Ajit Pai , new Chairman of the FCC
President Trump on Monday designated Ajit Pai, a Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission and an outspoken opponent of new net neutrality rules, to be the agency’s new chairman.
Pai, 44, would take over for Tom Wheeler, a Democrat who stepped down on Friday. Wheeler’s term had not expired but Trump gets to designate a new chairman as Republicans gain the FCC majority.
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,” Pai said.
A telecommunications lawyer who has served on the FCC since May 2012, Pai is a free-market advocate who has been sharply critical of new regulations adopted by Democrats in recent years.
He takes the chairman’s office amid reports that Trump’s advisors want to scale back the FCC’s authority.
“We need to fire up the weed whacker and remove those rules that are holding back investment, innovation and job creation,” Pai said in […]
The far-reaching, devastating consequences of killing Net Neutrality, I think, is one of those things that goes from a “yeah, that might be bad” to a tsunami, moving over an avalanche, and leveling everything as far as the eye can see, a disaster that once unleashed will only grow and hamstring life, business, personal enterprise, independent journalism, and commerce as we know it.
While cautious optimism is my usual state of mind, this issue is one that I believe could cause very dire consequences that we cannot even fathom yet. Time for a new round of citizen activism that squashed it before; the problem is, with this administration and the actions they have taken in just their first few days, I’m not sure if that activism will be enough this time.
To quote a line from the Guy Ritchie film, Snatch: ‘What’s wrong with you? This will get messy.’