Relations Improving at FCC on His Watch, Pai Says; Focus Continues on Storms

The FCC has become a friendlier place since he took over in January, Chairman Ajit said at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. Pai cited his trip to Florida last month with Commissioner Mignon Clyburn to inspect damage from Irma as an example of Republicans and Democrats working together (see 1709180034).

“I’ve empowered commissioners to vote on important decisions, instead of having subordinate bureaus decide them,” Pai said Tuesday evening. “I’ve visited a hurricane-ravaged region with a Democratic colleague. And under my leadership, about 80 percent of the major items voted on at our monthly meetings have been approved with bipartisan support and without dissent, compared to less than 50 percent under my predecessor.” Clyburn and former Chairman Tom Wheeler didn’t comment.

Pai discussed his digital empowerment agenda and his pursuit of light-touch regulation in remarks that the FCC livestreamed and later posted. He didn’t announce any new initiatives or advance current ones. Pai, noting a portrait of Reagan hangs in his office, said he learned lessons from Reagan on the benefits of cost-benefit analysis of FCC actions. Reagan once joked: “Economists are the sort of people who see something work in practice and wonder if it would work in theory,” Pai said. “But he understood their value.”

Reagan wisely eliminated the fairness doctrine, Pai said. A Reagan executive order made GPS available for civilian use and Reagan’s two FCC chairmen, Mark Fowler and Dennis Patrick, implemented a deregulatory agenda, Pai said.

The first audience question was on FCC efforts to fight robocalls. It has clamped down on spoofed calls and taken “very aggressive” enforcement actions against scammers, Pai said. The U.S. is also working with other countries, including India, to close call centers where scammers operate, he said.

Pai said most of his time over the past month has been focused on helping restore communications after Harvey, Irma and Maria. Each storm presented different problems, he said. A lesson learned from Harvey, where flooding created the most problems, is that fiber is more resilient than copper, he said: “The water pressure doesn’t matter as much” with fiber lines since “it’s essentially just a piece of glass that you’re putting a signal through.” The copper lines degraded or in some cases disintegrated, he said.

“Puerto Rico is just the worst of the cases,” Pai said. He also said the FCC Disaster Information Reporting System (see Wednesday's report) is helping the FCC determine where problems are most severe so information can be transmitted to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other government agencies.

When he started to use Twitter five years ago, Pai said, some of his colleagues then told him he was “crazy” and the first rule of the internet is “do not feed the trolls.” Pai finds social media useful in getting his message out and he learned through Twitter of problems that the FCC later addressed. He cited his campaign to get hotel chains to allow calls to 911 without first dialing nine (see 1401210049), which he said he first learned on Twitter was a problem.