On Wednesday, on the eve of the huge vote regarding net neutrality, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro interviewed FCC chairman Ajit Pai, who is in favor of revoking the regulatory regime put in place by the Obama administration in 2015.
After noting Pai has received death threats catalyzed by his support of reversing net neutrality, Shapiro asked Pai about the basics of the issue: what is net neutrality and why should anyone care about it?
Pai responded:
The first part of that is a very difficult question. It’s one of the most successful marketing slogans of all time; after all, who could be against neutrality? The other problem is that it’s been around for a number of years and it’s morphed to mean essentially whatever people want it to mean. But at the end of the day, what it means to most advocates is putting the government, bureaucrats and lawyers here in Washington, in charge of how the internet is governed. And that’s the basic question. If you want the government to start running the internet, then you favor net neutrality; if you favor a free market, as I do, and as many of the other people do, then you want the light touch approach we had prior to 2015, when these regulations were imposed.
Shapiro said that what he understood was that net neutrality is designed so that all of the people putting content online pay the same amount for putting their content online, regardless of how much bandwidth they are using. Thus a company like Netflix pays the same amount as a single individual, and so ending net neutrality would allow internet providers to charge differently for various pieces of content uploaded to the internet, and would allow people to download content differently to get a different subscription plan from different providers.
Pai answered:
That’s basically correct; essentially, net neutrality involves regulating all of these companies like a utility, treating your internet service provider as you would your water company or electric company or subway system … the internet is not like any of those things; it’s certainly important, increasingly, in our daily lives; but the internet also scales dramatically over time. Twenty years ago, you were talking about 28k modems and AOL CD-Roms in the mail and e-mail being the killer app; now we’re talking about gigabit fiber and 4G LTE and high-definition wireless streaming. The way the internet has developed is scalable, so to speak; in the way that utilities, as we traditionally think about them, are not.
And the argument that I’ve made is that treating the internet like another slow-moving utility guarantees that what you’re going to have is a slow-moving utility providing the internet. That’s the last thing that I think consumers want. They seem to want better, faster, cheaper internet access, not another DMV in their lives.
Shapiro stated that the opposition to reversing net neutrality is based in part on dismissing the claim that reversing net neutrality would lead to more open competition, that local monopolies and local regulations make it impossible to have numerous internet providers in a given area.
Pai responded:
Two different points: I agree that we need to have more competition, and that’s why the 11 months that I’ve been in office as chairman of the FCC, we’ve taken a number of initiatives to promote a lot more competition, getting a wireless spectrum put there for wireless carriers to use; making it easier for smaller wireless providers to enter the market place; getting the next generation of satellite companies into the marketplace to provide an alternative to the terrestrial folks. So we’re promoting more competition that way.
Number two: these heavy-handed regulations imposed by the FCC in 2015 take us in the opposite direction. They make it harder — it’s already hard as it is for a lot of these smaller internet service providers — to build a service case for deploying internet infrastructure, especially in rural and low-income urban areas. These regulations make it even harder. In the last week alone, I’ve spoken to small internet service providers that nobody has even heard of, from Minnesota and Montana, who have said that these regulation make it harder to raise capital, to build a business case for deployment, and to actually spend the money and the time building out these networks.
And so, ironically, these rules take us closer to an oligopoly, or monopoly in some of these situations. And so the solution, to me, is get rid of the regulations that are standing in the way of competition, not preemptively regulating how the internet operates right here in Washington.
Shapiro asked why there was so much ire and hostility for those who contemplated reversing net neutrality, whether it was Pai getting death threats or blasts Shapiro himself received after putting out a video simply explaining the issue in basic terms. He asked, “Is it just because of the propaganda that’s put out, people think that the next thing that is going to happen is somebody’s going to come along, take their internet away, force them to pay a fortune for Hulu or Netflix or for email that they’re going to parcel out, all of this because now you’re giving Comcast an opportunity to screw everyone?”
Pai answered:
I think the charitable explanation is that the internet is increasingly important in our lives; we rely on it from the minute we wake up almost until the minute we go to sleep every night. The less charitable explanation is ideology; when you have some people, especially those who are committed to government regulation as a religion, essentially, who go around saying the internet is about to be broken, democracy is about to be destroyed, free expression and speech online is about to be threatened, and here is a picture of the guy who’s doing it, that is an ideological commitment that has nothing to do with the facts and has everything to do with the ideology, which is the government should rule everything, any dissenting views should be squelched, and anybody who advocates those views should be demonized personally.
Pai concluded, “As I’ve often said, hell hath no fury like a regulator bored; so we’re trying to infuse more of the free market approach here at the FCC to make sure that we let the private sector do the heavy lifting, not the bureaucrats here in Washington.”
See video here.