Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai on Monday listed a number of concerns about social media giants in the country, largely repeating the sentiment President Trump has been reiterating over the course of this summer, albeit with a less confrontational tone. In a Medium post published earlier today, the Trump-appointed official called for the general public to pay close attention to the upcoming hearing that the Senate’s House Energy and Commerce Committee will be holding tomorrow with the goal of questioning a number of top executives from the Silicon Valley, including Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey.
The Republican official said he’s hoping to learn more about the manner in which America’s largest tech companies approach transparency, privacy, and freedom of expression, with the lattermost point often being repeated by other GOP members in recent times, President Trump included. Mr. Pai recalled a number of instances of what some alleged was evidenced of left-leaning social media bias that censored conservative voices on some of the world’s most popular online platforms owned and managed by American companies. The FCC Chairman questioned whether the likes of Google, Twitter, and Facebook should be “serving as gatekeepers of online content,” adding that Alphabet’s subsidiary in particular is embracing questionable projects such as a censored version of its Search engine for China whose existence was widely reported in August and even prompted a bipartisan query from Senators. Likewise, Mr. Pai believes Apple CEO Tim Cook also signaled the iPhone maker is preparing to collaborate with Beijing on delivering a censored Internet browsing experience to users in the Far Eastern country, having related such a service to its fundamental incompatibility with American values.
Mr. Pai is now also attempting to divert the still-ongoing efforts aimed at reinstating net neutrality that he and the agency he leads repealed as part of a highly controversial move earlier this year, claiming that tech companies and their attempts to regulate the Internet should be the target of those endeavors before activists turn their interest toward the telecom industry. That particular argument has been repeatedly dismissed by net neutrality proponents as not being related to the issue at hand seeing how regions of the U.S. lack any meaningful competition in the ISP space.