FCC Chairman Ajit Pai will step down on January 20 | Hacker News Reader

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai will step down on January 20

cnbc.com

207 pointsdredmorbius100 comments

Some people are saying that Mr. Pai has been a good force for the FCC and he hasn't done anything that terribly wrong. I strongly disagree and for proof I present the FCC's handing of the 2017 Net Neutrality repeal process.

Do you remember the millions of comments left by the public in opposition to NN? Do you remember that these comments were created by bots and not real people? Do you remember that after closer investigation it was revealed that the vast majority of "real" comments were for NN, not against it and that a large percentage of those comments in opposition were from Russian bots?

When questioned about it the FCC claimed that there was a problem with their logs during the voting period and they were unable to provide information about where these comments came from. As far as I can remember, there was no real consequence for these actions and the FCC simply continued to dismantle NN.

This type of activity is unforgivable and was a malicious attempt to put the will and good of ISPs over that of the American people. For this, Mr. Pai should have been shown the door years ago. I guess it's better late than never.

Honestly, he was just a return to how the FCC was before Genachowski and Tom Wheeler were chairman. The democratic commissioners Rosenworcel and Starks while more interested in consumer protections than their republican peers, if either them are selected to be the new commissioner I would be surprised to the same push or zeal as wheeler had. Although someone else could be named for the position.

Although, honestly wheeler was a bit of surprise a lot people thought he would be worse than Genachowski because he had ties to the NCTA (Cable company lobbying group). Although that was something like back in the 80's from my understanding.

I know he got a lot of flack for the Net Neutrality rules, but not everything out of this FCC regime has been bad. Just earlier this month the FCC added additional spectrum to the 5 Ghz unlicensed block used by Wifi[1]. I'm not sure I'll ever complain about additional spectrum for WiFi.

[1] - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/fcc-adds-45mhz-t...

What fears about Net Neutrality have come to pass?

I was really concerned about it at the time, I admit, but now seems overblown in retrospect. Internet speeds, for example, have only improved since then. And haven't seen the concerns about web site bundling or priority access manifest.

> What fears about Net Neutrality have come to pass?

ATT appears to have a transparent proxy [1] on LTE that selectively disables protocols based on usage. As a rural LTE user, we completely lost our ability to work/school from home for 2 weeks as a result until I could find a suitable alternative. Note, there was no violation of TOS or anything like that.

[1] - https://forums.att.com/conversations/other-phones-devices/at...

Net Neutrality regulations as debated a few years ago were never going to apply to wireless service providers.

>> And haven't seen the concerns about web site bundling or priority access manifest.

How would you know? Absolute blocks are one thing, artificial performance differences another. If your ISP was slightly reducing the performance of one streaming service to advantage another, how many people would actually test for this? If a phone maker (apple/google/whatever) was feeding an ISP money to ensure their phones would be that little bit better on the network, wouldn't most people chalk that up to differences in hardware? True evil survives by being difficult to detect with certainty.

Didn't Netflix create fast.com to help find out if any ISPs were throttling Netflix servers? I imagine they'd be pretty vocal about it if any ISP was artificially harming them. Although I guess the problem of net neutrality is that smaller streaming services would need equivalent speed tests to verify if they're being hurt by lack of NN.

Netflix finally acquiesced and paid ISPs (Verizon, AT&T, Cox) money to stop throttling their service. Though, this happened long before Pai took control of the FCC (~2014).

If you have one of those ISPs and Netflix, then you're paying your ISP twice: directly for the internet connection, and indirectly for the privilege of being able to use Netflix. This was literally the argument in support Net Neutrality, which ISPs said would never happen. It only took months for ISPs to capitalize.

Wasn't that a peering agreement? IIRC, ISPs weren't throttling Netflix per se — Netflix was just paying them for direct access to their last-mile networks, rather than going through "the open internet".

Selling of browsing history (shudder) did happen, didn't it? One of the reasons Firefox moved most users to DNS over HTTPS.

People have the strangest ideas of what “net neutrality” implies. This has nothing to do with it.

Ridiculously expensive data caps exclusively used for wealth extraction.

Blanket data caps have nothing to do with net neutrality.

They can if the provider white lists their own services or certain services from the data caps.

Also, speeds in Europe have been on average worse than the USA, despite their strong NN laws https://www.fastmetrics.com/internet-connection-speed-by-cou...

They have even had to ration internet during COVID https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/03/19/internet-u...

Although I despise our internet oligopoly in the US, in the EU it seems to be even worse despite their heavy handed regulation.

Was the internet rationing in the EU even necessary, or was it just a knee-jerk solution to a problem that didn't actually exist? At the time it seemed like the latter. Presumably Amazon, Netflix and friends are back to full bitrates now, has it caused any problems?

