FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and his family endure a season of hatred.

The self-styled “Resistance” to the Trump Administration is by its nature offensive to many participants in our democracy because it portrays our duly-elected President as some sort of tyrant. Lately it appears not just offensive but dangerous. This week the head of the Federal Communications Commission appeared on Fox News to discuss his effort to repeal misguided 2015 rules that imposed 1930s telephone regulations on the Internet.

Speaking of crossing lines, unhinged critics on Twitter have attacked Mr. Pai’s Indian heritage and wished death by AIDS and cancer upon him and his family. Mr. Pai’s Chief of Staff, Matthew Berry, has posted some of the appalling messages.

According to Variety, Mr. Pai’s wife “has received threatening messages at her workplace, according to an FCC source.” April Glaser has more in Slate: It wasn’t the first time that activists apparently showed up near his home. Menacing, handwritten signs also appeared in Pai’s local neighborhood, including one that named his children ...

The resisters are casting as a fundamental free speech right what was essentially a gift to tech lobbyists. Companies like Netflix, which by some measures generates more than a third of all North American Internet traffic, and Google, which also generates significant traffic via its YouTube video service, didn’t want to pay market rates to companies like Verizon for moving that traffic. Essentially, Silicon Valley wanted to cut its phone bill and it persuaded President Obama to instruct his supposedly independent telecom regulators to make it happen. In early 2015 the Journal reported how it went down: In November, the White House’s top economic adviser dropped by the Federal Communications Commission with a heads-up for the agency’s chairman, Tom Wheeler. President Barack Obama was ready to unveil his vision for regulating high-speed Internet traffic. The specifics came four days later in an announcement that blindsided officials at the FCC. Mr. Obama said the Internet should be overseen as a public utility... The president’s words swept aside more than a decade of light-touch regulation of the Internet and months of work by Mr. Wheeler toward a compromise. The Journal went on to describe “an unusual, secretive effort inside the White House,” led by two aides acting “like a parallel version of the FCC itself” and pushing the agenda of the tech industry.

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