Tony Romm

Democratic senators rejoiced on Jan 9 that they had secured enough votes to force the Senate to debate whether to restore the US government’s recently repealed network neutrality rules. But their celebrations could prove short-lived on Capitol Hill, where Republicans control both chambers of Congress — and can easily scuttle any attempt to revive regulations that required internet providers to treat all web traffic equally.  In speech after speech, though, Democratic Sens mostly sidestepped those issues.

The Internet Association, a leading lobbying group for Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Twitter and other tech giants, said that it would be joining the coming legal crusade to restore the US government’s network neutrality rules. The Internet Association specifically plans to join a lawsuit as an intervening party, aiding the challenge to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s vote in December to repeal regulations that required internet providers like AT&T and Comcast to treat all web traffic equally.

Apparently, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai canceled his scheduled appearance at a major upcoming tech industry trade show after receiving death threats. It’s the second known incident in which Chairman Pai’s safety may have been at risk, after a bomb threat abruptly forced the chairman to halt his controversial vote to scrap net neutrality rules in December 2017.

The fiercest advocates for network neutrality are readying a new war in the nation’s capital, hoping to restore the rules that the Trump administration just eliminated — and galvanize a new generation of younger, web-savvy voters in the process. Not even a month after the Federal Communications Commission voted to scrap its requirement that internet providers treat all web traffic equally, an armada of tech startups, consumer activists and state attorneys general are preparing to take the agency to court.

In the hours after the Trump administration scrapped rules that required internet providers to treat all web traffic equally, a handful of states mobilized in a bid to reverse the decision by the Federal Communications Commission in court — or perhaps write their own new regulations as a replacement. To start, a coalition of state attorneys general, led by New York, pledged on Dec 14 that they would sue the FCC to stop its rollback from taking place.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai thinks everyone from Cher to Twitter has it wrong when they say that his efforts to roll back the US government’s existing network neutrality rules will spell the death of the web. Instead, Chairman Pai said that tech giants could pose the greatest threat by discriminating against viewpoints on the internet.

President Donald Trump appeared to stress that he had not intervened in AT&T’s bid to buy Time Warner — nor did he seek to require that the companies sell CNN in order to obtain the US government’s approval of the deal.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said he believes technology companies that displayed Kremlin-linked ads during the 2016 election could help the United States “retaliate” against Russia. “What we ought to do with regard to the Russians is retaliate, seriously retaliate against the Russians,” Sen McConnell told MSNBC’s Hugh Hewitt.

For the moment, the fate of the Sinclair-Tribune deal rests in the hands of the Federal Communications Commission as well as the nation’s antitrust regulators. As with any merger of this size, the government has the ability to review and block the merger, permit it to proceed as proposed, or require Sinclair and Tribune to make certain changes in order for them to proceed.

Already, though, Sinclair has benefited greatly from the Federal Communications Commission: Under its Republican chairman, Ajit Pai, the agency has relaxed media ownership rules, beginning with a change in the way some stations are counted toward a company’s national footprint. That deregulatory move made Sinclair’s bid for Tribune fathomable, analysts have said. During the 2016 election, Sinclair stations appeared to have great access to the presidential candidate. While the company claimed it was not playing favorites, President Trump’s closest aide, Jared Kushner, said in December that Sinclair had actually struck a deal with Trump’s campaign with respect to its coverage. (Sinclair said the deal never happened.) Months later, Sinclair snapped up Boris Epsteyn, one of Trump’s spokespeople in the White House, as a chief political analyst.

A Q&A with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. Pai and Tony Romm discussed the future of network neutrality, the role of the FCC in “boring” things like the country’s infrastructure, and the agency's role overseeing telecom giants as they gobble each other up.

Asked, "What happens if we have millions and millions of Americans who file comments to the agency opposing the ideas [on net neutrality] that you’ve put forward?" Chairman Pai said, "Well, look, that’s part of the process. I wanted to make sure that we had a chance for the public to have its say. After that’s over, after that period is over, the agency takes stock of what’s in the record. Under the law, as enunciated by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals here, we have to have what’s called substantial evidence. We have to find in the record sufficient facts to justify what course of action we are going to take. There’s no numerical threshold that the courts have applied. They don’t say, “Okay, 51 percent say yes and 49 percent say no, then the decision is clear," or any proportion greater than that. They’ve said substantial evidence is the standard, so that’s the legal standard we’re going to apply going forward."