Ajit Pai is extremely competent, except he enacts policies that you do not agree with.

Listening to an interview with him, I could feel myself thinking that he had a ton of valid points about the FCC and industry as a whole.

And before I get called a shill, I disagree with many of his policies and am glad hes leaving the post.

Come on, Ajit Pai was regulatory capture at its worst. Now, as he always planned, he gets to go somewhere and collect his millions per year already furtively promised, until the next Republican administration.

Pai was originally nominated to be FCC commissioner in 2011 by President Obama during his first term.

Yeah I've been exposed to Pai and the man certainly is more erudite than myself. My view on network neutrality at this point is the companies pushing for those laws were always more of a monopolizing threat than the ISPs ever were. Netflix and Google loved network neutrality because it saved them lots of cash and they ended up getting an "internet fast lane" Comcast couldn't dream of by installing a massive CDN across the globe.

It seemed like policy that was supported mostly because it was pro-consumer and because honestly the ISPs are getting lots of taxpayer money.

> Netflix and Google loved network neutrality because it saved them lots of cash and they ended up getting an "internet fast lane" Comcast couldn't dream of by installing a massive CDN across the globe.

Comcast could easily install CDN servers if they wanted.

And everything related to Netflix and peering was ridiculous. Charging because the traffic is unbalanced, even though it's the ISP's customers requesting the data? What, they'd peer for free if netflix clients uploaded 5mbps of random data so that uplink and downlink are perfectly matched?

So sure, Netflix and Google are a monopolistic threat in other areas. But when it comes to ISPs getting into conflicts, it's almost always the ISPs in the wrong.

> It seemed like policy that was supported mostly because it was pro-consumer and because honestly the ISPs are getting lots of taxpayer money.

Am I getting wooshed or are these both great reasons to support this policy and thus oppose Ajit Pai?

It's almost as if there are good arguments on _both_ sides of the debate!

What are the benefits of abandoning net neutrality if you are not an ISP?

Which effectively states that the downside is that ISPs make less profit. I agree we want them to be competitive but I really don’t understand why many commenters here think that’s a design goal. The only consumer argument should be: “I want the Internet to be faster, not freer.” or “I pay to pay as little as possible.” Also the argument here that Facebook losses without net neutrality is a farce. Facebook gains because they can persuade telecoms to zero-rate and specifically pay telecoms to drop Tik Tok packets.

In my personal case: I'd much rather be able to buy special-purpose cellular plans with limited/restricted capabilities. I'd really like to see more $5-10/mo. device plans that offer connectivity that isn't artificially speed-throttled to dialup speeds. For instance, for the computer in my car.

If every single mobile network plan is legally required to support Netflix 4K and YouTube streaming, that's not workable from a business standpoint. And that's exactly Google and Netflix's goal: Require everything support their modern reincarnation of the boob tube.

That doesn't make much sense to me - if the issue from an ISPs perspective is data volume, then why not just put a cap on data and remain content-agnostic? Doesn't that address the issue in a much more direct way? For example, if there is no data cap, but only a block on netflix.com, it seems that you could get around that using a VPN or something anyway.

I'd be perfectly fine with fully metered data plans at high speed: However, the same group of people who support net neutrality complain that data caps are also unfair. Notice that "unlimited data" is once again, however inaccurate as it is, nearly the only way to buy wireless service in 2020.

I feel a very small group of companies are pushing an incredibly wasteful business model, because they aren't the ones paying for all of the waste. Google, Netflix, Spotify, etc. would rather you wirelessly stream content that makes... a lot more sense to store locally. And they're pushing things like streaming 4K... even when the cost/benefit of streaming 4K to a phone is questionable at best.

We're all paying for the extreme network contention of 90% of available bandwidth going to these very wasteful business models. It's pretty unsurprising ISPs would like to charge extra for them, either towards consumers or the streaming providers themselves.

> However, the same group of people who support net neutrality complain that data caps are also unfair.

I haven't noticed that - I have noticed opposition to other anti-consumer business practices, like inaccurately calling a plan "unlimited data", or pushing low-income people into capped data plans and charging excessive per-GB overage fees. I think a plan like you're suggesting is perfectly compatible with net neutrality goals - I just think there's not much of a market. But Google Fi is pretty close - as in not throttled and constant per-GB prices, and you can get extra sim cards for free for your other devices.

> Notice that "unlimited data" is once again, however inaccurate as it is, nearly the only way to buy wireless service in 2020.

Note that this is not the case in situations where bandwidth is actually scarce, such as satellite internet plans.

I think you're saying that these businesses have externalized the cost of bandwidth to consumers. I agree that ISPs charge a ridiculous amount, but are you sure this is actually the reason? I would have assumed it's more due to the lack of alternative providers that most in the US face.

Running at higher resolution literally has consequences like higher GHG emissions. So yes I think there is an argument that network neutrality incentivizes waste. Althoughh one could also argue 4k streaming helped prepare the internet backbone for mass teleconferencing.

It was never an issue of "abandoning" net neutrality. The US never had net neutrality.

As to reasons on why to not enforce net neutrality strictly is that it stifles investment in ISPs infrastructure.

This is a good discussion on the topic with more detail than can be summarized in a few characters in a hacker news comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKD-lBrZ_Gg

I think the downvotes are coming from the fact that net neutrality was the de facto standard, and once it was visibly broken by ISPs (e.g. after the Netflix and similar situations), Net Neutrality was quickly applied by the FCC under Tom Wheeler. This was overturned by Ajit Pai as one of his first acts and is the cause for this entire discussion.

I think your record of history is incorrect. Net Neutrality never existed and was not a de-facto standard. The time period involved most traffic flowing freely simply because there were no huge producers of content. When Netflix arrived it caused problems across the internet and the ISPs reacted to it. Tom Wheeler tried to introduce rules but didn't have the legal authority to do so which was overruled in court.

Net neutrality never regulated Google/Facebook or the other social media tech giants. It only regulated the ISP which have never posed any threat to free on the internet. Net neutrality was only about shoving the costs of the internet infrastructure to the consumer.

Net neutrality died, and all of the doom and gloom we were told would happened never materialized.

> In 2017, Pai voted with his fellow Republican commissioners to remove rules that prohibited internet providers from blocking or slowing traffic to particular sites and offering higher speed “lanes” at higher prices. Many major internet providers have not yet taken advantage of that rule change, however.

It seems likely that this is because they consider the looser regulations likely to be overturned in Biden's presidency, not because they don't actually want to make changes they spent millions lobbying for the right to make.

He's a good demonstration of why experts without ethics are problematic.

STIR/SHAKEN was, in essence, signed into law (as the TRACED Act) just about a year ago in December 2019. The FCC approved the mandate March 31 this year with a deadline of implementation June 30, 2021 (2022 for smaller carriers).

So to say he’s done nothing is very not true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN

Robocalls have been a notable concern dating to 2008:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=robocall...

That would be 8 years prior to Ajit Pai. If it makes him incompetent, it also makes his predecessor incompetent.

The fact that STIR/SHAKEN required a new law should be a big hint that the FCC Chairman didn't have the power to fix the issue.

It means that the problem was highly evident by the time Pai arrived. Taking four years to build political concensis on a decade-old problem sufficient to result in STIR/SHAKEN, dependent or not on Congress, isn't a laudable achievement.

> It's rare that someone is cartoonish levels of incompetent. reply

This sort of non-evidence based gaslighting it becoming depressingly common on HN these days. Ajit Pai has been a very competent individuals for the objectives he has been working for. One of the few in Trump admin who has skirted all controversies, done a good job quietly and delivered a good result despite so many people who earn their bread and butter from internet abusing him. ( I have even seen memes making fun of his skin color and face shape).

You disagree with his policies does not mean he is incompetent.

His thinking that the will and advantage of the few (his telecom bros) over the many (your average American with internet) and doing away with net neutrality makes him extremely incompetent in my opinion. He's a civil servant to the interests of the people of the USA not AT&T, Comcast, and Spectrum stock holders.

There's been little out of the FCC that's been supremely bad. People have a completely irrational hatred about this and talking to them is almost impossible. "Vitriol" is an accurate definition of what occurred.

I agree with you, having a rational conversation about NN and the FCC is sometimes difficult here. It seems like people just downvote anything they simply don't agree with. Your comment is a perfectly valid observation, yet people actively try to downvote it away and silence your point of view. My gut tells me that NN is probably a mostly beneficial regulation to have in place, but I have heard some very well reasoned arguments against it that seem more substantial and less reductive than "incompetency" or "corruption".