Remarks of FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai to the Policy Roundtable of the 2015 Convention of the Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia

At this roundtable, I've been asked to speak about the American perspective on the regulation of over-the-top video services. The US government has taken a hands-off approach to the regulation of over-the-top video. And I believe that our restraint has yielded terrific results. US regulators have largely left Internet-based video alone. We don’t regulate the content that over-the-top providers offer. We don’t regulate prices. And we don’t regulate business models. We leave those decisions to the market -- to the aggregated choices of millions of Internet-savvy consumers.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, not all US regulators agree with my perspective. Some have proposed extending to over-the-top providers many of the rules that currently apply to cable operators and satellite providers, regulations that in many cases are over two decades old. I strongly oppose this idea. Given the remarkable success of the over-the-top video industry -- success driven in part by regulatory restraint -- I don’t believe we should change our regulatory approach. A leading over-the-top provider, Amazon, put it well when it told US regulators, “There has been no indication that additional regulation is needed to enable this new industry to grow and bring consumers even more benefits.”