Ajit Pai calls California’s net neutrality rules “illegal”

Me too. I moved last year away from flawless 100/100 with a local Seattle ISP, to flawless gigabit for $45 with a local Seattle ISP, and now I'm 5 or so miles south of Seattle and I had to settle with Comcast since Centurylink DSL was my only other choice. Seattle DOES have good ISP's, but only really new buildings & downtown get that luxury.

Comcast does give me good speeds and reliability so far however, for a reasonable price. I still dislike them, and the sign-up process as well as the spam calls I received for weeks were terrible. They tried to get me to sign up for 10 TV channels I already had on my antenna in higher quality so they could gouge me on their TV rental equipment fees.

If you replace "communications" with "construction", you're advocating that the people regulating building codes should have absolutely no prior experience actually building things, and I imagine that is not a stance you would take. Why then is communication so different from construction?

The point of regulatory agencies is to take the aspirational goals of laws passed by the legislature and turn them into concrete, executable frameworks. This means you need people who are far more experienced on how companies are going to react to changes in regulation than the people who write the laws. Without personal experience, people are going to have rely a lot more on the corporate lobbying to make sense of what's going on, and they're going to have less basis to understand intentional misdirection in corporate responses.

I had a conversation with a lead researcher at a pharmaceutical company (also a friend) where she discussed her plans to work at the FDA for a few years and then return to private industry. She was very explicit about her reasoning: companies pay a premium for researchers with FDA experience because such people are more adept at navigating funding and approval processes.

When I asked whether she considered that she would be participating in a corrupting (if not corrupt) process, she simply waved the notion away--this is how it works and what you need to do to advance your career. This person leans very liberal from a social and political perspective.

This is where we're at as a society. The machinery of the administrative state is consuming everything in its path. I'm not anti-government or anti-regulation. But the centralization of power is extremely problematic; not just conceptually, but literally.

Once upon a time the Federal government had an explicit (if informal) policy of placing administrative offices across the country. This was, I believe, largely a matter of sharing the employment opportunities across the states. But it also had the effect of disincentivizing government work for highly ambitious people. (Moving to D.C. is far easier to justify than moving to Oklahoma City.) These administrative offices are increasingly centralized geographically around D.C. This has attracted industry. The phenomenon is one example of many that has promoted corrupting processes such as the revolving door between regulators and industry.

On the bright side, it means there are very concrete countermeasures that we could begin instituting. For example, instate an explicit, formal policy of locating administrative agencies--especially executive offices--far outside the Beltway. Yes, this will be costly in terms of administrative efficiency. But safeguarding democratic institutions is costly; if we're not prepared to pay the price then we deserve what we get.