Remarks Of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai At Cato Institute Policy Perspectives 2017

Across the board, we are reviewing our regulations to make sure that they reflect current market conditions; that they are applied evenly and fairly; and that they are consistent with the law and sound principles of economics. In some cases, that means streamlining rules to reflect current technological and marketplace realities.  In other cases, that means eliminating them altogether.  In all cases, it means getting government out of the way as much as possible in order to encourage private initiative. Beyond that, we have adopted a posture of regulatory humility. Government is not particularly well-suited to predict with certainty what the future will look like. That wisdom certainly doesn’t reside in Washington, DC. So, we aren’t seeking to manipulate regulatory levers to create a particular market structure. And we aren’t picking winners and losers. The history of such explicit or implicit centralized economic planning has been nothing short of a disaster.  Our role at the Federal Communications Commission isn’t to support any particular company or industry. Instead, we seek to foster a light-touch regulatory framework that permits all types of companies to compete in the communications marketplace. And then we’ll let  American consumers choose who succeeds and who doesn’t. After all, competition is a far better guarantor of consumer welfare than preemptive regulation.