Trump's new FCC boss could have a lasting effect on the internet — here's what to watch out for by Jeff Dunn on Feb 2, 2017, 10:06 AM Advertisement
 President Donald Trump last week named Ajit Pai the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Pai was previously the senior GOP commissioner at the agency, nominated in 2012 by Barack Obama to serve under previous chairman Tom Wheeler. Much like the transition from Obama to Trump, Pai's conservative leanings stand in near-total contrast to the views of Wheeler, his predecessor. That has net-neutrality advocates worried. Whereas Wheeler's commission took an unusually aggressive stance on regulating large internet service providers, Pai's voting record and past statements strongly suggest he will steer the agency in a more hands-off, pro-industry direction. With a majority at the FCC, like-minded Republicans in control of Congress, and no need for Congressional approval to issue regulations (since Pai still has one year left on his five-year term), several hallmark rulings of the last commission are immediately up in the air. SEE ALSO: It looks like we're going to have a less open internet under Donald Trump DON'T MISS: Trump just made a vocal opponent of today's 'open internet' laws the next FCC boss Trusting the incumbents with net neutrality What Pai does with the 2015 Open Internet Order, the landmark set of rules that enforce the net-neutrality framework in place today, is the sexiest issue on the table, and the one most likely to affect what the internet will look like in the years to come. In short, expect an attempt to roll it back in some capacity. Pai, along with current GOP commissioner Michael O’Rielly, voted against the 2015 Open Internet Order, claiming it was trying to “solve a problem that didn’t exist.” In December, he said he was “more confident than ever” that the 2015 Order’s “days are numbered.” And he’s repeatedly called for a light-touch, free-market approach to regulation in general, a process he has already started on a minor level. Many of the major cable and telecom lobbies like him because of this predictability. 
It's important to separate "net neutrality" as a concept from what net neutrality means in the context of today’s FCC turmoil. Simply put, net neutrality is the idea that all lawful traffic on the internet should be treated equal. An ISP cannot leverage its control over the network to discriminate against sites and services it deems inconvenient to its business. In terms of concrete laws, that comes down to three things: no paid prioritization, no throttling, and no blocking. Verizon, for example, cannot prevent you from going to YouTube, or slow YouTube’s speeds, or force YouTube to pay up for preferential treatment — restrictions that its own go90 video service would be extremely unlikely to face, thus giving it a leg up among Verizon subscribers.
Pai doesn’t necessarily disagree with most of these net-neutrality tenets, and has expressed his desire to protect a “free and open Internet” many times in the past. But like many conservative thinkers who’ve contested the 2015 Open Internet Order, he has a big problem with the way Wheeler’s FCC went about enforcing its rules. That way was to reclassify broadband as a utility under Title II of the Communications Act. The argument there is that the internet is as much a public necessity as electricity or running water, and thus companies providing it need to be regulated as such. 
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