What Is Net Neutrality? FCC Chairman Ajit Pai Reportedly Readying Repeal

United States Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is gearing up to repeal net neutrality rules passed by the FCC under during President Barack Obama’s administration, according to a report from Reuters.

Chairman Pai reportedly met with trade groups representing major telecommunications companies on Tuesday to discusses his initial plans for reversing Net Neutrality.

Read: Is Net Neutrality Dead? What The Internet Will Look Like Without Open Internet Rules

Pai will take aim at the landmark rules put in place by former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler that were designed to protect the principles of net neutrality, effectively requiring internet service providers to treat all data as equal. Net neutrality forbids blocking specific content, throttling connection speeds, and providing a favorable experience to one service while slowing another.

In order to protect those tenants, the FCC under Wheeler reclassified the internet as a common carrier, allowing it to be treated like a utility. The move gave the FCC broad regulatory powers over internet service providers.

That reclassification will be front and center of Pai’s repeal. The former Republican commissioner and current chairman of the FCC, who was appointed to the position by President Donald Trump, has expressed his belief openly that the Federal Trade Commission should be in charge of overseeing internet rules.

Currently, the FTC has no ability to regulate the internet because of the common carrier classification. It is also not clear it would be able to regulate the internet activity of a company like AT&T, which still offers a common carrier service—phone lines—and is considered a common carrier business, meaning it would still be under the oversight of the FCC.

Read: What Is Net Neutrality? How FCC's Title II and Open Internet Rules Came To Be

AT&T fought and won a lawsuit against the FTC in 2016 that found common carriers are exempt from being governed by Section Five of the FTC Act, which gives the FTC the ability to prevent corporations from using “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.”

The rule is regularly used by the FTC for consumer protection purposes. The FTC attempted to use it against AT&T for its practice of throttling the data speeds of its customers on an unlimited data plan. The FTC challenge failed, as the courts found AT&T, as a common carrier, was outside of the FTC’s jurisdiction.

Chairman Pai already abandoned a previous policy of the Obama-era FCC when he chose to halt the implementation and ultimately supported the full repeal of the Broadband Consumer Privacy Rules, which prevented ISPs from collecting user data without permission. Pai believed that was the responsibility of the FTC as well.

Despite the fact it is unclear, if not unlikely, that the FTC will be able to regulate telecom companies to ensure they adhere to net neutrality principles, Pai appears ready to move forward with undoing the protections. He reportedly has asked ISPs to voluntarily agree to maintain an open internet regardless if the legal framework is in place to respond if the ISPs abandon net neutrality principles.