Commissioner Pai embraces chief critic role on net neutrality

The toughest critic of the Federal Communications Commission’s new network neutrality rules isn’t marching outside the building waving a sign. He’s sitting at a desk in the agency’s DC headquarters. Commissioner Ajit Pai is taking the lead in crafting and articulating the conservative argument against Chairman Tom Wheeler’s plan, which represents one of the most sweeping efforts to regulate communications in the agency’s history.

A Kansas-raised lawyer and onetime aide to former Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), Commissioner Pai was Sen Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) choice for a Republican seat on the Federal Communications Commission back in 2011. Now he’s seizing the spotlight as the chief agitator against the net neutrality order. Commissioner Pai is slamming the rules as a shift toward government control over the Internet. He’s repeatedly taken his message to cable TV and Twitter — criticizing the chairman’s plan in unusually blunt and broad terms.

“Nobody’s ever done the things he has -- pulling out all the stops and using all the tricks he does,” said Harold Feld, senior vice president at Public Knowledge, a public interest group that supports the net neutrality plan. “He’s very much like Justice [Antonin] Scalia in terms of being a standard-bearer for a particular philosophical and ideological view that has a consistent, albeit very narrow, view.”