Sen Wyden accuses Chairman Pai of being 'willfully ignorant' on net neutrality

Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR) accused Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai of mischaracterizing his position from nearly two decades ago to justify the agency’s repeal of network neutrality rules.

In a comment filed to the net neutrality docket at the FCC, Sen Wyden said that Chairman Pai was being “willfully ignorant” when he cited a letter that the Oregon Democrat wrote in 1998 arguing against the reclassification of internet service providers (ISP) as telecommunications companies, which, in 2015, became the legal framework for the net neutrality rules. “The internet and internet access service today both are wildly different than they were in 1998,” Sen Wyden wrote in the filing. “Back then, large numbers of consumers were starting to take advantage of the whole internet, rather than just a walled-garden service." "The key difference, however, was that in 1998 consumers largely accessed the internet through third-party ISPs like AOL, or Prodigy, and those consumers used the infrastructure of the common carrier telephone system to connect to that third-party ISP,” he continued.