If You Care About Net Neutrality, Why Not Shoot Ajit Pai an Email?

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has been explicitly clear on where he stands on net neutrality. In short: he thinks it sucks, and he’s going to do whatever he can to make it go away. Fortunately, Pai is a public official, and the great thing about public officials is, you can email them any time!

Last week, the FCC released its notice of proposed rulemaking to roll back Title II regulations on Internet Service Providers, the 2015 decision that made the concept of net neutrality — or making sure all data on the internet is treated equally — a federal policy. Public comment for the proposal is open, and so far, it’s been lit. The FCC received more than 2.9 million public comments, many of them basically telling Pai that his plan to hand over the internet to private corporations with ironclad monopolies in many areas was a pretty crap idea.

The FCC also got plenty of comments supporting Pai’s proposal and bashing net neutrality — only, unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of them were fake. It turns out someone probably affiliated with the big cable lobby (ISP’s like Comcast, Verizon, etc) used unknowing citizens’ names, and a network of spam bots to post as many as 450,000 fraudulent comments. (We don’t like, know it was someone from big cable, but considering Comcast was sent a cease and desist letter to the website keeping track of the fraudulent comments, it’s either that or there’s a really passionate lone-wolf cable-lobby fanboy out there.) A group of 14 people who fell victim to the bots penned a strong letter to Pai last week, asking him to, y’know, do something about the widespread fraud in his agency’s daily functions, but so far, he hasn’t responded to it publicly.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s email is ajit.pai@fcc.gov

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s phone number is 202-418-2000

Inverse sent him an email to ask what was up with that, and happily, you can too! Ajit Pai’s email is ajit.pai@fcc.gov. You can find it pretty easily by looking through the FCC’s finding people directory, which also lists his office phone number, 202-418-2000. Pai hasn’t gotten back to us yet, but we’ll update this story if he does.

Meantime, there’s plenty of stuff you can chat with him about — you can ask how his old coworkers at Verizon are doing (he hasn’t worked there since 2003, but still), or maybe, what suit he’s going to wear in court when internet activists immediately sue the government after his rules go into effect.

It’s never a bad idea to casually shoot a high-ranking public official an email, but it’s also worth noting that the official public comment section is still really important, as all of those messages are entered into the public record and can be used in court. But if you’ve really got opinions to express, you can send them right to the man himself, too.