Ex-FCC Chair Tom Wheeler Dismantles The Case For Abandoning Net Neutrality

By Mark Sullivan

Tom Wheeler‘s legacy is the 2015 Open Internet Order passed by the Federal Communications Commission while he was FCC chairman, imposing network neutrality safeguards on big ISPs like AT&T and Comcast. The order was and is popular with the public, and yet is under serious threat from the current Republican-controlled FCC under Trump-appointed chairman Ajit Pai, a former FCC commissioner and Verizon lobbyist.

In order to impose the net neutrality safeguards–which prevent ISPs from blocking, slowing, or delivering some internet traffic faster than others–a federal court said Wheeler’s FCC would have to reclassify ISPs as “common carriers” under Title II of the 1934 Telecommunication Act. So it did, much to the displeasure of the ISPs.

Emboldened by the deregulatory agendas of both Trump and Pai, the ISPs are now pressing hard to get the FCC to roll back the Open Internet Order. Pai released a preliminary proposal for doing so in April. Lots of voices can now be heard talking about the issue this summer, both inside the Beltway and in Silicon Valley, but not Wheeler’s—until I talked to him on Thursday.