Congressional Democrats want you to think that they’re going to save the Internet. But the Internet never needed saving. That was true when the Obama administration first passed “net neutrality” regulations in 2015 and also when those regulations were repealed.
On Wednesday, House Democrats proposed a bill to bring back those old rules and reverse a 2017 deregulation by the Trump administration. It’s called, with apocalyptic flair, the Save the Internet Act.
The issue of net neutrality is relatively complex, and proponents have done a great job of leading the public to believe that without its framework, the free and open Internet we’ve come to know and love is a goner. But time and experience have proven that this isn’t true.
To unpack the meaning of the debate, I spoke to Gerald Faulhaber, a business economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who served as chief economist at the Federal Communications Commission from 2000 to 2001. When I call him to ask about net neutrality, he just sighs.
“This fight has being going on for what, 10 years?” he says. “It’s really boring.”
From the 1990s until recently, the Internet was doing just fine. Then the idea of net neutrality gained prominence in 2015, when the FCC approved the Internet Conduct Standard and classified the Internet as a public utility, something that certain large companies providing services online, such as Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, and Google, supported.
The new rules regulated the Internet like a public utility, based on rules nearly a century old. The FCC amassed more legal authority over Internet service providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, which stood opposite their tech-giant peers in the debate. The argument went that without these new regulations, ISPs would trample their customers by offering unequal access to the web — block some sites, zero-rating access to others that paid or entered partnerships, and charging certain services for their inordinate use of spectrum, supposedly to the detriment of consumers.
Then, in December 2017, the FCC under the Trump administration voted to roll back the public utility classification and turn over regulatory oversight to the Federal Trade Commission. Nothing bad has happened in the time since. But if the government goes back to regulating the Internet like it’s your land-line telephone company, something bad likely will happen.
“There will be no innovation left,” Faulhaber says. “Nobody wants to go into a regulated business. That’s not where you go to make money. That’s not where you go to innovate.” Public utility regulations, he points out, are designed for mature, stable services without much innovation.
Antitrust laws and the FTC can already deal with problems created by ISPs, which have always had a financial incentive not to make their customers unhappy. Thanks to market forces, which encourage ISPs to compete with each other, you can still enjoy streaming “Russian Doll” without net neutrality, just like you could from the mid-1990s until 2015.
Despite the hype, the Save the Internet Act is just another strip of federal red tape that will discourage investment in tomorrow’s Internet. And the net neutrality advocates who did so much to scare people in 2017, at this point, have a lot of explaining to do.
