These days, Donald Trump comes with another surprising move. It seems that he named an advocate of deregulation and a critic of the government’s net neutrality rules, Ajit Pai, as the next Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Ajit Pai will replace Tom Wheeler, who resigned last month. As we know, Pai has consistently opposed his predecessor and the other Democratic Commissioners on controversial issues, for example net neutrality.
So, with this new position, Ajit Pai will have control over the nation’s most powerful telecom and cable regulator.
He will also have a 2-to-1 Republican majority that is widely expected to begin undoing some of Barack Obama’s most significant tech policies.
Until now, Ajit Pai was a sitting Republican commissioner at the FCC, but he will now be serving as the agency’s 34th Chairman.
He was also a very powerful critic of Democratic efforts aimed at breaking the dominance of some of the country’s most powerful Internet providers, for example Comcast, AT&T and Verizon.
“I look forward to working with the new Administration, my colleagues at the Commission, members of Congress and the American public to bring the benefits of the digital age to all Americans,” has declared Ajit Pai in a statement.
Let’s talk about Ajit Pai’s past. He is a Kansas-born lawyer-turned-regular who spent much of his time working for Verizon in the early 2000s.
Then, he worked his way up in D.C. and earned his place on the Commission in 2012. To be added that Ajit Pai was nominated by Barrack Obama, but the Republicans in the Senate actually selected him.
After he joined the Commission, Pai both proposed and opposed rules aimed at consumer protection. So, he voted against orders lowering the cost for prison calls, the cost of cable boxes, restricting data collection by ISPs, and advancing municipal broadband.
It is not a secret that some of these objections didn’t serve well for customers, but we could not call them unreasonable either.
For example, for cable boxes, Ajit Pai has declared that the focus should be on removing them and associating costs altogether. But, the main reason why Ajit Pai has been so criticised was because of the net neutrality problem.
It seems that he vehemently objected the FCC’s landmark Open Internet Order starting with last year. He also released a 67-page dissent statement that takes issue with practically every aspect of it, from conception to execution.
Ajit Pai’s main objection is the fact that the FCC is overstepping its authority and regulating something that is better off without: “For twenty years, there’s been a bipartisan consensus in favor of a free and open Internet.
A Republican Congress and a Democratic President enshrined in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 the principle that the Internet should be a ‘vibrant and competitive free market . . . unfettered by Federal or State regulation.’ … The Internet has been an amazing success story, changing our lives and the world in ways that would have been unimaginable when the 1996 Act was passed.”