US administration’s new FCC chairman Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer, seems to be hastily pursuing the anti-consumer policies benefiting corporations, including dismantling net neutrality regulations.

Net neutrality rules forbid internet service providers (ISPs) to discriminate between traffic and to charge for transfer of some data more than for other. As a a result, internet business can operate on the same level play field and users can enjoy the delivery of data by the various websites and internet applications at the same speeds.

Since Ajit Pai took the office a number of actions aimed at weakening FCC’s consumer-protection position have topped his agenda, from exemptions for smaller ISPs from mandatory reporting disclosures of “network management practices, performance and commercial terms,” to terminating an investigation into AT&T and Verizon practices violating net-neutrality principles by exempting their own video services from their wireless data caps.

The reversal of the US net neutrality laws will mean that the companies that own both ISP and media content businesses, like Comcast which owns NBC, or AT&T, which owns DirecTV, will receive a substantial edge over competition, e.g. Netflix. The likely outcome of this policy is a stifling of competition.