After a congressional inquiry was started this week into whether the White House and its allies were influencing the future of the nation's broadband networks, Republican Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Ajit Pai hosted a press conference on Tuesday to further discuss concerns about President Obama's plans to regulate the Internet.
The independent Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to vote on the latest draft of net neutrality, which is being pushed by President Obama and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, on Feb. 26, The Daily Caller reported. However, according to Pai, proposal issues ranging from heavy-handed FCC regulations on the Internet to the plan being a "gift to trial lawyers" still linger.
Since questions about the influence of White House on the FCC's decision making regarding the policy, including rules that seem to favor a coalition of pro-net neutrality startups, have repeatedly been brought up, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson and House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz have requested information on the president's net neutrality proposal from the commission agency.
"We certainly want to find out to what extent [Wheeler's] change of heart was actually his own or whether there was influence by the White House. [The FCC] is supposed to be an independent agency and so we're trying to find the information. We want to find the communication between himself and the White House - his agency and the White House and see whether this truly was an independent act," Johnson told reporters after Pai's press conference on Tuesday.
When questioned about whether the government could bring about some kind of censorship if it gets involved in the future, Pai told The DC, "The document doesn't suggest that and I would hope, especially given the clear first amendment law on this question, the FCC wouldn't even entertain that proposition but if - and I've been outspoken in my opposition to it - and other attempts have hinted at infringement on first amendment values, I can tell you that if the agency ever proposed to do something like that, I would speak out against it."
According to Pai, there are two different reasons why this proposal is a little bit scarier than previous attempts at regulating the internet, according to The Washington Free Beacon.
"One is the unprecedented involvement of the executive branch in our decision-making. Traditionally the FCC has been an independent agency that, even though I and the other chairmen are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, we're considered to be independent and render expert objective judgment about some of these difficult policy questions."
"Here what you have is the president in an unprecedented way saying explicitly, 'Not only do I want the FCC to do XY and Z, but this is the legal theory I want them to use to support it.' I think once that announcement was made, the trajectory of how our decision-making was proceeding, I think the writing was on the wall and the FCC felt like it was under enormous pressure to do what the president wanted us to do. And so that's one fact."
At one point, Pai made comparisons between the country's business practices on healthcare and the Internet.
"It's not just the business practices of internet service providers that this plan is focused on. It's also going to directly affect consumers who have certain service plans that the FCC might decide at some future date are unlawful," he told The DC. "For example, for a sponsored data plan or other innovative plans like T-Mobile Music Freedom - it's essentially T-Mobile for certain online music providers that will exempt streaming music using those consumers' data allowance. That is something that is good for the consumers. You get to listen to music for free without accounting against your data allowance."
"The FCC has explicitly put practices like that in the crosshairs and has said, 'Under this new vague internet standard...' which is not really defined with specificity, the agency might decide that practices like that are unlawful and if it ends up barring people from getting service plans that they like, then essentially we're doing what happened in health care, where people who liked their plans were told, 'Sorry, a law is a law. Pick something else.' In the telecom space, that's something I don't want to see happen, because I think that there are a number of people like the plans they have and the FCC shouldn't stand in the way of them being able to enjoy them for years to come."
Meanwhile, the FCC has until Feb. 20 to provide the congressional committee with all net neutrality-related communications and calendar appointments between FCC employees, the White House, and other executive branch agencies since Jan. 14, 2014.
