Hate Your Internet Service? The FCC Wants to Know
*Any* successor to Pai was going to be an improvement, but Biden's FCC chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, is shaping up to be objectively *fantastic*.
By Cory Doctorow / Pluralistic
The Federal Communications Commision long epitomized "regulatory capture" - an agency whose leadership worked a revolving door with the industry it oversees; a crooked beat-cop who served as willing accomplice to decades of fraud, leaving Americans to struggle with overpriced, underperforming broadband.
There have been many terrible FCC chairs and commissioners, but even in that crowded, manure-strewn field, one man stands out as the worst FCC chair in American history, Ajit Pai, the former Verizon lawyer who became Trump's FCC chairman.
Pai set many precedents, such as accepting millions of comments in support of his anti-Net Neutrality order even though they came from dead people, people whose identities had been stolen, and a series of random strings prepended to "@pornhub.com".
Although he resigned last year, he continues to set precedent, refusing to surrender his official Twitter account after leaving office, and blocking his critics, Americans who are therefore excluded from the public records of his FCC activities.
*Any* successor to Pai was going to be an improvement, but Biden's FCC chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, is shaping up to be objectively *fantastic*.
Last month, she issued a call for Americans to create an official record of their disappointments with their Internet Service Providers.
The Rosenworcel hits keep coming! This month, she inaugurated an objective, data-driven survey of American broadband performance, calling on Americans to use and report speed-test apps that document their shitty, overpriced connectivity.
The FCC Speed Test App was first released in 2014 and has been under development ever since, but Ajit Pai studiously ignored these results in favor of the rosily juked stats the telecoms industry frauded up for the FCC's delectation.
The news that the FCC is using its own 7-year-old app to gather data on real-world broadband performance shouldn't be surprising and uplifting, but it is. It's a tribute to just how uniquely terrible Pai's run was, and what a great monster of history he turned out to be.
After a year of lockdown when the American people relied on broadband to deliver employment, education, health, family life, civics, politics, as well as news and entertainment, the unforgivable nature of Pai's rule became undeniable.
Pai was the worst, but he was carrying out a long tradition of official FCC forbearance for underinvestment, monopoly and price-gouging. We can't afford that any longer - and, it seems that with Rosenworcel, we won't be asked to.
