President Donald Trump on Tuesday officially supported the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in regards to its efforts to review and replace the existing net neutrality rules adopted by the same agency under the former Obama administration when the regulator was led by Tom Wheeler. The response comes a day after Press Secretary Sean Spicer said that he didn’t have any knowledge of the President’s personal thoughts on the initiative that’s been the subject of significant public scrutiny in recent months. The comment was eventually delivered by Principal Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Sanders who stated that the President supports FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, albeit the White House believes that “fair rules” on the matter still need to be adopted in the future.
According to Sanders, the current administration thinks that everyone from Internet service providers to websites and consumers themselves should care about “the rules of the road,” though the President’s official stance is that the FCC made a mistake when it opted to regulate net neutrality with Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. The Deputy Press Secretary didn’t elaborate on the matter, though Pai himself did on numerous occasions in the past, claiming that the manner in which the FCC adopted net neutrality in 2015 is archaic and hurts innovation, consequently negatively affecting job growth in the United States. The still-standing rules classify ISPs as utility providers and prevent them from selling priority access to the World Wide Web, essentially forbidding the creation of fast online traffic lanes and charging extra for them, consequently discouraging consumers from using alternative services that can only be accessed through slower lanes, provided that some websites aren’t entirely banned by the ISPs in the first place. Save for the aforementioned claims made by Pai, opponents of net neutrality previously argued that ISPs are already adhering to the principles of the open Internet even without the FCC’s 2015 ruling.
The White House also stated that the optimal manner of handling the current situation is having the U.S. Congress “create regulatory and economic certainty,” presumably through new legislation. A similar stance was expressed by opponents of the Title II rules on several occasions, though their critics argue that such a course of action is prone to being influenced by Washington lobbyists.