Most, but not all. Some 30 million Americans are without high-speed home internet access, a problem Chairman Pai has made worse by recent efforts to dismantle the FCC's Lifeline program, which offers affordable broadband access options to low-income households.

Ajit Pai is Federal Communications Commission Chairman, appointed by President Donald Trump in early 2017. He previously served as a commissioner to the federal agency, and before that as general counsel to Verizon.

Yes, they did. In 2013 and 2014, certain internet applications and services stopped working properly for millions of Americans. For many, “Netflix would not load and play movies in the evening, access to company VPNs for telecommuting would not maintain a steady connection, telephone systems between corporate offices operating over the Internet could not maintain a steady voice call, video conferencing was out of the question, and high-bandwidth online gaming was nearly impossible, writes Sarah Morris of the Open Technology Institute. The cause? ISPs weren’t providing enough capacity for content from certain sites as it crossed the boundary between the Internet service provider and the network hosting popular content and services. Congestion at the interconnections resulted in slow download speeds, dropped IP phone and video calls, and application freezes.

The American people were very clear what they wanted when this issue came before the FCC in 2014-2015. More than 4 million people submitted comments to the agency (breaking all previous records for public participation in a proceeding) with the vast majority stating their support for strong Net Neutrality protections.

And it’s not just a left-right issue. According to several national polls, Republican voters approve of government action to ensure that Internet service providers treat all web content the same. A November 2014 University of Delaware survey, for example, found that 85% of Republicans (and 81% of Democrats) were opposed to allowing ISPs to charge web companies a fee to deliver their content to customers more quickly than other content.

Not surprisingly, it's the internet's innovators who have been most outspoken in their support of the Net Neutrality protections that Chairman Pai seeks to dismantle. On the same day Pai delivered this speech a group of more than 800 startups sent him a letter .pdf&wmode=opaque)objecting to these plans.

“The success of the American startup ecosystem depends on more than improved broadband speeds,” they wrote. “we also depend on an open internet — including enforceable net neutrality rules that ensure big cable companies can’t discriminate against people like us. We’re deeply concerned with your intention to undo the existing legal framework.

“Without net neutrality, the incumbents who provide access to the Internet would be able to pick winners or losers in the market. They could impede traffic from our services in order to favor their own services or established competitors. Or they could impose new tolls on us, inhibiting consumer choice. [...] Our companies should be able to compete with incumbents on the quality of our products and services, not our capacity to pay tolls to Internet access providers.”

More anecdotally but noteworthy nonetheless is the increase in innovation of services to consumers: In the two years since the FCC's 2015 vote, we’ve actually seen an explosion in over-the-top video competition. There have been more new online video services launched — including SlingTV, PlayStation Vue and DirecTV Now — since 2015 than there were in the seven years prior to the ruling. Reports suggest that this is because the 2015 ruling brought certainty to the OTT video market, which previously was under the threat of broadband slowdown by ISPs with competing services. Tim Wu wrote about this for the NY Times.

It seems that, contrary to Pai's statements, Net Neutrality protections have helped innovators improve the network.

By 2015 the internet was coming under an increased threat from powerful phone and cable companies seeking to favor online content and services that they or their business partners owned, while degrading access to content by competitors. Over the previous decade, there were several documented instances of this abuse.

In response to Pai’s claim the Open Technology Institute issued a release stating: “In 2013 and 2014, the nation’s biggest ISPs—Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable—allowed their networks to become critically congested. Millions of Americans were frustrated by degraded speeds and unusable video connections—and they didn’t know why it was happening. In reality, their ISP was playing a dangerous congestion game to extract new payments from transit networks and edge providers. American internet users were just the collateral damage. For these millions of people, the internet was very much ‘broken.’ The FCC’s rules addressed this problem.”

Pai’s complaint about the FCC’s 2015 process is a smoking gun with no smoke and no gun. The agency made its legal decisions based on thousands of pages of public-record evidence, and took into account four million comments from Internet users, all to return to a foundation built on decades of solid law. All of those records are available to anyone with an Internet connection and the gumption to search the freely available archives at FCC.gov. The ruling itself has already withstood legal challenges by the broadband industry, reinforcing the reality that the process was correct and the rules legally sound.

This is one of the greatest fallacies of Pai's argument; That Net Neutrality protections are "government regulation of the internet."

Pai offered a similar argument in his lengthy dissent to the agency’s historic Open Internet Order in February 2015. In subsequent statements, he often claims the ruling was part of an elaborate Obama conspiracy to “regulate the internet.”

In truth, the rules aren’t internet regulations but a set of safeguards to govern broadband providers like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon. And these companies no more constitute the internet than a company like Georgia Pacific signifies the forest. The FCC’s decision reclassified broadband providers under an existing law that preserves the rights we’ve always had to defend ourselves against communications carriers bent on interfering with our speech. That's not a regulation of the internet itself but a protection of internet users against the companies that sell access.

These internet success stories are part of the Internet Association, a group that met with Chairman Pai in April. In subsequent statements they have made it very clear that, "the current FCC Net Neutrality rules are working and these consumer protections should not be changed."

Despite Pai's dire warnings and predictions, investment by broadband providers is up. In the two years since the FCC rules were passed and Title II was reinstated, investment by publicly traded broadband providers has increased by more than 5 percent compared to the two-year period prior to the ruling.

The FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order, which today protects Net Neutrality online, stands on the solid legal foundation of this same legislation. In 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected an industry challenge and upheld the FCC’s Open Internet Order in all respects, stating that the agency exercised its proper authority when it reclassified broadband internet access as a telecom service under Title II of the Act.