succinctly presenting Ajit Pai's Big Lie:
Over twenty years ago, President Clinton and a Republican Congress established the policy of the United States
“to preserve the vibrant and compe ive free market that presently exists for the Internet . . . unfettered by Federal or State regulation.”
For decades, Commission policies encouraged broadband deployment and the development of the Internet.
That ended two years ago.
In 2015, the Commission imposed heavy-handed, utility-style regulation on Internet service providers (ISPs).
Since then, broadband investment has fallen for two years in a row—
the first time that that’s happened outside a recession in the Internet era.
And new services have been delayed or scuttled by a regulatory environment that stifles innovation.
You might think that the "Big Lie" is the idea that the 2015 rules killed investment. And that is a lie.
Actual evidence from financial reports has proven that completely false repeatedly.
But, that's a smaller lie here.
Ajit Pai's Big Lie is the idea that gutting all net neutrality protections is somehow returning FCC policy to the way things were two years ago, and that "for decades" the FCC kept out of this debate.
All of that is wrong.
And, unlike the other lie concerning investment -- where Pai and others can fiddle with numbers to make his claims look right --
Ajit Pai knows that the Big Lie is false.
Pai likes to point back to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 as his starting point in claiming that the internet is free from regulations, and
suggests that things just changed with the 2015 FCC order.
But he literally knows this is wrong.
First of all, for all his talk of using 1996 as the starting date to show "decades" of supposedly unchanged FCC positions on this,
he conveniently leaves out that the FCC didn't actually classify cable broadband as an information service... until 2002.
That's from the FCC's own announcement about it.
And this was fought out in court, eventually leading to the Brand X Supreme Court ruling in 2005 that said the FCC had the right to determine if broadband was an information service or a telco service (which is why the 2015 order has been upheld).
And, even then, telco (i.e., DSL) based broadband was still classified under le II.
It was only in 2005 that the FCC officially reclassified telco-based broadband as an information service, rather than a le II covered telco service.
This move actually stripped broadband of the one feature that had created the most compe ive markets: the requirement to share their lines.
So, as a starting point, the idea that there's been a consistent policy position from 1996 until 2015 is simply wrong.
The FCC itself changed the classification of broadband providers in 2002 and again in 2005.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...-big-lie.shtml