Last week, my wife and I attended the Freedom to Connect Conference here in NYC. Susan Crawford warned that FCC Commissioner Pai is calling Net Neutrality "Obama's secret plan to regulate the internet." The audience laughed.
"The same laughter greeted the first attacks on Obamacare," Crawford warned.
Pai has been doing a national media tour to attack net neutrality. The lies have been debunked here on dailykos by Joan McCarter on the front page again (Nov. 21, 2014) and again (Feb. 26, 2015).
If there's any dirty secret about the net neutrality order, it's that the order does not achieve too much, as the FCC explains on its own blog. "There is no price regulation, no tarriffs, and no service requirements," explained Gigi Sohn at the Freedom to Connect Conference. It simply forbids fast lanes -- it's meant to ensure that Comcast Internet cannot insure that its internet subscribers can only view Comcast TV (a.k.a. NBC) on their internet lines. Instead of blocking other services, Comcast could simply charge money for, say, Netflix, and offer NBC internet video for free.
The lies that hurt
Commissioner Pai is demanding that the FCC release the 330+ page ruling immediately. WaPo has debunked this one. The FCC has to edit the order and address Commissioners' dissents before releasing the orders. So Pai is causing the delay he is complaining about -- and the RWNM is echoing his complaints.
After this duplicity, expect him to complain that his Democratic colleagues at the FCC don't trust him.
The FCC's Open Meeting on February 26, 2015 showed just how far the partisanship has gone. It was a detail that many will have missed. When Chairman Wheeler asked for editorial privileges, the GOP commissioners objected. What were they trying to achieve? Editorial privileges are a routine procedure that allows the FCC to catch errors before publication. But the GOP commissioners objected. They simply delayed the meeting for two minutes while the commissioners voted to grant editorial privileges.
A quick aside about the FCC. It's run by a team of five people. There are two Democrats, two Republicans, and the President appoints the chief, who gets the tiebreaking vote. Obama appointed Wheeler, a former lobbyist, and most commentators (and me too) assumed that was the end of net neutrality. I'm thrilled to be wrong. So when the GOP commissioners objected, they knew they were simply delaying the vote by two minutes. They were doing nothing constructive. They were playing to the base. The base is being fed with lies that you can find by googling "FCC pai obamanet".
At the Freedom to Connect Conference, Harold Feld of Public Knowledge said that he was appalled by the lies and that Pai was harming the FCC as an institution.
Running for Congress?
Why would Pai do this? Why would he tell lies that he knows are not true? He's very very smart, and was relatively moderate in the past. He worked well with Mignon Clyburn when she was the FCC's first female chief. Pai is from a small town in Kansas, and perhaps he wants to run for Congress. But if he does so, he will have to have politics that are Kansas GOP mainstream. So what's the mainstream? I don't know. But I've heard of the secretary of state, the one who tried to keep a Democratic candidate on the senate ballot in order to prevent an independent from beating the GOP candidate. The Secretary of State is back in the news. Because of his talk radio show (yes, he's got one). On the show, he told listeners that Obama would soon halt prosecutions of black criminals. He knows it's not true. He knows it's a lie. So why is he saying it? It must be a job requirement in Kansas.