Petition Calls for Ouster of FCC Chairman Pai (whitehouse.gov)

Long-time Slashdot reader speedplane writes: Yes, we've all heard that net neutrality is on its way out, and it seems NPR was able to snag one of the few (the only?) interview's of Ajit Pai on its effect. Sadly, NPR's Rachel Martin stuck to very broad and basic questions, and failed to press Pai on the change of policy. That said, it's worth a listen.
Pai insists that "We saw companies like Facebook, and Amazon and Google become global powerhouses precisely because we had light-touch rules that applied to this Internet. The Internet wasn't broken in 2015 when these heavy-handed regulations were adopted, and once we remove them, I think we'll continue to see the infrastructure investment that will benefit digital consumers and entrepreneurs alike... I've talked to a lot of companies that say, look, we want to be able to invest in these networks, especially in rural and low-income urban areas, but the more heavy-handed the regulations are, the less likely we can build a business case for doing it."

But New York's Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says he's spent six months investigating "a massive scheme to corrupt the FCC's notice and comment process" for net neutrality, adding that "the FCC has refused multiple requests for crucial evidence." (Nine requests over five months were ignored.) And now over 65,000 people have signed a new online petition at WhiteHouse.gov calling for the immediate removal of Ajit Pai as the FCC's chairman, calling him "a threat to our freedoms."

Meanwhile, The Verge has compiled "a list of the lawmakers who voted to betray you," with each listing also including "how much money they received from the telecom industry in their most recent election cycle."

Comments

Re:Manufactured Outrage

[Antique Geekmeister]

> If it were really that important, why didn't Obama implement it early in his tenure?

The president was pretty busy, with Iraq and Afghanistan as wars he didn't start but needed to clean up, with the health care program, the difficulty of appointing any Cabinet staff in the face of an obstructionist Congress, and an economy reeling from two Asian wars and the housing market economic meltdown. I think we can safely say that he was _busy_.

Moreover, the FCC is supposed to be an independent agency from the White House. So any guidance or promotion of particular policies at the FCC can take much longer because it can't be done by presidential mandate.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:This will backfire on FB, Google etc

[dgatwood]

And the Net Neutrality advocates won't confront the fact that their argument for net neutrality should apply to Google and FB which are decidedly non neutral for political content.

That's a very silly argument that falls apart under even the slightest scrutiny. Changing ISPs means selling your house and moving to another city. Changing to a new search engine or social network requires merely typing a different address at the top of your browser window. The two situations are simply not comparable.

The reality is that anybody with sufficient technical experience could pull together a team and build a new social network or search engine from the ground up in O(months). That's why everybody on the planet has access to multiple social networks and multiple search engines. Regulating them makes no sense, because if you don't like the policies of one, you can trivially leave and go to another, and bring all of your friends with you, if necessary.

By contrast, starting a new ISP involves attaching to utility poles that are owned by a third party and/or digging up roads and people's yards. And the telcos recently managed to get a federal judge to overturn Nashville's laws that are designed to make it more feasible to move existing utility lines in ways that make it practical to add new utilities. The current regulatory environment makes it largely infeasible to start a new ISP in most places. Worse, because of the relatively high cost per customer, it would still be infeasible even without those regulations except in dense urban areas. There's a reason that outside of the big cities, the fiber network in Tennessee is being built by the state government. There's not enough profit in it for a single ISP to run fiber, much less multiple ISPs.

And it's more likely that both the Democrats and Republicans decide on regulation based on whether it helps companies that donate to them and hurts ones who don't than that they're acting out of anything resembling principle.

Not at all. The Democrats feel we should regulate monopolies because they are monopolies, and should not regulate industries that have healthy competition, while the Republicans feel we should not regulate anybody, and believe that somehow competition will magically appear in markets with an obvious natural monopoly even though history has shown repeatedly that this almost never occurs in practice. Basically, Democrats believe in the notion of a natural monopoly, whereas Republicans just put their hands over their eyes and pretend that the problem doesn't exist, to the benefit of monopolies owned by their buddies.