FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, after announcing plans last week to eliminate the Obama-era net neutrality rules, said Monday that his family is being targeted over the plans, and that should not be happening.
"It certainly crossed the line with me," Pai told Fox News' "Fox and Friends" program. "I understand people are passionate about policy. One thing in America that should remain sacred is that families, wives and kids, should remain out of it, and stop harassing us at our homes."
Over the weekend, signs went up near Pai's home, accusing him of being a "murderer of democracy" and warning his children, whose names were listed, that their father was killing the internet.
He said the reaction isn't surprising, considering the misinformation that is going around about the FCC's plans for the internet, but he defended the move to end net neutrality as one that will encourage technology.
"We are going to return to President [Bill] Clinton's internet framework which existed from 1996 all the way until 2015," said Pai. "under that light touch, market-based framework, we saw tons of investment in infrastructure. We saw companies like Facebook and Apple and Google become worldwide names. We saw consumers going online in unprecedented numbers."
Such progress was jettisoned in 2015, said Pai, when "the Obama administration imposed heavy-handed rules based on 1930s regulations on the internet. These were solutions that weren't needed for a problem that didn't exist."
Pai has suggested that he wants the free market to figure out the structure of the internet, while putting engineers and entrepreneurs in charge, instead of Washington bureaucrats and lawyers.
"We shouldn't be micromanaging how this very dynamic free market success story should work," said Pai. "I think that's the model that's been tried and tested from President Clinton all the way through the first six years of President [Barack] Obama."
He said he thinks it's also vital to have more competition and innovation, which will allow online networks to be built out further.
"The FCC has a lot of initiatives built towards doing that, but the problem is that this is simply slapping on very heavy handed regulations that make it even harder for companies to make internet access more common," said Pai.
The FCC will vote on Pai's plan on Dec. 14, and he believes it will be approved by a 3-2 vote, if all indications are correct.
"I hope that, however, we return to that bipartisan consensus that serves so well for two decades," he concluded.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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