Trump AG Pick William Barr Is Longtime Foe of Net Neutrality

Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as the next United States attorney general, 68-year-old William Barr, who previously served as attorney general from 1991 to 1993, has a history of staunch opposition to porn, as AVN.com reported on Monday. But Barr’s stance on another issue that affects the porn industry as well as any type of internet commerce or other use—net neutrality—also presents a bleak prospect for the future. After the Federal Communications Commission, chaired by Trump appointee Ajit Pai, scrapped net neutrality rules last June, activists and many Democrats in Congress have fought to restore the rules, which guarantee an open internet on which all data is treated equally by the big telecom companies that provide online access to a huge segment of internet users in the U.S., where 290 million people, or three of every four Americans, regularly accessed the internet as of 2016. But those internet freedom advocates will have a powerful opponent in Barr, who is on the record opposing net neutrality measures for more than a decade, according to the tech magazine Fast Company.  Barr served as general counsel—that is, the top lawyer—for the telecom and internet access giant Verizon from 2000 to 2008, according to his online professional bio. That means he would have also been Pai’s direct boss, as the current FCC chair who orchestrated the commission’s repeal of net neutrality regulations was employed as associate general counsel at Verizon from 2001 to 2003. Like Pai, Barr has said he believes that net neutrality rules somehow discourage investment in the broadband industry, telling an audience at Fordham University Law School in 2007, “We didn’t build these networks, we cannot put this money at risk, Wall Street would not allow us to spend this money, for regulated returns and regulatory control. This is a competitive market. This is not what regulators are used to working with: regulated markets where competition is limited. We need to allow the marketplace to work.” But studies by the Internet Association, a trade group that counts such online mega-sites as Facebook and Amazon.com among its members, found that after the Obama administration imposed net neutrality rules in 2015, overall investment did not decline and actually rose somewhat. Barr also claimed that competition flourished before the net neutrality roles were put in place, saying that 81 percent of U.S. ZIP code areas enjoyed a choice of three or more online access providers. But a study by PC Magazine found that the number was actually 30 percent, in a sample of 20,000 ZIP codes.  Barr is also a member of the board of directors of WarnerMedia, a company now owned by AT&T, another behemoth online provider, which in turn owns the pay cable network HBO, the cable news network CNN, Turner Broadcasting, and the Warner Bros Entertainment Group, which includes the Warner film and TV studios. Photo by C-SPAN YouTube Screen Capture