Former FCC Boss Tom Wheeler is unsurprisingly unimpressed by the current FCC boss' looming attack on net neutrality. Wheeler called the looming attack on the rules "a classic example of regulatory capture, where the regulatory agency bends to the wishes of those they are supposed to oversee," adding that he believed that the current FCC under Ajit Pai was "walking away from the responsibility... to oversee networks" and "walking away from existing consumer protections for a fast, fair, and open Internet."
Wheeler has
previously called Ajit Pai's claim that the FTC will rush in to fill the enforcement vacuum "a fraud," noting that the entire goal is to remove meaningful oversight of an uncompetitive industry with a long history of anti-consumer behavior.
"The FTC doesn’t have rule-making authority," Wheeler said. "They’ve got enforcement authority and their enforcement authority is whether or not something is unfair or deceptive. And the FTC has to worry about everything from computer chips to bleach labeling. Of course, carriers want [telecom issues] to get lost in that morass. This was the strategy all along."
Wheeler this week also took aim at Comcast's obvious retreat from its previous promises to avoid paid prioritization, now that the death of net neutrality nears.
"When we were considering our rule, they were constantly coming in and saying we will not have paid prioritization," Wheeler said. "Well, you noticed that paid prioritization is off the list now."
Wheeler also warned that without the FCC keeping an eye on interconnection, we will likely see a return to the kinds of double dipping we saw a few years ago when ISPs were letting peering points congest to drive up costs for content and transit companies. The end result was slower Netflix performance for everybody. When the FCC under Wheeler warned that it would be keeping a close eye on this behavior, most of the problems magically disappeared.
"That simple keeping-an-eye-on-what's-going-on has resulted in the elimination of the interconnection bottlenecks that existed before, and interconnection prices actually going down, just because somebody was watching," Wheeler said.
The FCC is scheduled to kill net neutrality rules on December 14. After the repeal is posted in the federal register in January, the FCC will be
inundated with numerous lawsuits accusing the agency of ignoring the will of the public simply to please giant telecom providers.