ACA Summit: Pai: Open Internet Order Was 'Galling Regulatory Onslaught’ | Multichannel: U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai praised smaller cable operators for broadband deployment and as a competitive force, and renewed his attacks on edge providers in the network neutrality rule debate. Pai took aim at edge providers he said had pushed Title II on ISPs large and small. Those edge providers are an increasingly familiar target in Washington in conversations about power over internet content.
"Silicon Valley tech giants with market caps in the hundreds of billions of dollars demanded that the FCC regulate small companies like yours more heavily than they were!," he said. "That’s right... [T]hey claimed that small broadband providers like Spencer Municipal Utilities and Laurens Municipal Utilities were anticompetitive monopolists who posed a greater threat to a free and open Internet than companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter."
The thing is Mr. Chairman, telecommunications infrastructure is a natural monopoly. It doesn't matter whether it's owned by big players like Charter and AT&T or small cable companies. It thus requires a regulatory scheme predicated on that monopolistic reality. The FCC's 2015 Open Internet rulemaking does so in treating it as a common carrier utility as basic telephone service was in the pre-Internet era under Title II of the Communications Act.
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