The Republican FCC chair Ajit Pai is not only creepy when he’s trying to push “humorous” propaganda clouding the net neutrality debate, his ideas are transparently insane to the people that work shoulder to shoulder with him. One of the first orders of business for the former Verizon counsel is to get those modest broadband definitions lowered. This is not simply big telecom and Ajit Pai’s plan—it’s been the entire Republican Party platform since they lost the first Net Neutrality battle. Jessica Rosenworcel is one of two Democrats on the five person FCC panel chaired by Pai. On Wednesday, probably annoyed by yet another idiotic joke made by Pai, she tweeted out this sober factoid.
As Arstechnica explains, the current policy on broadband, defined under the previous Tom Wheeler FCC, had asked for a very modest bump up in what we as a nation call acceptable broadband access.
The FCC's current policy, a holdover from former Chairman Tom Wheeler, is that all Americans should have access to home Internet service with speeds of at least 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream and access to mobile broadband. If that policy remained in place, having one or the other wouldn't be enough to be considered "served" in the FCC's annual analysis of whether broadband is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.
But with the FCC now chaired by Republican Ajit Pai, the commission suggested in its annual broadband inquiry last month that Americans might not need a fast home Internet connection. Instead, mobile Internet via a smartphone, with speeds of just 10Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream, might be all people need, the FCC now suggests.
The reason that Pai and other telecom shills want to lower broadband speed classifications is that it saves telecoms money from having to build meaningful and updated infrastructure for their services—it is especially annoying to big business when poor people start asking for equal treatment—and it also allows the monopolistic broadband markets to create ridiculous charging tiers for services the rest of the world have had for decades. As with the rest of his political party, Pai speaks out of both sides of his mouth by saying that regulations are terrible and have been destroying the world, while repeatedly saying everything is the best it has ever been. Only, the things Pai says are “best,” are things where the digital divide—the growing inequality between the haves and have nots in the digital marketplace—has never been larger.