Current FCC head Ajit Pai has made it abundantly clear that he wants to get rid of net neutrality in its current form and replace it, and reports are floating around that he’s going to reveal his grand plans to do just that this Wednesday. The pending announcement could and likely will be followed up by a “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking,” a document that government agencies typically use to garner feedback on a proposal before beginning the process of putting it into law. Should that happen, Pai will be able to begin having talks and writing up possible changes this May.
This comes on the heels of Pai and his people meeting with a number of prominent figures in the tech and telecom worlds to talk over Net Neutrality privately. Though the full contents of the discussion were not released publicly, a summary of one talk was released by The Internet Association, a loose consortium of web, tech, and telecom outfits who, for the most part, have a vested interest in keeping net neutrality laws as they are and preventing the web from becoming a place where content providers have to pay for customers to be served their site at a decent speed, or where telecom providers can essentially censor sites that they don’t like. Changes to the rules could simply unshackle companies, or could have the Federal Trade Commission doing the policing, among other possible outcomes.
This whole sordid saga comes amid a power struggle of sorts in the industry. Essentially, telecom companies are pushing for the new FCC to make policies that allow them to maximize profits and user count in order to deliver a more optimized customer experience through investment, while internet and tech companies are fighting for a more open, fair internet that encourages innovation and puts all content providers on an even playing field. The telecom firms recently had a win on their hands when the FCC voted to repeal an Obama-era law against collecting and selling consumer data without the consumers’ consent, which was set to go into effect soon after it was struck down. This is only the latest battle in a long war that both sides are waging over how the future of the internet is going to look, and everybody is waiting for Pai to declare exactly where he stands, and by extension, where the FCC stands.