I spent an evening recently slogging through the Federal Communication Commission’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) regarding net neutrality. The desired outcome seems reasonable to me: Preventing broadband providers from degrading or blocking consumers’ ability to send or receive information over the Internet. Far less convincing, however, is the FCC’s position that this is actually a problem.

In the NPRM’s 99 pages, only two incidents are cited. In the first, a relatively small telecommunications company, Madison River Communications, prevented Vonage, an Internet-based telephony competitor, from operating over its network. Perhaps the handiwork of an overzealous executive, this incident was remedied under the FCC’s existing regulations.