‘The Chairmanship of Ajit Pai Has Been a Disaster’
Janine Jackson
Janine Jackson interviewed Free Press’s Gaurav Laroia about Ajit Pai’s FCC for the December 4, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
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Janine Jackson: After a particularly unhinged press conference, at which Trump raved from behind a weirdly tiny desk, Twitter users set the hashtag #DiaperDon trending. To which Trump responded as everyone would have predicted: by lying big that Twitter trends are “false,” made up to make him look bad, and then by lashing out with what tools someone told him he has at hand—in this case, by attacking Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says that websites can't be held liable for what users post. Trump had targeted it over the summer when Twitter factchecked his lies about voting by mail.
How seriously should we take this lame-duck flailing? And how does it fit the context of the Trump era in media and telecommunications policy? Joining us now to assess things is Gaurav Laroia, senior policy counsel at the group Free Press. He joins us by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Gaurav Laroia.
Gaurav Laroia: Thank you for having me on.
JJ: Let's start with Section 230, which I'm sure many folks have never heard of before. At first blush, it might not sound unreasonable to question it. It sounds like websites aren't being held accountable for content. What's going on here? What does 230 do that bugs Donald Trump so much?
GL: 230, as you said, a relatively obscure provision of communications law until the last couple of years or so, and especially the last couple of months. Really, it provides legal protection for websites that post third-party speech.
So the idea behind 230 is to assign responsibility to the users for the speech that they put online, and not to the people that carry that speech. There are some laws that deal with speech, let's say defamation, things like that. So the way 230 works, it says that if I defame someone on a website, on Twitter, the person defamed is allowed to go after me for that speech, but not the carrier of the speech, which is Twitter itself. It's credited with allowing the explosion of social media and websites writ large, since they're allowed to carry now, in the example of Facebook, billions of people’s speech without having to literally vet every single comment on there, let's say, in the way a printed newspaper does, or a radio program.
JJ: And yet, you'd think if it was really about letting anything fly, well, then it would be the groups who we know are most often victimized online—it would be people of color, it would be women, it would be immigrants—you'd think would be on Trump's side, and the fact that those folks are saying, “No, Section 230 actually allows us to engage,” it sort of gives the story of what's going on here.
GL: So the flip side of 230—well, I guess the second part of it—is it also kind of solidifies the ability of websites to take down speech that they find distasteful. So this is really a right given to the operator of a website by the First Amendment, but it's given additional protections in Section 230, and this is where President Trump has really decided that he can't stand by these protections anymore. As you said, his fight with Section 230, and Twitter in particular, started because Twitter put up a warning label on a tweet that he had about mail-in voting.
JJ: Right.
GL: And, more recently, put up (in his mind) a hashtag to trend on Twitter that made him look bad. And so what he wants to do is take away the ability of websites to, in his mind, “censor speech,” but really editorialize on their own websites, or even ban users, go after misinformation, add any kind of context to the speech of the users on the platform.
His time is running out, and I think the ability to pull this off is pretty limited, but that he is trying it, and has people clamoring for this kind of thing, is not great for communications policy and free speech in general.
 Ajit Pai
JJ: Let's look at that broader picture. People in the US now having to work from home, do school online, and Comcast has announced it's going to introduce home internet data caps. It just throws into relief how we don't have a telecommunications infrastructure that is people-focused. Now, we do have an agency that's tasked with representing the public interest there, the FCC, but under now-exiting, GOP-appointed FCC chair Ajit Pai, some would say that the agency ran full out against that mandate. What do you see as the Pai legacy, if you will, and how much of it can be quickly undone?
GL: The chairmanship of Ajit Pai has been a disaster as far as telecom and the regulatory ambit of the agency is concerned. He has completely abdicated the responsibility to protect our communications infrastructure, make sure people have access to the internet and all these powerful communications technologies.
One of the first things he did out of the gate is end net neutrality. He's claimed his radical deregulatory agenda has closed the digital divide; that’s not true at all: 80 million people lack broadband at home, and as you mentioned, this is in stark relief, how important internet access is now; he has made it incredibly difficult for people to get online. By getting rid of net neutrality, he’s tossed out the ability of the FCC to promote universally affordable broadband; those prices are rising again, increasing the digital divide in this context.
 Gaurav Laroia: "He's failed in his job to make sure that the people come first, and not these companies."
His deregulatory agenda extends to older forms of communication technology, too. We've seen massive consolidation in radio/TV, leading to collapse in the diversity of voices, and really just huge profits for legacy cable, TV, radio stations that really aren't serving the public interest. He's failed in his job to make sure that the people come first, and not these companies.
JJ: Do we think that there are things that when a Biden administration comes in and appoints a new chair, anyway, of the FCC, can some of this be turned back?
GL: We certainly hope so. And I think we've seen rumblings from the incoming administration on that. I hope that first and foremost, what they do is restore that Title II authority for broadband. That's the power the FCC can use to do things like net neutrality, but it's really the clincher that leads to all the other good things too, including modernizing the Lifeline program to support internet adoption, making sure prices remain low and competitive, allow the agency to investigate unjust and anticompetitive pricing and practices by internet service providers....
There are other things we want to see: Let's say a no shut-off moratorium for broadband during the pandemic. One of the other first things Congress did was kill broadband privacy rules; we want to see those things back, so people aren't snooped on by their ISPs as they're online, and that information is used against them in all sorts of ways. I think these are things we can hope to see, and organizations like Free Press will be out there making sure that the incoming administration lives up to its promises.
JJ: We've been speaking with Gaurav Laroia, senior policy counsel at Free Press. You can find their work online at FreePress.net. Gaurav Laroia, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
GL: My pleasure. Thanks for having me here.
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