Fortunately, the FCC isn't empowered to make such decisions on their own. The tech companies need to be speaking to Congress if they want the laws changed, and legislators will work on legislation to change the US government policy.

I assume the tech giants, knowing how our government is set up, understand this and are just using their letter as a publicity stunt.

In any case, we absolutely should not promote the idea that regulatory agencies have such a free hand to implement whatever policies they can be convinced to implement.

The FCC was always involved. It chose to take a more active role in 2015 despite the Telecommunication Act not asking it to, and despite its means of involvement kicking the FTC off the case.

That's one of the huge problems with how the FCC acted under Wheeler: they removed the FTC and its consumer protections. Pai has now been pushing to get the FTC back on the case, and their proposal of regulation lays out clearly that restoration of FTC protections is one of the key elements of his plan.

"The problem for Mr. Pai is that government agencies are not free to abruptly reverse longstanding rules on which many have relied without a good reason"

Well no, he gets this exactly backwards. Network Neutrality was EXACTLY such a reversal, and here's Pai simply undoing what the FCC wasn't free to do in the first place. Pai is correcting the very transgression Wu is citing here.

It was previously a longstanding rule--supported by law--that the FCC would have a hands off approach to the internet. Wheeler reversed that policy drastically. Pai is saying the FCC can't make such reversals.

Anyway, in the end Wu is complaining that he's not getting his own way. It's akin to throwing a tantrum when he's just not managed to convince lawmakers that his perspective is the right one.

Pai also sat down with Reason a few months ago to discuss his goals as FCC chairman and his argument for reversing the Open Internet Order. You can see that interview here.

But Slashdot is doing a disservice conflating two issues here. Submitters' abuse of the online comment process has nothing to do with the propriety of reversing the last chairman's effort to regulate the internet.

It needs to be emphasized loudly: regulatory bodies are not democratic. Congress is the place where representatives hash out the direction of the US government, and commissions like the FCC are to follow the direction decided upon legislatively. They are not to act as a shadow legislature overriding and undermining the decisions made by Congress.

If you don't like that Congress decided we should have a light-touch approach to the internet, then great! Write your congressman and work to change the law. Meanwhile, the FCC will address the issues brought up in its comment period regardless of who submitted them as the law directs it to do.

Here's just one example of a release from 1999 about the FTC's activity in protecting consumers online, showing that it was a concern of the FTC before.

This is a longstanding issue, so I've seen analyses in the past that detail the FCC's weaker protections than those of the FTC. It may even be a legal matter, that the FTC had more authority to go after companies misbehaving online, and when the FCC revoked their jurisdiction, the FCC just didn't have the same broad legal tools to replace those of the FTC.

https://www.ftc.gov/sites/defa...

We need a quick review of the history here to see that the Slashdot article misses key parts of the story.

Previously, the Federal Trade Commission regulated tech companies to protect consumer privacy.

Then the last chairman pushed forward Title II classification which stripped the FTC of their jurisdiction, killing those privacy protections and replacing them with weaker protections under the FCC.

Pai is pushing to revert that change, working with the FTC to restore the stronger consumer protections. Technically yes, he proposes to end the weak FCC protections, but it's not giving an accurate picture to present that without mentioning that he's trying to restore stronger protections in the process.

If the country was evil, then why would it be seen as out of order to have an evil president be answering to the evil population?

But practically, a president acting unilaterally is doing so without the institution behind him. It doesn't work in our system of government, as our system is specifically designed not to recognize authority that doesn't reflect the wants of the people.

In this way a president with good ideas is forced to work with society, bringing them at least somewhat toward those good ideas in the process, which is a good thing!

The Obama administration was marked by a guy pushing society away from what might have been good ideas by his insistence on bucking consensus instead of contributing to it.

The job of president is to faithfully execute the laws of the country. That is, yes, it is his job to to be a follower, to follow the direction that our representative body comes to consensus around.

Yes, Obama did run afoul of many laws, as confirmed in court over and over again. This is just the latest example of an action that was so far outside the law that it blocked by courts even before going into effect. The EPA's draft spells out exactly how Obama's Clean Power Plan broke with the Clean Air Act.

Of course a president probably should work to sway consensus in the directions he sees best for the country, but when he loses the argument--no matter how right his side of the argument may have been--then it's his job to grit his teeth and work within the results of the deliberation. Or he can quit.

This mess is what happens when a president decides to go it alone. Our system doesn't allow for such unilateral authority.

To be clear, a president can't put in place something that wasn't authorized by Congress.

Every executive order has to gain its legitimacy through authority granted to the president by law, normally mandated by law. With some exceptions, the executive branch gets its orders from Congress, so the president can only do what he was told to do, and he must do those things.

For this reason courts look super skeptically on changes of regulation. If one administration is undoing what the past administration did, something's wrong seeing as the new administration would be just as mandated by the same laws as the last one. Presidents can't just undo the last administration's work willy-nilly.

However, in this case it turns out Obama put in place an awful lot of stuff that ran contrary to law. As the EPA document lays out, Obama's CPP violated the Clean Air Act's orders, and courts have tended to agree with that. Trump here is undoing what a president never had the ability to do in the first place.

I'd encourage everyone to actually read the EPA's document as it lays out the ways in which the Clean Power Plan doesn't follow the law on the books.

In short, the Clean Air Act, which Obama used to justify his regulation, authorizes specific ways of regulating pollutants. The regulation here wasn't in line with those authorized approaches, so it was without legal authorization.

Obama COULD HAVE put in place a policy that was actually legal. He didn't, for better or worse, and so his plan was found wanting by the courts before being corrected presently.

As for Trump, we should celebrate the moments where he recognizes the legal constraints of his office. With so many people worried about him being authoritarian, let's encourage these shows of legal restraint.

The draft from the EPA addresses all of that. I'd encourage you to read it.

In short, even IF CO2 is a pollutant (and the statue defines terminology in ways that make that questionable), the law specifies the ways in which pollutants are to be regulated.

Obama's regulation acted outside of the ways the law provides for regulation of pollution.

The Clean Power Plan, when compared against the law on the books, was clearly illegal from the beginning.

Bingo.

If a president doesn't have the backing of the rest of the country, well maybe that's good or bad on any particular issue, but it's reality. He can't legally just dictate policy on his own.

What happens if the president can't convince the country to back him on something good? Then he has to try harder to convince them.

(And maybe, just maybe, he might want to reconsider his own position in the process if he finds himself so out of touch with the general perception)

There were no requirements build into the Paris Agreement, which is partly why it was such a bad deal.

Had there been requirements, Obama would have had to get the rest of the country involved to agree to the requirements. He didn't want to bother speaking for the entire United States, or even the entire US government, so they left out any requirement.

The Paris Agreement was largely a request that countries around the world make up goals for themselves and then write the goals down.

So yeah, the whole thing was a joke, more of a vision board exercise than anything substantial.

Not much.

Mainly they get to keep some of the money they earn by providing goods and services to consumers, just like everyone else, which is hardly a subsidy.