FCC Chairman Pai talks about the limited role for regulation

A Q&A with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. He says the government's role should be to step in when there is a market failure — but he was tough to pin down on where he sees those occurring. Chairman Pai sounded skeptical that Facebook and Google are in need of being regulated as a utility in the same way that broadband providers are. "Utility is a very seductive word to those who want [to] conflate it into 'something that is useful to me.' And the fact that something is useful does not necessarily mean that it should be regulated like a utility. There's a long, long history of utility regulation in this country as you know — and it comes fraught with a lot of very arcane, sometimes economically onerous regulations and those regulations can in some cases disserve consumers if applied fully to companies like the ones you mentioned. So, I always want to be careful about applying that moniker to any particular service or product."

At the same time, Chairman Pai acknowledges the challenge posed when some competitors face regulation and others don't. "But I do think that companies that compete in a particular space should be regulated similarly. Whether all those companies together you just mentioned do in fact compete in the same space is a difficult question. Now, there's some sort of bleed over into — what is network and what is edge is becoming more and more and more of a (complicated) question. And that's something that I think ultimately lawmakers are going to have to sort out."

When asked whether he is frustrated that the FCC has oversight over certain companies, while others are overseen by the Federal Trade Commission, he replied: "There's no question that in some cases the law says you may go this far, and my conception of the public interest would suggest we go further. Or conversely, we find that there is a problem that we should try to solve but yet the law gives somebody else the authority to do it...As boring and unsatisfactory as it sounds, we have to stay within the four corners of the law and that's not always the right answer for a lot of people."