Public interest groups, political organizers and free speech advocates expressed anger and alarm on Monday about President Trump’s decision to elevate Ajit Pai, a right-wing opponent of Net Neutrality, to lead the FCC.
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.
Pai consistently opposed consumer-protection regulations, including the Net Neutrality rules, during the three-year chairmanship of Democrat Tom Wheeler.
"We are at a fork in the road. One path leads forward. The other leads back to re-litigating solutions that are demonstrably working," Tom Wheeler said in his final public speech as head of the FCC.
Media executives are positively elated about the 2016 election, which, thanks to $2.4 billion in political-ad spending and record ratings, was great for Big Media's bottom line.
Big Telecom’s best friend in Congress just got a very big promotion.
Rep. Marsha Blackburn, the arch-conservative Tennessee Republican who has received mountains of campaign cash from the telecom industry, has been chosen by the GOP to lead a key congressional subcommittee with broad jurisdiction over cable, phone and internet issues.
Some of America's biggest cable companies are asking the government to roll back a landmark set of privacy regulations it approved last fall — kicking off an effort by the industry and its allies to dismantle key internet policies of the Obama years.