Not surprising anyone, Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai announced that he plans on leaving his post on Jan. 20 in the coming year. What Pai will do after leaving his government post is anyone’s guess, but I would put all of my money down on something in the private telecommunications lobbying industry. His tenure under Trump has been predictably grotesque in its lathering of corrupt big business largesse and deregulating an already barely regulated telecommunications sector.
Like everyone else in the Trump administration, Pai has lied to Congress, pushed false data about fake successes, received dubious funds from big companies that got preferential treatment, and has been ridiculed throughout the process for being the perverse sociopath he seems to be. He’s also promoted corrupt and criminal individuals for positions of power (den of thieves and all of that). Pai’s most infamous achievement was to end the consumer protections of net neutrality. Like everything else his Republican-controlled FCC did, he supported his decision to do this with false data and under dubious, possibly criminal circumstances. But this was not all Pai accomplished.
Here’s a small list of the ways the American public, or the American consumer, got screwed under Ajit Pai’s leadership:
- Pai increased the digital divide between the haves and the have nots. He began by rolling back the Obama-era expansion of broadband subsidies to low-income families. But his shining moment of pretending to care about bringing high speed internet services to those without, was voting to kick around 70% of people off of their low-income broadband plans. The silver lining here was that an appeals court overturned Pai’s attempts to kick low-income families off of their broadband services.
- Pai and others hid the true nature of the fraudulent anti-net neutrality comments that Ajit Pai used to support his unpopular decision to end the consumer protections.
- Pai got nice and swampy with Sinclair Broadcasting, the Trump/Republican propaganda media titan, and then worked on deregulating the industry further in order to allow Sinclair a better shot at becoming a monopolistic information ministry by exploiting a “technologically obsolete” regulation allowing the media company to say it had less of a monopoly than it did. His attempts to hand everything over to Sinclair were sidetracked by a mixture of the company’s greed and mounting pressure from lawsuits and watchdogs. He did what he could to not protect the American public’s source of news and information.
- Pai lauded the destruction of an Obama-era anti-robocalls consumer protection and then, after saying he would, transferred more power to the telecommunications companies, but didn’t do anything much to stop the terrible practice.
- Contradicting the famously bullshit conservative claim to want less federal government control over smaller municipalities’ autonomy, Pai and friends voted to take away an estimated $2 billion from cities and towns to give to telecoms. They did this by limiting their ability to charge telecoms for access to their infrastructure grid in order to supposedly build out 5G wireless access. At the time, Pai claimed that this money would be used by telecoms to build out those infrastructures. Since there was no law or requirement for telecoms to do any such thing under Pai’s ruling, telecoms just pocketed those profits.
In the end, Pai’s FCC did what it could to stifle infrastructural growth throughout the country. The grand private investment that the Republican Party and Pai said would happen if the rich just got richer, never happened, and in fact slowed down.
Like every other Republican policy, you could say that Pai’s legacy is not dissimilar from other GOP operators: promises of gold that very quickly turned to coal for consumers and gold for corporations. And just like coal—being equated here to corporate greed and corruption—it’s been subsidized by a Republican-controlled government.
The good news is that Pai will be gone from the FCC. In other sort-of-good but also shakier news, Pai’s ability to do much right now, before Inauguration Day, has been hampered by Republican FCC member Mike O’Reilly’s ill-advised firing by Donald Trump, right before the election. His anti-First Amendment replacement, Nathan Simington, has not yet been confirmed by the Senate and it is unclear if there are the votes to confirm him. As of Dec. 1, the FCC has a 2-2 deadlock between Democrats and Republicans, but if Simington is not confirmed, Biden will begin with a 2-1 majority on the FCC, allowing him control of the important government agency at a time when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is working to stifle any and all Biden appointments.
Source: Daily Kos
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