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by JustSomeNobody 3423 days ago
Is there any way, as a citizen and consumer, to stop Pai? Or get him fired from FCC? Will writing Congress help?
4 comments

Nope. Not unless you can show that he did something a)unethical, b) immoral or c) illegal. Since he gets to define legality through what the FCC dictates, within reason, he can't really violate c on a policy level. If you got a and/or b, please let us know. You can even leak that information.

In general Congress has to pass a law declaring the ISPs utilities. Then net neutrality is a good thing. The problem is that none of the congress (obviously a generalization) really care about the topic. It appears to be too much for them to understand that AT&T made the claim that bandwidth over the wireless is limited. They went so far as to say that caps were needed. Now AT&T has changed it argument, "Our bandwidth is too limited for our users to use services from providers that we haven't made a peering deal with." Congress can't understand that peering or not, wireless spectrum is limited. Too complex.

If you write your representatives, you might need to use really basic language. Think Alan Shore explaining the pharmaceutical case to Denny.

edit: grammar.

Alternatively, congress can pass laws that would define net neutrality and enforcement... but good luck with that.
Pai's position on the issue is in line with the President and the majority of Congress; even if he were to be fired for some reason, he'd be replaced by someone similar on this issue, unless his firing was because you had a massive groundswell of public support for net neutrality that was enough to convince a sufficient number of members of Congress that support for neutrality was essential to their reelection prospects.
About the only way that could happen in the next two years is if Trump dissolves the FCC as a wasteful impediment to business.
Wouldn't he just be replaced with some "abolish the FCC" know-nothing?