Trump’s Net Neutrality-Hating FCC Chair Is Already Gutting Public-Interest Regulations

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has been an outspoken foe of network neutrality, the first amendment of the internet that guarantees the free flow of information without censorship or corporate favoritism. With President Trump’s backing, and that of a Congress whose Republican leaders never say no to telecom giants, Pai will have an FCC majority and plenty of leeway to go after net neutrality. Its “days are numbered,” he says.

Activists predict that he won’t stop there. Through formal actions by what will be a Republican-controlled FCC and by granting of waivers that allow corporations to get around cross-ownership and joint-sales rules that were designed to maintain competition in local television markets, the FCC could end up facilitating media mergers and monopolies at the national and local levels that will be devastating to competition and to the democratic discourse. At a time when the United States should be supercharging public and community media to prevent development of news deserts where the only “information” comes from partisan corporate outlets, Trump and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon are dusting off the playbooks of the 1990s. Schemes to weaken competition and diversity, to create one-size-fits-all “newsrooms,” to set-up digital fast lanes for subsidized content and slow lanes for democratic discourse—all were proposed back then.  “They’re coming for all of it,” Free Press president Craig Aaron says of the Trump administration’s agenda. “They’re coming for net neutrality. They’re coming for every protection for citizens and consumers. Our movements have to be bigger now. But if we could get four million for net neutrality under Obama, just imagine what we can get under Trump.”