When the Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality, critics heralded impending doom for the internet as they knew it. They claimed that certain websites would become unavailable — that internet service providers would use their newfound freedom to block or slow down their own competition, reduce consumer choice, and ultimately charge more for less service.
They claimed that content providers, and thus consumers, would have to pay for internet “fast lanes” or else suffer agonizing slow speeds.
They warned, as FCC Chairman Ajit Pai later put it, “they would get the internet one word at a time. They were told that they would have to pay $5 per tweet.” The reaction on the Left was so hyperbolic that someone actually called in a bomb threat at the FCC.
So what happened? Not a single one of its panicked, hysterical predictions has come true. Nobody in that community seems willing to acknowledge or take responsibility for just how wrong they were. It was lies all the way down, mostly originating with Big Tech companies that wanted to avoid their fair share of the market costs of building out the networks they use and rely on to do business.
In the real world, consumer prices did not rise due to the repeal of Title II internet regulation. Websites were not restricted. In fact, the consumer experience of the internet in the United States has dramatically improved in the last three years. The availability of gigabit internet service exploded from 6% to 85% penetration in a matter of two years. Download speeds nearly doubled during the same period, and cellphone data providers added 72,000 new cell sites in 2018 and 2019 alone — more than 3 times the number they had added under the net neutrality regime from 2014 to 2017.
By nearly every metric, the internet in the U.S. is now outperforming the networks in the rest of the world, thanks to the repeal of Title II regulation. More, faster, and better connections have been established.
Meanwhile, data plans have become much cheaper and much better in value. One of the horribles that the net-neutrality Chicken Littles warned about was “zero-rating” — the practice of some ISPs of giving free, unmetered data for certain uses, such as a free subscription to Amazon Prime with their data plan. That did happen at first, making no one worse off for it — but this concern has since been obviated. Unlimited data plans have proliferated, thanks in large part to the repeal of net neutrality, meaning that nobody’s data is being metered anymore.
The internet is thriving now that it is no longer regulated as if it were a Depression-era phone company. The incoming Biden administration ought to recognize this reality and avoid turning back the clock to a bad Obama administration rule that is being made even more obsolete than it was before thanks to improving technology.
