February 2017

In his first days as President Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai has aggressively moved to roll back consumer protection regulations created during the Obama presidency.

Chairman Pai took a first swipe at network neutrality rules designed to ensure equal access to content on the internet. He stopped nine companies from providing discounted high-speed internet service to low-income individuals. He withdrew an effort to keep prison phone rates down. In total, the chairman of the FCC released about a dozen actions in the last week, many buried in the agency website and not publicly announced, stunning consumer advocacy groups and telecom analysts. They said Pai’s message is clear: The FCC, an independent agency, will mirror the Trump administration’s rapid unwinding of government regulations that businesses fought against during the Obama years.

“With these strong-arm tactics, Chairman Pai is showing his true stripes,” said Matt Wood, policy director at the consumer group Free Press. “The public wants an FCC that helps people. Instead, it got one that does favors for the powerful corporations that its chairman used to work for.”

Rep Anna Eshoo (D-CA) said, “Ajit Pai is intelligent and genial, but he is not on the side of consumers and the public interest.”

The Federal Communications Commission is no longer pressing to cut the costs of most prison phone calls, backing away from a years-long effort to limit charges imposed by a handful of private companies on inmates and their families. The shift comes as the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit on Feb 6 considers whether commissioners went too far when they capped prices for inmate calls that had reached more than a $1 per minute.

After President Trump tapped a new leader for the FCC, the commission’s attorneys changed course and told the court that the FCC no longer would defend one of its own key provisions that limited fees for prisoners’ intrastate calls. The issue set for court was first raised more than 15 years ago by a retired nurse in the District of Columbia who could not afford to call her incarcerated grandson. Because the FCC is no longer defending a key provision of its own rule, the court has provided additional time for arguments from attorney Andrew Jay Schwartzman, who represents inmate advocates, including the DC Prisoners’ Legal Services Project and the Human Rights Defense Center.

[Andrew Jay Schwartzman is the Benton Senior Counselor at the Public Interest Communications Law Project at Georgetown University Law Center's Institute for Public Representation]

The “E-rate Modernization Progress Report” tells a powerful story of how pragmatic FCC policies are playing a vital role in extending gigabit broadband to every school, Wi-Fi to every classroom, and opportunity to every child. It tells of progress being enabled by the E-Rate and commitments of support from a bipartisan group of governors. This impressive broadband progress is something that all of us, as Americans, can be proud of. It’s surprising that a day after taking new transparency steps, the FCC would somehow feel the need to remove this data from the record and hide this broadband progress report from the public. We just aren’t sure what this “sweep under the rug” strategy may be about, or why the FCC is now playing politics with our kids' digital future.

The Federal Communications Commission has rescinded its March 2014 guidance on the processing of applications for various broadcast TV sharing arrangements like joint sales agreements (JSAs). That came from the Media Bureau's acting chief Michelle Carey, whose bureau was busy undoing actions of the former Democratic majority. "This Public Notice rescinds, in its entirety and effective immediately, earlier guidance provided in a March 12, 2014, public notice, DA 14-330, 'Processing of Broadcast Television Applications Proposing Sharing Arrangements and Contingent Interests,'" the bureau said. In March 2014, the Media Bureau issued guidance to broadcasters that it would be scrutinizing sharing arrangements with financial components closely to make sure they were arms-length transactions and not de facto control.