Once he left the big stage at the Mobile World Congress Americas in San Francisco last week, Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai walked a couple of blocks to an event put on by the Lincoln Network, a Silicon Valley political club with a libertarian outlook. It was a much smaller stage, but he seemed completely at home in a room full of smart people – some even smarter than him – who would rather let the market sort things out than to try to fine tune the Digital Age using the blunt, mindless tools of government.
The moderator, tech journalist Ina Fried, asked Pai what does ideal regulation look like?
Ideal regulation is regulation that solves a market failure, regulation that creates a competitive market place that otherwise would not exist but for those rules. That’s part of the reason why I consistently say…what is the problem we’re trying to solve? And do the costs of this regulation outweigh the benefits?…What are the impacts of the rule? Is the rule solving the market failure, and if not we could have unintended consequences that could actually disincentivise investment or distort the market place in ways that wouldn’t serve consumers. How do you measure the cost and benefits? So those are some of the things I think about. And so that’s why I don’t really like the term deregulation or hyper regulation. Simply, in my view at least, the goal is to make sure our goals are tailored to the market place that exists in 2017.
Pai has a coherent philosophy of political economy and a sense of right and wrong: without it, he wouldn’t have broken with FCC tradition and political expediency and begun publishing draft decisions weeks before commissioners vote, instead of weeks afterwards, as his predecessors did. If he can hold onto his values and seek facts beyond those shovelled by the lobbyists and lawyers that slither through the halls of the FCC, there’s hope of rational decisions ahead.
If.