#153: Trump Picks Ajit Pai for FCC Chair

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2017

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Early this week, the White House confirmed that President Trump picked FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai to chair the agency. This means that Republicans have a 2-1 majority until the vacancies can be filled by candidates confirmed by the Senate. While some of his more hysterical critics pull their hair out over the impending “death of the Open Internet,” others are looking forward to a new direction at the FCC. Hopefully this is characterized by a renewed spirit of bipartisanship on a wide range of telecom issues, including net neutrality and broadband deployment. Pai has proposed “Gigabit Opportunity Zones” to jumpstart broadband in both urban and rural low-income communities. What else can we expect from the new FCC? Evan and Berin discuss.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Schwarger. On today's show, President Trump has made his pick for FCC chairman. Commissioner Ajit Pye, who was a minority Republican commissioner under Chairman Tom Wheeler, has been elevated to the chairmanship. And while all we saw on Friday
0:22.3	were news reports, we saw an official statement from now Chairman Pye yesterday thanking President
0:28.5	Trump for the appointment. Joining me to discuss this is someone who knows some stuff about the FCC,
0:34.1	not that much, but whatever. President of Tech Freedom, Baron Soka.
0:37.6	Baron, are you upset that you were not selected?
0:40.6	Well, yes, of course, but I couldn't have asked for a better pick than Ajit.
0:44.0	He is everything that people say they want these days, which is thoughtful, well-tempered, open-minded, and funny.
0:53.1	We've talked about this on the show before,
0:55.0	but you could not ask for a more pop-culturally literate person to be in that role
1:02.0	who can write entire dissents from the Big Lebowski.
1:05.0	Yes.
1:06.0	And when we say that, we mean he throws a reference in, he doesn't just take the dialogue
1:10.0	or the script from the
1:11.2	big labowski and use that as a dissent but that would have been funny too well say what you will
1:14.4	about tom wheeler at least he had an ethos okay um so uh let's start with an issue that we haven't
1:21.5	talked about on the show before it's uh prison pay phones and this might be slightly surprising to
1:27.0	some people because on the tech
1:28.1	policy podcast, we try to generally keep things high tech and there's nothing less low tech.
1:34.9	No, sorry, I deduce that. There's nothing more low tech these days when we're talking about FCC stuff
1:39.1	than pay phones, right? But here we are. This is an issue where the FCC plays a role. And briefly, before we get into the policy, what does the FCC have to do with this? This seems in prisons. We think of this as a local issue. It's a municipality or it's a state issue. Why is the FCC focused so much on broadband and video and things like that. What do they have to do with pay phones?
2:01.5	Well, remember, the FCC has jurisdiction over interstate calling. So the issue here,
2:08.1	this has been brewing for now 13 years back in 2003. Right when Barron got out of prison,
	...

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