FCC’s Pai: ‘Heavy-Handed’ Net Neutrality Rules Are Stifling The Internet

The Federal Communications Commission chairman announced plans Tuesday to repeal Obama-era regulations on Internet service providers. The 2015 rules enforce what’s called net neutrality, meaning that the companies that connect you to the Internet don’t get to decide which websites load faster or slower, or charge websites or apps to load faster.

In an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai says his plan to remove net neutrality rules is a way of bringing the Internet back to how it was in the 1990s.

“President Clinton got it right in 1996 when he established a free market-based approach to this new thing called the Internet, and the Internet economy we have is a result of his light-touch regulatory vision,” Pai says. “We saw companies like Facebook and Amazon and Google become global powerhouses precisely because we had light-touch rules that apply to this Internet. And the Internet wasn’t broken in 2015 when these heavy-handed regulations were adopted.”