Chairman Pai is pitching Internet deregulation as a return to Bill Clinton’s policy

President Donald Trump treated “Bill” — as in Clinton — like a four-letter word during his campaign for the White House, but now Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is invoking the 42nd president's name in a positive way to help sell a plan to repeal a major Internet regulation. “We're going to return to President Clinton's framework, which existed from 1996 all the way until 2015,” Ajit Pai said Nov 27 on “Fox & Friends.” “Under that light-touch, market-based framework, we saw tons of investment in infrastructure. We saw companies like Facebook and Apple and Google become worldwide names. We saw consumers going online in unprecedented numbers. That is the kind of successful framework that was jettisoned in 2015, when the Obama administration imposed heavy-handed rules.” Chairman Pai's effort to frame deregulation as a return to Clinton's policy is an attempt to blunt criticism by suggesting that the Trump administration's view of the Internet aligns with that of a previous, Democratic administration.