Activists mobilized, fearing a dystopian future where telecom companies could censor websites or slow traffic for a profit. They launched national campaigns, painted Wheeler as a lobbyist sellout, and descended on his house. Comedian John Oliver famously compared the appointment of Wheeler to a dingo watching a baby. (Dingoes eat babies.)
Then-President Barack Obama publicly came out in support of strong net neutrality rules in November 2014, which conservatives have pointed to as evidence that he unduly influenced Wheeler. But the president simply added to the existing momentum, Wheeler said later. And big-weight tech companies had also joined activists in speaking out in support of an open internet. Wheeler proposed strong rules in February 2015 — rules that required reclassifying internet service providers as a “common carrier” under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act — and the FCC was flooded with public comments supporting the decision. The agency subsequently approved the rules in a 3-2 party-line vote.
Now, Pai wants to roll them back and allow the industry to police itself. The agency could take it a step further and propose eliminating any existing rulings on net neutrality, permitted they have a compelling legal case to do so, senior FCC officials told Recode on Thursday. Pai is expected to go through a lengthy rule-making process that includes a period of public comment. (People can start commenting on the draft released today, an agency spokesman said.)
Gigi Sohn, who previously served as counselor to Wheeler, estimates that the repeal process will take at least seven to 10 months. “We know from when we did the net neutrality rules, the groups will make it painful for every single day,” she said. “There will be emails, phone calls, protests ― it’s going to be a tsunami.”
Having now read @AjitPaiFCC’s proposal 2 repeal #netneutrality, I would say it leans heavily towards NO rules at all. Not even transparency.
Pai should know the backlash is coming: He’s active on Twitter, where he is already getting hammered by activists over his proposal. And as a former commissioner who voted against Wheeler’s rules, he was around for the last fight.
This time, the backlash could be even worse. Wheeler’s FCC issued the current net neutrality rules only after an appeals court said it did not have solid legal footing for earlier rules. But that same appeals court upheld the new, stronger rules last year, soundly rejecting arguments from AT&T and other groups that had sued to overturn them. (A petition to rehear the case is pending before the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where judges appointed by Democratic presidents hold a solid majority.)
Activists are better-prepared for a fight this time, said David Segal, executive director of Demand Progress, a leading pro-net-neutrality group. “People are better networked than they previously were, and are looking for opportunities to engage,” he told HuffPost. “We plan to make use of the internet to save the internet, as we did last time.”
Steve
Steve is an affordable multifamily housing professional that is also the co-founder of Whiskey Congress. Steve has written for national publications such as The National Marijuana News and other outlets as a guest blogger on topics covering sports, politics, and cannabis. Steve loves whiskey, cigars, and uses powerlifting as an outlet to deal with the fact that no one listens to his brilliant ideas.
