U.S. President Donald Trump, in January, picked Indian-American lawyer Ajit Pai to head the country’s internet regulator Federal Communications Commission . Mr. Pai, a Republican, is a vocal critic of net neutrality.
He was one of the two Republican commissioners on the five-member panel that regulates the country’s communications infrastructure, including TV, phone and internet service when Barack Obama was the President.
Mr. Pai was born in New York after his parents moved from India to the U.S. in 1971. His mother grew up in Bengaluru, and father was raised in Hyderabad. Mr. Pai studied social studies in Harvard and graduated in law from the University of Chicago Law School.
During his roughly 15 years in government, he’s been a Senate staffer and worked at the FCC and the Justice Department. He was also a lawyer for Verizon and an attorney at the law firm Jenner & Block. He was the Associate General Counsel at Verizon Communications from 2001-03.
Mr. Pai has maintained that the FCC under former Chairman Thomas Wheeler had “overstepped its bounds” and the Commission has to take a “weed whacker” to “unnecessary regulations” that hold back investment and innovation.
Analysts say Mr. Pai’s policies have been more favourable to the phone, cable and broadcasting industries than the Silicon Valley. One of the early decisions of Mr. Pai as the Chairman was cancelling a proposal to open up the cable box market to tech giants such as Amazon and Google, saying the “days of set-top boxes are numbered”.
Mr. Pai also cancelled an investigation into zero-rating practices by wireless providers T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon.
But Mr. Pai asserted in a speech that Internet companies are “a much bigger actual threat to an open Internet” because they choose what people see on their services.
On arguments that scrapping net neutrality rules would result in higher prices on data usage, Mr. Pai, during an interview to Fox News Radio, said: “it’s going to mean exactly the opposite.”
“These heavy-handed regulations have made it harder for the private sector to build out the networks especially in rural America,” Mr. Pai had said adding that with the new ruling “the federal government will stop micromanaging the Internet.”
