"He certainly doesn't fit into the typical politician/regulator mold. It's baffling."
He's a shining example of Trump's promise to evict the political class in exchange for the corporate class. Seems to make sense that he'd be so obvious about being a shill, that's what we (as a country, not me or probably you in particular) asked for when we elected Trump.
While I agree in general that this is a trend and we will see more of it, keep in mind that Pai was an Obama appointee (at the request of McConnell) in 2012 and Trump simply promoted him to Chairman.
I also find him at the very least interesting. The first interview he gave after the announcement that they were going to pursue this was with a relatively small and irreverent podcast that indexes high for libertarians.[1] He's definitely hard to categorize as a stock corporate shill. Supporting point 2, Ben Thompson does a pretty good job of summarizing the case for Pai's views from a more detached position [2][3].
Oh he totally believes it because this video shows all the truly trivial things about the Internet that makes it merely "cable TV on crack cocaine." Not the actual Internet that has been the most important force in culture and technology in a century.
To big incumbents like Verizon, your job is to eat what's shoved at you and crap cash. That's it. You're just an abstraction for these elites to buy their 5th home in Maui.
