FCC's Pai Warns: Internet Regs Target Free Speech

Ajit Pai

FCC's Ajit Pai is doubling down on arguments against the agency’s recent Open Internet Order, saying the agency failed to “identify a single” net neutrality abuse before adopting new regulations over broadband providers earlier this year.

“The commission ominously warned that ‘[t]hreats to Internet openness remain today,’ that broadband providers ‘hold all the tools necessary to deceive consumers, degrade content or disfavor the content that they don’t like,’ and that the FCC continues ‘to hear concerns about other broadband provider practices involving blocking or degrading third-party applications,'”  FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai told the Bill of Rights Institute’s Kansas Public Lecture late Thursday, according to insidesources.com.  Click Here for a transcript of Pai's prepared remarks.

“The only problem with all of this: none of it is true.”

Pai, one of two Republicans on the five-member commission who have found themselves in the minority on regulatory policy, described the net neutrality rules as “a solution in search of a problem,” adopted via a highly politicized process originating inside the White House.

“The difficulty with the FCC’s regulations isn’t just their breadth,” Pai said. “They’re also vague.”

“Instead of providing any specific guidance, he analogized the FCC to a football referee and said that it would throw the flag if it saw behavior that it didn’t like,” Pai said. “That answer, I would submit, is the very definition of regulatory uncertainty.”

Earlier this year Pai talked about net neutrality’s potential impact on online free speech.

“It is conceivable to me to see the government saying, ‘We think the Drudge Report is having a disproportionate effect on our political discourse,” Pai told the Right Online conference in May. “’He doesn’t have to file anything with the FEC. The FCC doesn’t have the ability to regulate anything he says, and we want to start tamping down on websites like that.’”

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