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Students from Howard Payne University's Guy D. Newman Honors Academy recently attended a public policy lecture through the Institute for Policy Innovation. Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, spoke on the topic "Preserving a Free, Open and Innovative Internet."

The FCC needs to cut unnecessary regulation, starting with parts of the 2015 net neutrality rules, to spur the growth of broadband, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said Thursday at the Institute for Policy Innovation in Irving, Texas. 

Pai spoke at an event hosted by the Institute for Policy Innovation, an Irving think tank that advocates less government regulation and public policy driven by the free market. It drew an audience of tech executives, students and even AT&T's chief executive Randall Stephenson. 

If Congress passes the Email Privacy Act and sends it to President Donald Trump, it could be an "quick, easy bipartisan victory" for taxpayers and get the new administration and lawmakers off to a "positive" start, said IPI President Tom Giovanetti in an opinion piece in TechCrunch Wednesday.

The H-1B visa "impasse" should be the "easiest" of all the "controversial elements" of proposed immigration reform for Congress to fix, said Tom Giovanetti in a Thursday blog post.

IPI president Tom Giovanetti in a statement called it a "slam dunk" for President Donald Trump and Congress. "This legislation has nothing to do with preventing or prosecuting terrorism, but rather simply corrects lack of foresight in legislation passed 30 years ago, long before digital data became such a pervasive part of normal life," he said.

"No one has any idea what the Trump campaign's positions are on communications policy," Giovanetti told us. "There's no evidence at this point that there is anything approaching a policy process on the Trump campaign -- which is part of why I thought the platform was more important in this peculiar year."

"We salute the Congressional Republicans who have legislatively impeded [Obama's] plans to turn over the Information Freedom Highway to regulators and tyrants," the platform said. It included language similar to what IPI recommended last week: "We will consistently support internet policies that allow people and private enterprise to thrive, without providing new and expanded government powers to tax and regulate so that the internet does not become the vehicle for a dramatic expansion of government power."

Institute for Policy Innovation President Tom Giovanetti tweeted that the 2016 draft GOP platform's language on "protecting Internet from taxation and regulation is INADEQUATE" and proposed language that IPI would prefer.

The Institute for Policy Innovation also took Apple's side. "It's a sad state of affairs when Americans have to rely on private companies to protect our constitutional rights against the government, but apparently that's where we are," said President Tom Giovanetti in a Thursday blog post. "That's why I commend Tim Cook of Apple for his strong statement opposing the FBI's overly broad demand for the creation of a tool that would allow them to break encryption on any iPhone in the world," Giovanetti said of the Apple CEO.