Ajit Pai Is Working Hard to Make Broadband Users Dumb Again

The death of federal network neutrality protections in the US didn’t only give Internet service providers license to penalize customers who don’t agree to buy their services. It also pointlessly mystified the process whereby consumers acquire the most basic, unsimplified details about their home internet’s price, speed, and capacity. Whereas the Open Internet Order—the now-repealed Federal Communications Commission rules that established net neutrality—required ISPs to offer consumers quick access to information in a format that’s easy to digest, the method devised by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai all but ensures that some consumers will never find it. "Not only did the FCC’s misguided net neutrality decision do away with efforts to give consumers easy-to-digest information about their broadband service, it left them with an ISP disclosure portal that relies on the agency’s abused and antiquated electronic comment filing system,” FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. 

As with most decisions over the past two years, Pai’s FCC apparently now aims mostly to help ISPs do the bare minimum to serve consumers; allowing them, for instance, to hide information from consumers might need to make an informed purchasing decision. Ultimately, this easy access to knowledge is just another casualty of the FCC’s war against a free and open internet. “[T]he FCC is telling consumers ‘you are on your own’ when it comes to learning more about just what their broadband service can deliver,” Commissioner Rosenworcel said. “It’s not right that the agency sells consumers short like this—they deserve better.”