Touting Productivity, Pai Recaps First 100 Days, Pushes Title II Rollback
Chairman Ajit Pai said the FCC has been more productive in his tenure than under recent past permanent chairmen, with 49 items adopted in his first 100 days, compared with 34 under Julius Genachowski and 25 under Tom Wheeler during the same time period. Pai's comments were in a talk Friday at the American Enterprise Institute in which he largely recapped agency actions since he took over and described how they fit into closing the digital divide, modernizing rules, promoting innovation, consumer and public safety protection, and operational improvement. Text of the prepared remarks, which we heard live, was posted by the FCC along with a fact sheet.
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Pai also talked up the draft proposed Title II Communications Act net neutrality rollback. "A lot of the rhetoric obscures the basic point ... the Clinton administration got it right" when it opposed Title II regulation of the then-nascent Internet, he said. "Light-touch Clinton-era regulation ... is the very reason many of you are able to tweet out your disagreement to what I said." He wanted a more open and transparent process than the 2015 institution of Title II regulation, which is why the net neutrality NPRM was made public before the May 18 commissioners' meeting as part of his process reform push. Pai said making the text of items publicly available three weeks before FCC meetings has been "one of the initiatives that I've heard the most positive feedback about. It's hard to remember why this was such a controversial idea."
Pai said numerous actions have been taken toward closing the digital divide, including approving $170 million in Connect America Fund Phase II broadband deployment in New York state (see 1701260047), establishing a bidding process for CAF Phase II (see 1702230019), and creating the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee (BDAC) (see 1701310033). Pai spent considerable time lamenting the regulatory burdens imposed by the FCC. "You don't need a weatherman to know that the wind is blowing certain FCC rules toward modification or elimination," he said.
Pointing to the FCC closing its inquiry into zero rating, Pai said the practice was popular with consumers and increased wireless market competition. "The FCC will seek to promote, not prevent, that kind of innovation," he said. He said he hopes to have the new Office of Economics and Data operational by year's end.
The Pai administration has taken on issues "at a pace ... far more akin to an Internet startup than a moribund Washington bureaucracy," said Jeff Eisenach, AEI visiting scholar and Trump transition landing team member: "It's been change after change, all in the spirit" of former Chairman Bill Kennard, who championed reducing regulatory burdens and moving the agency to a more competition-based framework. Pai reacted positively.
"Pai has devoted his career to serving corporate gatekeepers that want to lock down our internet," Free Press said in a statement Friday. "Now he works for authoritarian and white nationalists in the Trump administration. People need Net Neutrality to expose corporate wrongdoing, push back against racism and other forms of hate, hold leaders accountable and fight for justice." The group also picketed the AEI speech.
Pai said he was "thrilled" by the introduction of the Gigabit Opportunity Act, by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., (see 1705030029) which the chairman said closely follows the proposed gigabit opportunity zone idea he has been promoting for months (see 1609130061). The FCC is doing a variety of things to foster ISP competition -- including promotion of 5G -- which could be a competitor to fixed broadband networks without the infrastructure, he said. He said BDAC is looking at regulatory burdens that affect particularly smaller competitors, such as barriers to pole attachment access.
Asked about the possibility of a wireless carrier takeover and whether he'd allow the number of national operators go from four to three, Pai said he doesn't know the optimal market structure, and any deal would be judged by the state of the market. He gave no specifics about possible changes to the USF fee (see 1705040059), saying the joint board headed by Commissioner Mike O'Rielly is looking at the issue: "I hate to pass the buck." And he didn't comment on a question about possibly ending the FTC common-carrier exemption.