Saturday, February 11, 2017

New FCC chair closely guards his strategy to restructure net neutrality

It will be interesting to see how this all turns out. I remember back when everyone was hating on Tom Wheeler over his "fast lane" plans saying it presented a "grave threat to the internet," and look what he accomplished while heading the FCC. I think I will hold off on panicking just yet.

Ajit Pai, 44, a Republican lawyer who has served as a FCC commissioner since 2012, strongly opposed former Democratic President Barack Obama administration's 2015 net neutrality rules that reclassified broadband providers and treated them like a public utility. "I believe, as I think most Americans do, in a free and open internet and the only question is what regulatory framework best secures that," Pai said in an interview in his FCC office, where several storage boxes remain to be unpacked. "Before the imposition of these Depression-era rules, we had for 20 years a bipartisan consensus on a regulatory model."