BREAKING: FCC Chair begins the roll back of Obama Net Neutrality

We’ve had a lot of good news today via two executive orders by Trump and progress on the health care bill.

Now we find out that the FCC Chairman, Ajit Pai, is beginning the process that will undo Obama’s onerous Net Neutrality rules from two years ago:

NBC NEWS – Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said on Wednesday that he’s beginning to roll back net neutrality rules, a process he says will promote competition, create jobs, and give more Americans access to high-speed internet.

“Nothing about the internet was broken in 2015,” he said, speaking of when the FCC moved to regulate the internet as a public utility under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. “It was all about politics.”

The internet is now regulated under Title II, which was created in the 1930s to regulate the Ma Bell telephone monopoly. By applying these rules to internet service providers, the FCC has more authority to regulate the behavior of internet service providers, including helping to control what consumers are charged and ensuring there is no paid prioritization online, which would create so-called fast and slow lanes.

Among the four basic points are not blocking websites for certain users, no throttling (creating a fast and slow lane), fostering more transparency between consumers and ISPs, and finally, no paid prioritization to move to the front of the line.

That all may sound great, but Pai says it’s not working. He wants to go back to the internet rules instituted in 1996 under President Clinton and a Republican Congress.

“The internet is the greatest free market success in history,” Pai said. However, he believes the “heavy-handed” net neutrality rules were never needed, aren’t helping people as intended, and are in fact doing the reverse.

He said the rules have led to reduced investment, which he said has cost 75,000 to 100,000 jobs such as laying cable and digging trenches to help bring high-speed internet access to rural and low income areas.

The current framework, he said, is actually “widening the digital divide,” because companies are avoiding rural and low-income areas because it may seem like it’s “not worth the time and money to deploy there.”

As a result, he said, this also reduces competition.

“There is no question that the easiest path would be to do nothing,” he said. “When we are saddled with FCC rules that will deny many Americans high speed access and jobs, doing nothing is nothing doing.”

“We need rules that focusing growth and infrastructure investment,” he said. “We are going to deliver.”

If you want to understand more about what Pai doesn’t like about Obama’s Net Neutrality rules, you can read what he wrote about them in 2015.

Also here’s a long interview Ajit Pai does with Reason TV on the issue. It definitely sounds like it’s worth watching if you want to understand this issue.


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