President Donald Trump’s decision to make Ajit Pai the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has provoked fears that the end of net neutrality is nigh.

There has been some speculation that Trump is no fan of an open Internet and could be the catalyst in overturning what has so far been trenchant support within the FCC for net neutrality, the policy that Internet content should be equally accessible to all users.

Now that policy looks all but dead following the hiring of the commission’s senior Republican member, an outspoken critic of the commission’s 2015 reforms supporting net neutrality. Following those reforms, the FCC and its then-chairman Tom Wheeler seemed galvanized regarding what Wheeler said was protecting consumer rights with more regulation.

In 2016 Wheeler told the press, “Our networks are open and will remain open for innovators to use without permission, and for consumers to access any place they want to go on the web, without permission, without blocking, without throttling, and without paid prioritization.”

Pai has stated that he will “revisit” many of the issues surrounding net neutrality, stating that current regulations hold back “investment, innovation, and job creation.” Pai, who served as FCC commissioner since 2012, has always maintained that the Internet should be minimally regulated. In 2016, he accused the government of “micromanaging the Internet economy,” following the FCC’s  2014 disapproval of the Comcast-Time Warner cable merger, which Pai favored.

Besides being accused of being a supplicant to only “corporate interests,” Pai has sparked fears about changes to user privacy rules. Pai opposed regulations forcing broadband providers to ask people for permission before using their data.

In a survey to be officially released on Wednesday, conducted by information technology industry experts Spiceworks, 82 percent of IT professionals working in the U.S. were in favor of current net neutrality regulations. The main concern by the vast majority of respondents to the survey was that less regulation would mean Internet service providers throttling speeds, blocking certain kinds of content and so becoming a threat to free speech. The issue of ISPs collecting data without user permission was also a concern for over 80 percent of the respondents.

Photo credit: ReindeR Rustema via Flickr