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03/22/2018

ACA Summit: Pai: Open Internet Order Was 'Galling Regulatory Onslaught’

Neither rain nor snow nor a federal government shutdown kept the American Cable Association from plowing ahead with its annual D.C. Summit, or FCC Chairman Ajit Pai from making the rounds with a keynote speech Wednesday morning (March 21), according to a copy of that speech supplied by the chairman's office.

Pai praised smaller cable operators for broadband deployment and as a competitive force, and renewed his attacks on edge providers in the network neutrality rule debate.

Pai took aim at edge providers he said had pushed Title II on ISPs large and small. Those edge providers are an increasingly familiar target in Washington in conversations about power over internet content.

"Silicon Valley tech giants with market caps in the hundreds of billions of dollars demanded that the FCC regulate small companies like yours more heavily than they were!," he said. "That’s right... [T]hey claimed that small broadband providers like Spencer Municipal Utilities and Laurens Municipal Utilities were anticompetitive monopolists who posed a greater threat to a free and open Internet than companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Some of us understood back in 2015 that this was absurd.  In 2018, with each passing day, many more people are waking up to reality."

The 2015 Order was specifically targeted to ISPs by an FCC, under Chairman Tom Wheeler, that labeled them the monopolistic threat to an open internet that required regulating as common carriers.

The chairman said that one of the impediments to competition, including by imposing unnecessary cost burdens on smaller operators, has been the Title II-based network neutrality rules, which he, along with his Republican colleagues, voted Dec. 14 to eliminate.

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