Trump Backs FCC Attack on Net Neutrality

The White House threw its formal support behind FCC boss Ajit Pai's plan to kill popular net neutrality protections. Speaking to reporters Tuesday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the President fully supports the FCC's plan to dismantle the rules, which were created in 2015 to prevent giant ISPs like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from abusing the lack of competition in the broadband market.

"We support the FCC chair's efforts to review and consider rolling back these rules,” Sanders said, "and believe that the best way to get fair rules for everyone is for Congress to take action and create regulatory and economic certainty."

Of course that perfectly mirrors the desires of large ISPs, which have been pushing hard to kill the FCC rules and replace it with a federal law.

Why? Given AT&T, Verizon and Comcast's immense control over state and federal legislatures, they know they'll be the one writing such legislation if it gets created at all. That way they can ensure that the "protections" are filled with so many loopholes as to be largely meaningless.

That would bring us back to rules much like the original, 2010 FCC rules that were the internet policy equivalent of wet tissue paper. In large part because those rules were written by AT&T, Verizon and Google -- and didn't even cover wireless networks.

It's not entirely clear Donald Trump even knows what net neutrality is, at times confusing it with the fairness doctrine, legislation written in 1949 and discarded in 1987 that tried to force news outlets to engage in fair coverage. In this case it seems likely that the President is simply deferring to the "wisdom" of FCC boss Ajit Pai, whose policies are quite directly shaped by the large ISPs that used to employ him.

The decision to kill the rules also flies in the face of the public's position on the subject. Surveys consistently show that net neutrality has broad, bipartisan support among consumers. In fact, one recent poll found that 70% of Trump supporters think the internet has improved under the FCC's 2015 net neutrality rules, and support keeping the rules intact by a wide three to one margin. Another poll recently found that 81% of Democrats and 73% of Republicans support net neutrality, largely because they're we're all too familiar with the anti-competitive behavior of companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon.