Editorial staff

[Commentary] Anyone doubting the power lobbyists still hold in Washington need only look at the ongoing, shameful net neutrality travesty.  It was bad enough that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer, engineered the repeal of President Barack Obama’s landmark rules prohibiting Internet Service Providers from blocking or slowing down the internet or giving preference for certain online content.

[Commentary] Net neutrality shouldn't be a controversial issue. Pipelines and power grids, telephones and railroads, all must comply with common carrier regulations that prohibit discrimination and special treatment. There's little reason for the internet to be any different. The promise of the internet exists in its open, unrestricted nature. Nevertheless, the Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to vote on rolling back its net neutrality regulations on Thursday, Dec. 14.  The tech trade group Internet Association is pushing for the FCC to delay its vote.

[Commentary] Like all major government efforts to deregulate industries, from telephones to airlines, the Federal Communications Commission’s move to do away with net neutrality is destined to have a major impact. We think consumers will benefit because increased competition is a greater spur to technological innovation than government fiat.

[Commentary] The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission wants to let Comcast, Verizon and other broadband companies turn the internet into a latter-day version of cable TV, in which they decide what customers can watch and how much they pay for that content. That might sound like a far-fetched scenario. But there is reason to fear that some version of that awful vision could become a reality, because most Americans have just one or two choices for broadband access at home.

[Commentary] With a speed many American internet users can only envy, the Trump administration is re-writing the rules for US internet providers. The administration is quite right that the industry has a serious problem: lack of competition. But a regulatory rollback, paired with the administration’s apparently sanguine attitude towards industry consolidation, will do nothing to solve it, and could make matters worse. The root problem is lack of competition in network construction and improvement. If consumers had more options, fewer rules would be required. President Donald Trump likes to talk about infrastructure investment. Encouraging investment in digital infrastructure — a natural area for private-public partnership — should be part of that agenda. That would do much more good than rolling back sensible if imperfect rules and waving through deals in an industry that already has the upper hand on the consumer.

[Commentary] If the Federal Communications Commission, which has a 2-to-1 Republican majority, approves Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal, there will be little stopping the broadband industry from squelching competition, limiting consumer choice and raising prices. The previous FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, helped put the rules current Chairman Pai is attacking in place in 2015, and the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld them.

Large telecommunications companies have been raking in profits in recent years. And they have been making multibillion-dollar acquisitions — not something you see from an industry that is withering from senseless regulations. Charter spent more than $65 billion last year to buy Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. AT&T bought DirecTV for $48.5 billion in 2015 and is trying to buy Time Warner, the media company, for $85 billion. Not only is Pai’s lament for the broadband industry based on alternative facts, it misses the bigger point. Net neutrality is meant to benefit the internet and the economy broadly, not just the broadband industry. That means the commission ought to consider the impact the regulations have on consumers and businesses. In particular, the commission has a responsibility to protect people with few or no choices; most Americans have access to just one or two companies for residential service and just four big operators for wireless.

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said he’ll advance his network neutrality proposal under a notice and comment procedure, instead of offloading the rules with a blunt agency tool known as a declaratory ruling. This is a welcome departure from his predecessor, Tom Wheeler, who ditched his own network neutrality proposal after President Barack Obama ordered the agency to invoke public-utility regulation.

Chairman Pai’s open process won’t prevent a synaptic breakdown by the lobbyists who want political control of the internet and are calling him a shill for cable companies and a fascist who wants to squelch speech on the web. No matter that Chairman Pai wants to divest government and himself of discretionary power. Pai deserves particular credit for calling out Free Press as a “spectacularly misnamed” group that deployed net neutrality as a pretext for government control. The Pai plan will take regulatory shape in stages over the next few months, and perhaps his actions will galvanize Congress to take the hint and codify his protections into law.

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s latest target is the network neutrality rules the commission adopted in 2015 after a federal appeals court threw out the commission’s previous neutrality regulations. The 2015 rules try to preserve the openness that has been crucial to the Internet’s success by barring broadband providers from blocking or impeding legal sites and services, favoring some sites’ traffic in exchange for pay, or unreasonably interfering with the flow of data on their networks. These are all vitally important principles, as even opponents of the rules recognize.

The fight has largely been over how strictly they should be interpreted and enforced. In particular, the dispute has been over the FCC’s move to reclassify broadband providers as utilities, which a federal appeals court ruled the commission had to do before it could impose blanket prohibitions on blocking, throttling or prioritizing data. The reclassification also subjected providers to some of the same, decades-old rules as local phone monopolies. The process of undoing a rule usually requires another public notice and months of public comment on the proposed change. But Chairman Pai may take a procedural shortcut next month that undoes the utility classification right away. And instead of having neutrality rules that the FCC would enforce, Chairman Pai may call on broadband providers to pledge not to block, impede or prioritize traffic unreasonably — with the Federal Trade Commission available to slap the hands of any provider that goes back on its pledge. That’s a laughable idea.

Protecting net neutrality shouldn’t be a partisan issue, considering how widely shared that goal is. If Chairman Pai manages to kill the current rules, Congress shouldn’t wait for the courts to settle the matter. Instead, lawmakers should make clear once and for all that broadband providers mustn’t pick winners and losers online, and that the FCC has the power to make sure they don’t.

[Commentary] For all of President Trump’s boasts that he is a man of action, he is likely to close out his first 100 days with no major legislation to his credit. That may actually be for the best, since his most significant effort so far would have destroyed the Affordable Care Act. And yet, even without a big win, President Trump has done significant damage with smaller-bore measures, whose cumulative impact will be felt for a very long time. Specifically, he has signed into law 11 regulatory rollback measures, passed by Republican majorities using the Congressional Review Act — a law that lets lawmakers use fast-track procedures to repeal rules completed in the last six months or so of a previous administration. Two more repeal measures await Trump’s signature, and 20 that have been introduced in Congress could be passed before fast-track procedures expire. At least there will be no more ugly surprises, since the deadline for introducing new rollback measures under the Congressional Review Act passed on March 30. The wreckage has been extensive. Nor is the damage easily undone. When a regulation is repealed using the Congressional Review Act, agencies are blocked from issuing “substantially similar” rules without express authorization from Congress.

[Commentary] Standing before the cheering throngs at the Republican National Convention last summer, Donald Trump bemoaned how special interests had rigged the country’s politics and its economy, leaving Americans victimized by unfair trade deals, incompetent bureaucrats and spineless leaders. He swooped into politics, he declared, to subvert the powerful and rescue those who cannot defend themselves. “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” To Trump’s faithful, those words were a rallying cry. But his critics heard something far more menacing in them: a dangerously authoritarian vision of the presidency — one that would crop up time and again as he talked about overruling generals, disregarding international law, ordering soldiers to commit war crimes, jailing his opponent.

Remember that President Trump’s verbal assaults are directed at the public, and are designed to chip away at people’s confidence in these institutions and deprive them of their validity. When a dispute arises, whose actions are you going to consider legitimate? Whom are you going to trust? That’s why the public has to be wary of Trump’s attacks on the courts, the “deep state,” the “swamp.” We can’t afford to be talked into losing our faith in the forces that protect us from an imperial presidency.