FCC chair: Government should get out of the internet economy’s way

Senate Republicans introduced a bill on Monday that would essentially undo the net neutrality rules in the Federal Communications Commission Open Internet Order from 2015.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said the 2015 order “put federal bureaucrats in charge of engineering the internet’s infrastructure.” The bill nullifying net neutrality rules has been co-sponsored by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) and other conservatives.

FCC chair Ajit Pai talked about the importance of a deregulated internet on Tuesday’s “The Glenn Beck Radio Program.”

“The key point here is that nothing about the internet was broken from the dawn of the internet age in the 1990s until 2015,” Pai said. “The internet economy in the United States was the envy of the world precisely because President Clinton and a Republican Congress agreed that instead of regulating the heck out of this new technology, we would let it develop and take targeted action as necessary.”

Pai credited the rapid growth of the technology industry to the lack of government regulation of the internet. He explained that the FCC imposed “heavy-handed rules” in 2015 that will reduce consumers’ choices and give companies less incentive to invest.

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