Given his past actions, why give him the benefit of the doubt? He has proved to be a liar and a shill for the telcos.

He lied about the FCC's fake DDoS attack and refuses to investigate all the bots on the FCC's comment site as the NN open commenting period was coming to a close.

He's the Scott Pruitt of the FCC.

He could only be right if there were real broadband competition - there's no point in the ISP disclosing how it's going to screw me if I have no choice.

In the past few places I've lived (in Seattle and the SF Bay Area), there has been only a single high speed broadband provider (2 of those places had a DSL provider that promised "up to 1.5mbit" speeds), but that's barely enough for standard def streaming, and not nearly enough for HD streaming -- 1.5Mbit DSL was "high speed" 20 years ago.

His main point is that by allowing corporations to use abusive practices, there will be incentive for competition.

First of all, there is practically no competition to start with. Six ISPs control the majority of the market, and the majority of customers have only one ISP to choose from. Getting rid of net neutrality will not make other companies suddenly appear.

Secondly, one company doing worse does not make a competing company better. It makes it relatively better. That doesn't matter, especially if there isn't another company to begin with.

Put these together, and it's trivial to see that getting rid of net neutrality will not bolster competition. Pai's conclusion is nonsense. In our reality, we are only left with worse options.

Given that the US ISP industry has shown that it is wholly on-board for zero-rating their own services, have been questioning "why should YouTube get free access to our pipes", and have displayed an active interest in tiering the internet by site and not bandwidth... No. Ajit Pai is not right.

The information to make an informed choice between service providers is meaningless when most of us in the US have no practical choice.

I think most tech people are, and have - do you have some new insight to add that is convincing?

I did consider it, but at least for me, it's only a negative. The key quote:

> [The repeal] will protect consumers and promote better, faster Internet access and more competition

First of all: I think the "competition" in question is along an axis that I'm not interested in; e.g. does this plan give me faster Netflix or unlimited Facebook. So now I have one more thing to worry about when picking a plan, which is very likely going to make me less happy with my choice.

The better/faster internet he's talking about is probably along these lines too, e.g a deal being struck with Netflix to make just Netflix faster.

So, for me as a consumer, I think this is terrible. I'm going to be spend more time thinking about my plan and be less happy it. It will also be worse in the sense that ISPs are spending time and money on a feature that I didn't want in the first place.

I also think this is terrible for new companies, but that's for another post.

A great book on this is The Paradox of Choice

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

As a European: he’s right. You’ll love zero-rating. I do. :-)