"Ajit Pai is going to lose", wrote Evan Greer over at Fight for the Future just before the FCC voted to gut net neutrality...

"The organizations behind BattleForTheNet.com and Team Internet (Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, and Free Press Action Fund) are announcing a massive Internet-wide campaign to demand that our elected officials in Congress use a Resolution of Disapproval under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to overturn the FCC's illegitimate rulemaking.

Now, the Congressional Review Act was put into place by Congress - by Republicans in Congress specifically - to make it possible for Congress to overturn excessive regulations as it were from executive branch agencies.

The EPA is given a broad mandate, for example, "you can deal with pollution". So the EPA decides, "well we're gonna decide that carbon dioxide is part of pollution." This hadn't been part of the law, but the EPA gets to make the rules because that's what the law says - the EPA makes the rules. So the EPA makes that rule.

At that point Congress could, under the congressional oversight law - the Congressional Review Act, the CRA- Congress could come in and say, "now, we didn't really mean carbon dioxide, we were just talking about soot" and they can actually change the rules that have been put into place by regulatory agencies.

So one of those regulatory agencies is the FCC and the FCC is fixing, in fact just voted, to gut net neutrality protections. Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer, is the head of the FCC. There's three men who are Republicans on the FCC and two women who are Democrats. The two women who are Democrats are saying we need a free and open Internet, the three men who are Republicans are saying we need to turn the internet over to a half a dozen giant corporations so that they can make huge profits that they will recycle back to the Republican Party.

-Thom


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