I objected strongly to the bizarre process that waylaid the FCC during Obama's Reign of Error, including an unprecedented intervention by the White House and the legally fraught decision in early 2015 to enact the new rules while, at the same time, transforming broadband Internet access services into public utilities.
In reclassifying broadband access as a public utility, the legal authority of the Federal Trade Commission to police anti-competitive practices was immediately cut off.
That removed what had been an active and often aggressive “cop on the beat” for consumer protection, and likely the reason actual net neutrality concerns always remained theoretical during nearly two decades when the FCC had no rules of its own in place.)
We also need to remove outdated and unnecessary regulations. As anyone who has attempted to take a quick spin through Part 47 of the Code of Federal Regulations could tell you, the regulatory underbrush at the FCC is thick. We need to fire up the weed whacker and remove rules that are holding back investment, innovation, and job creation.
One way the FCC can do this is through the biennial review, which kicked off in early November. Under section 11, Congress specifically directed the FCC to repeal unnecessary regulations. Removing obsolete and outdated regulations is hardly partisan or controversial.
Obama's 2015 order is one part net neutrality, and 99 parts public utility—including a return to the Ma Bell days of regulated rates, services, and artificial barriers to entry.
Emotional but misleading appeals to "Internet freedom" are not just playing politics. Leaving Internet governance largely to the engineering-driven multi-stakeholder process has been critical in revolutionizing the information industries, empowering consumers in a golden age of new content, services, and devices, and left the U.S. the clear winner—a source of envy and imitation by every other world economy
Though the Commission promised repeatedly in the 2015 order to limit its new public utility powers solely to ensure net neutrality rules could be enforced, that forbearance was short lived.
In the final months of the Obama FCC, the Commission rushed through orders re-regulating rates for enterprise data services, subjecting ISPs (and only ISPs) to a highly-restrictive privacy regime that upends the model of ad-supported free content, and flirted with banning free and sponsored mobile data services that consumers actually want.
The desperate conflation of net neutrality rules with the FCC’s decision to impose public utility treatment on all ISPs is intentional. It is part of an aggressive campaign by advocacy groups whose true goal for over a decade has been the re-regulation of the communications industry in all its forms.
The Ford Foundation, which supports all of these groups, freely acknowledged after the public utility order was issued, the goal of its Internet Freedom campaign has been to use net neutrality as a populist wedge to push for public utility treatment for the Internet—if not outright nationalization of private broadband infrastructure.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2017/01/24/why-is-the-media-smearing-new-fcc-chair-ajit-pai-as-the-enemy-of-net-neutrality/2/#598cf8af68bd
