Washington

Protesters from the far-left group Popular Resistance have swarmed the Arlington, Va., street where Ajit Pai lives, placing pamphlets with his face on his neighbors’ front doors. “Have you seen this man?” the flyers ask, stating that Mr. Pai—“Age 44 / Height 6'1" / Weight 200”—is “trying to destroy net neutrality.” Mr. Pai is chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and the activists, not without perverse humor, describe their picketing of his home as “Ajit-ation.”

“They were there yesterday,” Mr. Pai tells me Monday in his office at the FCC, in uncool Southwest Washington. “I understand they’ll be there today. They’ll be there tomorrow and the day after. It’s a hassle, especially for my wife and my two young children.” The activists, he adds, “come up to our front windows and take photographs of the inside of the house. My kids are 5 and 3. It’s not pleasant.”

Few phrases in the English language are more dowdy than “net neutrality.” Yet the passions the two words arouse are so intense that the earnest, nerdy Mr. Pai—his hair crew-cut, his smile somewhat goofy—is among the Trump officials most loathed by the left. That hatred was consolidated Thursday, when Mr. Pai’s FCC voted 2-1 to begin the process to scrap the Obama administration’s net-neutrality regulations.

Coined in 2003 by legal scholar Tim Wu, net neutrality has come to mean government oversight of the internet aimed at protecting the consumer from exploitation by internet service providers. In February 2015, under the incongruously named Open Internet Order, the Obama FCC overturned nearly two decades of precedent for treating the internet as a largely unregulated “information service.” Instead the FCC reclassified it as a “telecommunication service.” Having done so, the commission asserted the authority to regulate the internet as a “utility” under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, which was enacted, Mr. Pai never tires of saying, “to deal with Ma Bell,” the telephone monopoly.