Edit: although if the EU requests to slow down data were totally unnecessarily it certainly doesn't disprove your point about excessive regulation

The EU is a whole different level of incompetent, but attributing that to regulation alone would be misleading. For one, Europe is much denser than the US. Naturally net loads would be high if everyone were forced into a lock down uniformly, with armed patrols and the like.

Depends what they took the spectrum from I guess

That spectrum had been reserved for vehicle communication which is arguably both important and under served.

A broken clock is right twice a day. It's rare that someone is cartoonish levels of incompetent.

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality#Criticism

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.

> 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".

The new neutrality boogeyman folks had created during Ajit's appointment has turned out be false. Not only internet has grown stronger, but average speeds in USA are up by 91%. All the horror stories that people created have not come to pass. Deregulation has been better for internet in general.

This is not to say Ajit has been doing a stellar job. I am pretty pissed at him for banning phone calls on airplanes.

https://reason.com/2019/02/20/more-americans-have-high-speed...

Except Pai did that because of US cellular companies lobbying him... he's giving that spectrum to 5Ghz wifi so that automakers are FORCED to use cellular providers.

https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/1109637413744/2020.11.06%20DOT%...

https://ih.advfn.com/stock-market/stock-news/83766758/welcom...

This isn't a good thing... this is Pai once again siding with private profit over public good. The fact the spectrum is going to the public 5Ghz spectrum is just to prevent outrage from the general public.

Automakers are hoarding the spectrum citing some pie in the sky safety stuff. Not a single car was ever shipped with that tech. I'd rather have my WiFi router running reliably rather than some promise ware hoarding it.

To put some real numbers to this notion:

> But as FCC Chairman Ajit Pai today said, "99.9943 percent of the 274 million registered vehicles on the road in the United States still don't have DSRC on-board units." Only 15,506 vehicles have been equipped with the technology, he said.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/fcc-adds-45mhz-t...

Considering the American car market sells 17M+ cars annually this is bad progress after two decades.

Your wifi will never get any better. There is a limited amount of spectrum, and practically no one is aware that the channel bonding required to get higher bandwidth means there are just a few distinct channels even in 5GHz. So everyone keeps bonding channels, turning up the power, even though the best solution is for everyone to use 20Mhz slices at the lowest power possible. Then you add channel hopping and mesh networks soaking up even more lanes for intercommunication and here we are.

It's a great example of the tragedy of the commons.

The only hope for dense areas is transmitting in frequencies that don't go through walls and hard wiring each room with something close to line of sight radios integrated into light fixtures, but I'm not sure they've figured out the wiring for that.

Meanwhile my $10 CAT5e cable continues to chug along...

So true. Shannon seems to get lost in the noise (sic).

Cadillac shipped DSRC in the CTS sedan: https://media.cadillac.com/media/us/en/cadillac/news.detail....

Volkswagen is shipping DSRC in their latest Golf: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/volkswagen-new-golf-cars-...

"Automakers" aren't hoarding anything. If you read the cited links, the DOT is the one asking to retain the spectrum.

As for it not being used yet: that's because the technology wasn't there yet... The first trial was deployed in 2017. You're the guy declaring electric vehicles a failure in 1990 because battery technology wasn't ready yet.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5888501

https://www.fcc.gov/wireless/bureau-divisions/mobility-divis...

I was an infosec contractor at DOT'S NHTSA while the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) workgroup was in it's begginings. I recall infosec leadership I respected being against it while short-term political appointees and key industry players like VW pushed it. Maybe we are better off without it?

Then they should request the spectrum after the tech is available, not over a decade before.

> automakers are FORCED to use cellular providers

Choose to use cellular providers. They don't need to put any kind of remote access backdoor or spyware at all.

The first thing I plan to do after buying a new car is to rip out the cellular and gps antennas.

If your GPS antenna is doing any transmitting, you likely have other problems.

If the GPS antenna is separate then you're probably fine leaving it, unless you are worried about IF leakage.

If you rip out the antennas, will all the transmit power emit from the signal traces on the PCB instead?

The reason automakers include cellular radios already is to do app-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-internet communications. Things like Internet radio or unlocking your car from your phone need the Internet, and cellular providers offer that. Presumably at a cut-rate deal compared to general-purpose cell plans.

The spectrum in question was being held for short-range vehicle-to-vehicle communications (Wi-Fi range stuff, hence why this spectrum will be... used for Wi-Fi).

So they're probably going to have the cellular connection anyways. And technically, it's not impossible for them to still use Wi-Fi bands... they're just likely going to have to contend with some more interference. I think more than likely, vehicle-to-vehicle communication should only be an additional indicator, not something to be fully relied upon, since other cars can "lie" to yours.

Wouldn't allowing automakers to use it also benefit private profit?

Yes, just not the profit of those paying Pai.

I don't want my car to use that spectrum or any other. I don't feel that the manufacturer (or Google or Facebook) needs to track my vehicle usage, and I don't wish for my car to pay any heed to signals emitted by untrusted unknown transmitters.

Once the technology is actually ready, car manufacturers can request spectrum again. Spectrum should be used, not held in lack of use. There's rules around spectrum that if you don't use it, you lose it.

OTOH, it's difficult (impossible?) to un-allocate spectrum that has been put into use at any point. Perhaps there are foreseeable uses in the medium term that we should be reserving spectrum for, rather than auctioning our future resources off to today's rent-seekers.

Multiple sources, several submitted to HN:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/say-goodbye-to-a...

https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/fcc-ajit-pai-leave-jan...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-30/u-s-fcc-c...

https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/30/21726572/ajit-pai-fcc-st...

https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/30/fcc-chairman-ajit-pai-will...

The Ars, Variety, Bloomberg and TechCrunch stories have more meat, especially regards Net Neutrality repeal and Section 230 attempts.

Probably because the entire internet bullied him for the decisions he made. Being a well-known person must be awful. Everyone magnifies your faults and conveniently forgets your strengths.

Which of Pai's strengths did we conveniently forget?

I, for one, didn't forget his stregths. The most notable for me, is his vigorous defense of the status quo for telecoms companies. His FCC's official policy was that the FCC should not regulate the internet at the federal level. When states started to haphazardly write independent laws to regulate the internet, his FCC argued states shouldn't do that either! That kind of mental flexibility is impressive, but sadly, is not to the benefit of "We, the people".

What were some of Ajit Pai's strengths?

I don't know him personally, so I wouldn't be the best person to ask. Internet is too quick to assume someone is 100% bad. Do you really have to ask a random person on the internet what his strengths are? Will that answer convince you that he's a person who probably has his own strengths?

I do enjoy playing devil's advocate, but it helps to remember that some people are simply devils. In Ajit's case, wasn't he getting money in exchange for favors? Even if not, he may as well have been. He came pretty close to removing net neutrality.

I don't think I've met anyone in Silicon Valley who hasn't gotten money in exchange for favors.

Exaggerating, but I think this is a more common occurrence than you think.

Good riddance. Ajit Pai is a friggin’ scumbag. Him and Martina Markota are both garbage.

https://twitter.com/delmoi/status/941195823572045824?s=21

https://www.gq.com/story/fcc-pai-bad-video

https://gizmodo.com/ajit-pai-thinks-youre-stupid-enough-to-b...

https://twitter.com/martinamarkota

So, several years passed since he removed net neutrality. I remember seeing ads along the line of "pay $5 for WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, pay $10 for that and Gmail, Google maps and Google, pay $20 for ... " https://sites.utm.utoronto.ca/berrey/sites/sites.utm.utoront...

Has anything similar to that come to pass?

I'll never forget his oversized reese's coffee mug. Strange that someone with such an obviously good sense of humor could also be so ill informed about good policy.

Does it have been that he's ill informed? Couldn't it be you & he just disagree?

Verizon just texted you, Ajit. You're too hot for them, and now need to look for honest work.

He'd be better suited to ALEC or any industry group. Companies like to farm their bribing (ahem, lobbying) out to groups who don't have to worry about their reputations.

This seems most likely. Being a lobbyist could easily make him millions.

Will the person who takes his place be better or even worse?

It would be awesome if Biden brought Wheeler back, but I suppose he's earned a rest.

Wheeler wanted to allow paid "fast lanes."

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/technology/fcc-new-net-ne...

It'll be a Biden nominee, so politically liberal concepts like net neutrality will be pushed by the new FCC chairman.

This sort of resignation is basically standard faire for the executive branch transfer of power.

Yeah I’m kind of surprised an article was even made. This is true for dozens of people/positions. I get no one likes Pai but this isn’t exactly news.

I think it's newsworthy. Pai is a polarizing figure and his anti-NN video campaign was widely panned by the internet in general, I think there is a justified public interest in reporting on his status as Chairman.

The vast majority of things published on news websites are not news.

Or at least not news worth reading an article about.

Because of his involvement in the infamous net neutrality case, his departure, while routine, certainly merits a mention by those interested in upholding those principles. Especially since the fight to keep net neutrality was mired in controversy iirc.

Another reason why it’s noteworthy is that it’s a Member of the current POTUS’ executive team clearly signaling that Biden won, despite the current POTUS’ refusal to concede the election.

Even I would make a better FCC Chairman and I'm not the most savvy person.

I am so happy he will be gone.

Let's see if Wheeler is brought back in some capacity.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25255157

And there was much rejoicing!

This isn't newsworthy. FCC has 5 members. 3 of them match the party of the sitting president, 2 of them do not. Trump's term ends on January 20th.

People downvoting seem to be missing something. This has been known since Trump lost the election. The FCC chairman (and generally leader of most federal organizaitons) always steps down at the end of the presidential term. The head of NASA is also stepping down then.

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