STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN AJIT PAI Re: Small Business Exemption From Open Internet Transparency Requirements, GN Docket No. 14- 28. Two months ago, the small business exemption from the expanded reporting requirements in the Title II Order expired. That lapse left thousands of our nation’s smallest and most competitive Internet service providers—mom-and-pop wireless Internet service providers (WISPs), small cable operators, municipal broadband providers, electric cooperatives, rural telephone companies, and others—worried that they would be subject to unnecessary, onerous, and ill-defined reporting obligations. 1 Today, we are taking action to exempt small businesses from these burdensome requirements— requirements that impose serious and unnecessary costs on small providers. I’m particularly pleased that we do so consistent with the bipartisan compromise reflected in the Small Business Broadband Deployment Act of 2017, which unanimously passed the House earlier this year. 2 Our decision will help the country’s smaller providers—namely, those with 250,000 or fewer broadband subscribers—better serve their communities. For I firmly believe that these ISPs should spend their limited capital building out better broadband to rural America—not hiring lawyers and accountants to fill out unnecessary paperwork demanded by Washington, DC. With this action, the small businesses that are critical to injecting competition into the broadband marketplace will be better able to do just that. I’d like to thank John B. Adams, Micah Caldwell, Alison Kutler, Karen Schroeder, Kurt Schroeder, and Mark Stone from the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, and Rick Mallen and Bill Richardson from the Office of General Counsel for their hard work on this order and their continued dedication to the public interest. 1 Statement of Chairman Ajit Pai on Voting to Protect Small Businesses from Needless Regulation, http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017/db0127/DOC-343229A1.pdf (Jan. 27, 2017). 2 See Small Business Broadband Deployment Act, H.R. 4596, 114th Cong. § 2(d)(2) (2016); Small Business Broadband Deployment Act, S. 2283, 115th Cong. § 2(a)(4) (2017); Small Business Broadband Deployment Act, H.R. 288, 115th Cong. § 2(d)(2) (2017).