The Trump administration gets the history of Internet regulations all wrong

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s history of Internet regulation is wrong.

The government regulated Internet access under President Bill Clinton, just as it did in the last two years of Barack Obama’s term, and it did so into George W. Bush’s first term, too. The phone lines and the connections served over them — without which phone subscribers had no Internet access — did not operate in the supposedly deregulated paradise Chairman Pai mourns. Without government oversight, phone companies could have prevented dial-up Internet service providers from even connecting to customers. In the 1990s, in fact, FCC regulations more intrusive than the Obama administration’s net neutrality rules led to far more competition among early broadband providers than we have today. Pai’s nostalgia for the ’90s doesn’t extend to reviving rules that mandated competition — instead, he’s moving to scrap regulations the FCC put in place to protect customers from the telecom conglomerates that now dominate the market.

Chairman Pai talks about the importance of competition, but so have a lot of other FCC chairmen wishing that it would happen. Unfortunately, the 1990s legacy he keeps endorsing offers no hope that dumping the rules of those days will give us more competition.

[Rob Pegoraro covers technology for Yahoo Finance, USA Today, the Wirecutter and other sites. From 1999 to 2011, he wrote The Post’s personal-tech column.]