It’s been a year since the world ended. In case you didn’t notice, that dire event took place when the Trump administration ended the policy of net neutrality.
In the real world, beyond the scaremongering fantasies of those opposed to this policy change, the Earth managed to scrape by and, for the past 12 months, internet providers and online services have existed within the old-fashioned, lightly regulated paradigm that had governed the internet from its creation up until the end of Obama’s term.
Nobody got hurt. Nobody even noticed.
Self-styled tech market experts, such as those millenarian prophets of Y2K, have some explaining to do.
Contrary to those activists’ breathless representations throughout 2017 and early 2018, internet service providers have not held their customers to ransom for extra payments, lest they be relegated to the slow lane. They have not throttled popular content from major streaming services. In fact, internet speeds rose by more than 35% in 2018. The internet is constantly getting better and more reliable. The rising tide has lifted all packets.
Where net neutrality activists envisioned a dystopia of corporate greed, poorer service, and less accountability, market forces produced the exact opposite. That’s what usually happens. The market works. It adjusts to serve customer needs. The invisible hand harnessed the power of the profit motive to create a highly functional and ever-improving online experience. Today, consumers in most markets have more choices for service and more opportunities to punish bad behavior by their providers.
It never made sense to regulate the internet according to 85-year-old “common carrier” rules that once governed Ma Bell. But that’s what net neutrality advocates demanded — they would settle for nothing less — right until the time their battle was lost. They flatly rejected compromise efforts in Congress that would have addressed specific stated concerns about throttling. They also ignored the internet’s huge success up to that point without net neutrality. After all, from its inception, the internet thrived and democratized the world’s information as never before, all under the lighter touch of its regulation as a Title I “information service.”
Net neutrality was a solution in search of a problem. Its proponents’ entire case was based on one or two highly unusual anecdotes involving local providers who briefly throttled heavy users, only to change policy afterward or admit error. The activists, who took their cue and their money from Amazon, Google, Netflix, and other content providers that wanted a free ride from ISPs, cannot seriously argue that the internet was in safer hands or performed better during the three years when “common carrier” regulation was in effect.
They only display their ignorance when they talk about Title II as though Moses brought it back, carved onto stone tablets, from the top of Mount Sinai. “Title II … is the law that a bipartisan Congress wrote for all telecom networks, including internet access,” the Free Press Action Fund’s Matt Wood complained in a press release this February. Please, tell us more about this internet of 1934; we hadn’t heard of it.
Fortunately, net neturality has been put on the back burner, and we hope someone turns the burner off and lets the issue go cold. Democrats may try to heat it up again someday, but by then the internet will probably have improved so much that it will be moot. Already, internet speeds are fast enough that they have encroached on the adjacent market for home television entertainment. Thanks to much faster internet, consumers can drop their cable TV service to get channels over Sling, Hulu, or even YouTube. But the real game-changer will come when 5G mobile data obviates reliance on cable monopolies for home internet service. With the advent of lightning-fast 5G, cell phone and home internet plans will merge seamlessly into one, and the amount of over-the-air data available monthly will skyrocket even as prices fall.
This revolution will make the concept of net neutrality obsolete for all practical purposes. That’s a good thing.
