Fortune

Ajit Pai is drunk on free market economics. There’s no other way to explain his decision as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission’s to tear up the nation’s net neutrality rules for no good reason. Contrary to the view of some critics, Pai is not corrupt. Yes, he was a lawyer for Verizon, a fierce opponent of net neutrality, but his decision to scrap the rules was not motivated by a desire to win favor with his former bosses in the telecom industry. Instead, the problem is that Pai is a zealot.

[Commentary] In essence, the Federal Communications Commission has given Internet service providers the legal power to blackmail any content provider that does not pay them with the threat of a slowdown in service delivery. The FCC clearly has put the ISPs profits above the benefits of consumers and of the overwhelming majority of businesses.

New financial disclosures for a November ballot initiative show that a group backed by private internet providers spent just over $900,000 to try and block city-owned broadband service in Fort Collins, Colorado.

[Commentary] Despite Internet service providers’ clearly stated threats and attempts to circumvent net neutrality protections, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai wants to unilaterally disarm the FCC and move broadband providers from light-touch regulation to no regulation. That would be disaster for the Internet ecosystem. The U.S. has always had a free and open Internet precisely because of net neutrality protections. The only danger now is Pai catapulting us into a future without it.

Comcast Xfinity Internet service suffered major problems on Nov 6, leaving customers in many major cities with slow connections or none at all.  Internet-monitoring company Downdetecter said that the outage is affecting Xfinity customers in Denver (CO), Portland (OR), Chicago (IL), Seattle (WA), New York (NY), San Francisco (CA), Houston (TX), Minneapolis (MN), Boston (MA), and Mountain View (CA). Comcast’s customer care on Twitter apologized for the outage and said that the company was trying to fix the problem, but it did not say when it would be solved.

The Trump administration proposed plans giving two big wins to the nation's largest communications companies. President Donald Trump proposed tax cuts that would make AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast among the biggest winners of his plan. Later, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai proposed lifting net neutrality rules that put limits on Internet service providers.

A former ally of Vice President-elect Mike Pence with a strong focus on deregulation could be in line for an appointment to the Federal Communications Commission, possibly as the next chairman. Brandt Hershman, a longtime Indiana state senator, is rumored to be the leading candidate for an opening on the agency, which oversees the telecommunications, broadcasting, and cable industries, apparently. Hershman worked closely with the vice president-elect after Pence was elected Indiana’s governor in 2012. Hershman, the senate majority floor leader, authored a massive law to deregulate telecommunications in Indiana a decade ago. The bill ended government regulation of phone rates, freed up cable companies from needing to get dozens of local licenses to offer service, and stopped cities and towns from setting up their own municipal broadband services.

Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) says that Time Warner should be blocked from using Washington’s so-called revolving door to push through its controversial deal with AT&T.

The media giant has hired lawyer Christine Varney -- a partner at Cravath, Swaine and Moore -- to make the case to the government that AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner would not kill competition. Varney is one of the nation’s top antitrust lawyers working for corporate America. But six years ago, Varney was the government’s head antitrust cop, leading the Obama administration’s effort to crack down on deals that could result in higher prices. Now, she is one of the attorneys who’s being paid big bucks to try to get the AT&T-Time Warner merger approved. “Americans have had it with regulators like Varney, who talk a good game about holding the bad guys accountable while counting down the days until they can collect a fat paycheck from the corporations they were supposed to regulate,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren tells Fortune. “The revolving door is out of control. If we want to hold corporate lawbreakers accountable, we can’t ask their friends to do it.”