PROOF: FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai mislead the public in his official FCC statement

UPDATE: After we posted the statement below on reddit, the FCC corrected Ajit Pai’s statement to remove the false claim that Fight for the Future is a “government funded” group. 

During FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai’s dissent against the new net neutrality rules, he presented false and misleading information about the support for net neutrality. He characterized one of the leading net neutrality advocacy groups as a government-funded group – even though we’ve never received a dollar from the government.

Full disclosure: I’m Jessica Bruno, and I keep the books for Fight for the Future. We’re a pro-net neutrality group responsible for driving 777,364 pro-net neutrality comments to the FCC through the Battle for the Net campaign.

In his official, written testimony opposing net neutrality, Commissioner Pai called Fight for the Future a “government-funded group,” citing our 990 tax form as proof. But that form doesn’t mean we take government money. If you look at page 9, right next to where it says, “Government grants (contributions),” there’s a blank space indicating that we received $0 from the government.

The reason we filed a 990 is to be transparent about where we get our funding from. Most of it comes from small grants or donations from our 1.2 million members who overwhelmingly support net neutrality and donated to us to help make sure we could fight to protect it.

The full text of Commissioner Pai’s testimony is here: http://www.fcc.gov/article/fcc-15-24a5

A screenshot of just the relevant text and citation is here: http://cl.ly/image/3u1A0m3y0H2a.

Our full 990 is available here: https://www.battleforthenet.com/images/990.pdf