Ajit Pai also poked fun at criticism from celebrities like Alyssa Milano about his plan to repeal net neutrality rules and called out Twitter for censorship.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has gone on the attack to defend his proposal to roll back net neutrality regulations.
Pai said in a speech Tuesday he wanted to “cut through the hysteria and hot air” about the proposal he unveiled last week that would unwind the Obama-era rules that prevent broadband companies from controlling consumers’ internet experience.
The Federal Communications Commission chairman defended his plan as a return to a light regulatory framework established by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s at the dawn of the commercial internet. Then he went on the attack against social media platform Twitter, accusing it and other unnamed internet companies of censorship.
Ajit Pai, chairman of the FCC, says he supports the principles behind net neutrality, but thinks the 2015 rules should be repealed.
He argued these companies, rather than internet services providers, are the real threat to an open internet.
“Let’s not kid ourselves. When it comes to an open internet, Twitter is part of the problem,” Pai said at an event hosted by the R Street Institute in Washington. “The company has a viewpoint and uses that viewpoint to discriminate.”
Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment.
He also attacked several celebrities who have taken to Twitter and other social media networks to criticize his new policy. He poked fun at actress Alyssa Milano’s tweet last week that accused the FCC’s move of threatening democracy. Milano, who starred with Tony Danza in the 1980s hit TV show “Who’s the Boss?,” has advocated for net neutrality in the past.
“I’m threatening our democracy? Really?” Pai quipped. “If this were ‘Who’s the Boss?,’ this would be an opportunity for Tony Danza to dish out some wisdom about the consequences of making things up.”
Meanwhile, the backlash seems to be having an effect. Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, late last week broke with her fellow GOP lawmakers to voice her support for the net neutrality rules.
“Pai is clearly panicked he is losing Republicans. Hence, the attacks on Silicon Valley and Hollywood celebrities,” Harold Feld of the advocacy group Public Knowledge said. “It’s usually a dead giveaway that someone is trying to snow you when they explain how criticism of a highly unpopular item claims that the facts are on his side and everyone else is subject to fear mongering or hysterics.”
But the FCC’s plan does more than just ditch the old rules and change the legal classification of broadband. It also abdicates much of the FCC’s authority for overseeing the internet to another federal agency, the Federal Trade Commission. And the rules also make sure that states can’t pass their own regulation that could help protect customers from internet service providers that might abuse their power.
In his speech, Pai said his plan “will bring back the same legal framework that was governing the Internet three years ago today and that has governed the Internet for most of its existence.” He said that under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush the internet flourished under a light-touch regulatory regime in which broadband was not subject to the same outdated regulation as the old telephone network.
Then under President Barack Obama “the FCC scrapped the tried-and-true, light-touch regulation of the Internet and replaced it with heavy-handed micromanagement.”
Net neutrality supporters refuted Pai’s retelling of the past.
“The chairman’s speech is revisionist history,” said Gigi Sohn, a former adviser to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, who pushed for the 2015 rules. “His decision to repeal all of the substantive net neutrality protections and toss away all of the FCC’s legal authority over broadband constitutes a radical abdication of the FCC’s responsibility to protect consumers and competition.”
Sohn added that “what the chairman calls ‘hysteria’ is actually the American people responding to a flawed and dangerous plan.”
She said he should listen to the outcry and pull the item from the December FCC agenda meeting.
But Pai, who as a commissioner vehemently opposed the 2015 rules, seems unlikely to do that. He has the support of his two Republican colleagues on the commission, Brendan Carr and Michael O’Rielly. What’s more, Pai argued that the 2015 rules are fundamentally bad for the internet and consumers because it discourages investment. He said the negative effects can already be measured.
He said that investment in broadband and wireless infrastructure declined by $3.6 billion, or more than 5 percent, in the two years since the rules were put in place. He said this was the first time that such investment declined outside of a recession in the internet era.
“When there’s less investment, that means fewer next-generation networks are built,” he said. “That means fewer jobs for Americans building those networks. And that means more Americans are left on the wrong side on the digital divide.”
Pai said smaller telecom companies are the ones most hurt by the 2015 rules, with more than two dozen of them submitting a letter to the FCC complaining of how the agency’s heavy-handed rules affected their ability to get financing.
But net neutrality backers say these statistics are misleading given that many of the largest broadband and wireless companies in the US have told investors that the rules have little effect on their investments.
Pai criticized claims that revoking the net neutrality rules would leave the internet vulnerable to censorship by internet service providers and could lead to less free speech.
He said the real threat to an open internet are companies like Twitter that regularly pick and choose what gets posted to their sites based on their political agendas. He accused Twitter specifically of blocking Republican Rep.
