On October 15, FCC President Ajit Pai promised that the FCC would “move forward with regulation” to clarify the “meaning” of Section 230, the important Internet law that protects free speech online.
Apparently, Pai never really thought about it – and less than three months later, he also doesn’t plan any more, explaining that he’s running out of time. “[T]there is simply not enough time to complete the administrative steps necessary to resolve the rules creation. In view of this reality, I do not think it is appropriate to move forward ”, he says. Protocol.
The reason he is short of time is quite simple: he is stepping down on January 20, when Joe Biden becomes president of the United States.
But he may also be giving up because the idea that the FCC had the power to do such a thing was laughable. Like Recode explains in depth, the FCC’s justification was effectively that it has the power to make whatever rules it needs to make – which goes against the logic the Pai FCC itself used to kill net neutrality. But that did not stop Pai from claiming that the FCC had the authority to do so, a political tactic that has become so common in the Trump administration that my colleague Russel Brandom invented a phrase for that: “Collusion legalism.”
It doesn’t matter that Section 230 isn’t so hard to understand – although that, admittedly, didn’t keep 60 minutes to fall on your face earlier this week. Here is our explainer.