Commissioner Pai: FCC Partisan Rancor 'Unprecedented'

In an upcoming appearance on C-SPAN’s The Communicators, Federal Communications Commissioner Ajit Pai said the partisan rancor at the FCC over the past year-plus has been unprecedented in scope, pointing out that about half of the public meeting votes are strictly along party lines, while that number was more like 10% under the previous chairs. He said that on enforcement matters, there have been more party line votes in the last 14 months than in the previous 43 years.

He took aim at the FCC's recent requests for data from and meetings with Comcast, AT&T and T-Mobile about various zero-rating and sponsored video broadband-related business plans as they pertain to new FCC Open Internet rules. "What we are now seeing is that net neutrality has morphed from a concern about last-mile connectivity to the FCC micromanaging all kinds of business plans and hauling in companies to flyspeck whatever innovative service offerings they might choose to put out into the marketplace. Commissioner Pai said the FCC should not have called the companies in at all, and that regardless of whether the FCC takes any action, it has set the precedent that "if a band of special interest groups inside the Beltway decide to protest a particular offering, the agency is going to jump to the tune."