Ajit Pai Appointed As The Head Of Federal Communications Commission

The Federal Communications Commissions looks to have found a new leader as current commissioner Ajit Pai has been nominated to head up the powerful government regulatory agency.

Until now, Ajit Pai was a sitting Republican commissioner at the FCC, but he will now be serving as the agency’s 34th Chairman. John Thune said he’s “committed to the cause” of net neutrality, and suggested the threat of the newly-Republican controlled FCC repealing the rules may convince Democrats to get on board with a legislative solution.

“In the months to come, we also need to remove outdated and unnecessary regulations”, Pai declared after Trump’s election. After Trump’s victory, Pai said he believed net neutrality’s “days are numbered”. He voted against reclassifying internet service providers as Title II carriers in 2015, and said the change showed the FCC was “turning its back on Internet freedom”. The contentious net neutrality rules, established during the Obama administration, sought to impose rules on Internet service providers to prevent them from throttling and discriminating against certain kinds of online content.

Pai has always been critical of net neutrality and has said that he intends to “revisit…the Title II Net Neutrality proceeding…as soon as possible”.

The next day, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey took to the service to apologise for two issues that had complicated the account transition; some people who had followed @POTUS44 (Obama’s account) had also been set to follow @POTUS, and some who had unfollowed @POTUS in the past were mistakenly re-added. He has been a critic of many of Wheeler’s initiatives, particularly net neutrality. “With Pai as chair of the FCC, we’ll undoubtedly need to amplify our efforts”. During his roughly 15 years in government, he’s been a Senate staffer and worked at the FCC and the Justice Department.

“Frontier looks forward to working with Chairman Pai and the Commission on issues of critical importance to our country, such as expanding broadband deployment in rural America and updating FCC regulations to promote next-generation technologies”, Frontier said.

Particularly, Trump is keen on seeing that net neutrality is obliterated, methodically dismantled as soon as possible to pave way for a deregulated telecoms industry.

While large tech companies like Netflix (NFLX, Tech30), Facebook (FB, Tech30) and Google (GOOGL, Tech30) benefit from not having to pay additional fees to ensure the speedy delivery of their content, they’re less at risk from any net neutrality rollback.

A longtime voice of dissent at the FCC, Pai is expected to reduce media regulations and open the door for more big media mergers. This is different from being opposed to the idea of a free and open internet itself.

Pai, on the other hand, has stoked fears that he wants to protect corporate interests.