Regulation: A last pitch for Trump’s tech agenda
In President Trump’s waning days, the White House is “entrenching the Trump tech legacy,” with fiercely partisan appointments, said Leah Nylen in Politico .com. Last week the Senate advanced the nomination of Nathan Simington to the Federal Communications Commission, moving an aide who has worked to “target Silicon Valley companies” one step closer to a five-year term at the agency. Simington, who currently serves at the Commerce Department, tried to enlist Fox News host Laura Ingraham in an effort to pressure social media companies ahead of Election Day. If Simington is confirmed, the FCC will have a 3-2 Republican majority until Chairman Ajit Pai steps down in January—and could be left with a 2-2 deadlock as Joe Biden begins his presidency.
Democrats are coming in hoping to revive net neutrality rules, but we’re doing fine without them, said WashingtonExaminer .com in an editorial. When in 2018 Pai repealed the rules that prohibited internet providers from throttling traffic, critics told us we were facing “impending doom for the internet.” In fact, none of the “panicked, hysterical predictions has come true.” The consumer experience of the internet has “dramatically improved,” with costs dropping and download speeds nearly doubling in the past three years.
If telecoms haven’t taken advantage of Trump-era rule changes, that’s only because they have not “had time to kick the tires on new strategies to milk their customers for extra cash,” said Rhett Jones in Gizmodo.com. Now that Pai is leaving, telecoms “need a new man on the inside.” Enter Simington. “Believed to be the author” of the president’s executive order tasking the FCC with redefining Section 230, Simington earned his chops helping Trump “screw with his enemies.” Now he is the favored choice of business groups to make sure the FCC stays jammed up for as long as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell can stymie Biden’s efforts to confirm a new chair.
The irony of Trump’s last days is that while Pai’s tenure has been “defined by the desire to impose as few rules as possible on private businesses,” said Sara Morrison in Vox.com, his final days will see a push to “introduce more regulation through Section 230.” Modifying that has “become a rallying cry” for Republicans, who claim they are censored on social media. The agency, however, almost certainly doesn’t have enough time, and most likely a Biden administration will let the effort die. Eventually, Biden will get a new FCC chair, and then he can “reclaim some of the authority ceded under Trump” to address his top priority of increasing broadband access to “address the digital divide.”