Enlarge / Ajit Pai backs slowly away from President Trump. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Photo by Gage Skidmore )

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said he is dropping his plan to help President Trump impose a crackdown on social-media platforms and offered mild criticism of Trump's incitement of a mob that stormed the US Capitol in a failed bid to overturn the election results.

In October, Pai backed Trump's proposal to limit the Section 230 legal protections for social-media websites that block or modify content posted by users. At the time, Pai said he would open an FCC rule-making process to declare that companies like Twitter and Facebook do not have "special immunity" for their content-moderation decisions. But Pai hasn't moved the proposal forward since Trump's election loss and has now stated in an interview that he won't finalize the plan.

"The status is that I do not intend to move forward with the notice of proposed rule-making [to reinterpret Section 230] at the FCC," Pai said in an interviewed published yesterday by Protocol. "The reason is, in part, because given the results of the election, there's simply not sufficient time to complete the administrative steps necessary in order to resolve the rule-making. Given that reality, I do not believe it's appropriate to move forward." Pai announced shortly after Trump's election loss that he will leave the FCC on January 20, President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration day.

Enlarge / FCC Republican members (L-R) Brendan Carr, Michael O'Rielly, and Chairman Ajit Pai participate in a discussion during the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 23, 2018 in Maryland. (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla )

The Republican-majority Federal Communications Commission took another vote against net neutrality rules today in its last meeting before a presidential election that could swing the FCC back to the Democratic party.

Today's vote came a year after a federal appeals court upheld FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's repeal of net neutrality rules and deregulation of the broadband industry. Though Pai was mostly victorious in the case, the judges remanded portions of the repeal back to the FCC because the commission "failed to examine the implications of its decisions for public safety," failed to "sufficiently explain what reclassification [of ISPs] will mean for regulation of pole attachments," and did not address concerns about the effect deregulation would have on the FCC's Lifeline program, which subsidizes phone and Internet access for low-income Americans.

The FCC approved its response to the court's remand instructions in a 3-2 vote today, but didn't make any significant changes. "After thoroughly reviewing the record compiled in response to its request for additional comment on these issues, the FCC found no basis to alter the FCC's conclusions in the Restoring Internet Freedom Order," the commission said in its announcement . "The Order on Remand finds that the Restoring Internet Freedom Order promotes public safety, facilitates broadband infrastructure deployment by Internet service providers, and allows the FCC to continue to provide Lifeline support for broadband Internet access service." A draft version of the decision is available here .

Enlarge / T-Mobile advertisement in New York City's Times Square on October 15, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images)

The Federal Communications Commission has finished investigating T-Mobile for a network outage that Chairman Ajit Pai called "unacceptable." But instead of punishing the mobile carrier, the FCC is merely issuing a public notice to "remind" phone companies of "industry-accepted best practices" that could have prevented the T-Mobile outage.

After the 12-hour nationwide outage on June 15 disrupted texting and calling services, including 911 emergency calls, Pai wrote that "The T-Mobile network outage is unacceptable" and that "the FCC is launching an investigation. We're demanding answers—and so are American consumers."

Pai has a history of talking tough with carriers and not following up with punishments that might have a greater deterrence effect than sternly worded warnings. That appears to be what happened again yesterday when the FCC announced the findings from its investigation into T-Mobile. Pai said that "T-Mobile's outage was a failure" because the carrier didn't follow best practices that could have prevented or minimized it, but he announced no punishment. The matter appears to be closed based on yesterday's announcement, but we contacted Chairman Pai's office today to ask if any punishment of T-Mobile is forthcoming. We'll update this article if we get a response.

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai speaking at a press conference on October 1, 2018, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Mark Wilson )

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is backing President Donald Trump's proposal to limit legal protections for social media websites that block or modify content posted by users. Pai's views on the matter were unknown until today when he issued a statement saying that he will open a rule-making process to clarify that the First Amendment does not give social media companies "special immunity."

"Social media companies have a First Amendment right to free speech," Pai said. "But they do not have a First Amendment right to a special immunity denied to other media outlets, such as newspapers and broadcasters."

Trump's attempt to punish social media websites like Twitter and Facebook for alleged anti-conservative bias landed at the FCC because Trump had the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) petition the FCC to issue a new interpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This US law says that providers and users of interactive computer services shall not be held liable for "any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected." The law also says that no provider or user of an interactive computer service "shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, June 24, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai touted inaccurate broadband-availability data in order to claim that his deregulatory agenda sped up deployment despite clear warning signs that the FCC was relying on false information.

Pai claimed in February 2019 that the number of Americans lacking access to fixed broadband at the FCC benchmark speed of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream dropped from 26.1 million people at the end of 2016 to 19.4 million at the end of 2017, and he attributed the improvement to the FCC "removing barriers to infrastructure investment." The numbers were included in a draft version of the FCC's congressionally mandated annual broadband assessment, and Pai asked fellow commissioners to approve the report that concluded the broadband industry was doing enough to expand access.

But consumer-advocacy group Free Press subsequently pointed out that the numbers were skewed by an ISP called BarrierFree suddenly "claim[ing] deployment of fiber-to-the-home and fixed wireless services (each at downstream/upstream speeds of 940mbps/880mbps) to census blocks containing nearly 62 million persons." This is an implausible assertion and would have meant BarrierFree went from serving zero people to nearly 20 percent of the US population in just six months. BarrierFree admitted the error when contacted by Ars at the time, saying that "a portion of the submission was parsed incorrectly in the upload process."