Vocal net neutrality critic is Trump's pick for FCC chairman

Dive Brief:

President Donald Trump indicated he will fill the vacancy at the top of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with net neutrality opponent Ajit Pai, as reported by Recode. Pai has suggested he will "take a weed whacker" to many current FCC regulations and has previously stated that net neutrality's "days are numbered," per Recode.
The previous FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, was a strong advocate for net neutrality, but the shift in stance and ruling to someone like Pai was expected when Trump took office since the president is on-record as opposing existing net neutrality rules.
Pai is already on the commission’s board, so his transition to being chairman could happen relatively quickly.

Dive Insight:

For marketers, the death of net neutrality could lead to a degradation of the online user experience through the re-introduction of practices like bandwidth throttling, and poor user experience has been the primary driver of negative trends like ad block adoption over the past several years.

Net neutrality rules prevent internet service providers (ISPs) from charging websites to reach end users more quickly and instead have to treat all internet traffic equally. In a marketplace without net neutrality, mega ISPs including Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon could charge websites delivering a large of amount of web traffic like Netflix and Facebook a fee to reach users at higher speeds. Ultimately, those higher fees could be passed on to consumers while sites that don't pay the fee will see their user experience suffer.

In the run up to net neutrality’s adoption in 2015, those ISPs were vocal opponents while content providers including Netflix, Facebook, Google and Kickstarter were obviously supporters of a free, open and unthrottled internet.

The public was also firmly behind net neutrality during the debate over the policy, with an online discussion forum from the FCC receiving 4 million comments in favor of the rules, a number the FCC said was the highest level of public participation in its history.