“The difference between genius and idiocy is that genius has its limits.”
“The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result.”
Albert Einstein never said either of these things, even though both are attributed to him all over the internet. But both phrases are appropriately applied to the numerous influential yet misguided voices that championed the bogus cause of net neutrality in 2017.
The dishonor roll behind this hoax includes a lot of people who should know better, from Linus Tech Tips to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. These advocates’ ridiculous predictions of a post-neutrality internet apocalypse were always groundless and puzzling. Fortunately, they could not have possibly been proven more wrong than they have been in the time since the FCC abandoned the thoroughly dense Title II policy.
Unfortunately, however, President Joe Biden is putting the band back together. He is nominating FCC officials who would turn back the clock and regulate the internet as if it were some old-timey 1930s phone company whose employees direct your calls through a switchboard. There is no rational grounding for such a policy, which is sure to retard internet investment the moment it takes effect. Biden probably has no idea what a bad idea this is for his failing administration. Someone who loves him needs to explain to him why this is such a gigantic mistake.
Net neutrality, as applied by the Obama FCC, is more accurately described as “Title II internet regulation.” It is the anachronistic application of a 1930s regulatory standard to the modern internet that treats it as a public utility rather than the “information service” it has always been since the Clinton administration first gave it that label.
Most of the hoaxers, swept away in a flood of online content, simply got on the wrong bandwagon despite knowing very little about the substance of the issue. They supported a bad policy that limited investment in the internet during the brief period when the FCC adopted it — indeed, investment in the internet declined by as much as $200 million, or 20% to 30%, between the time Title II regulation was first proposed and when it was repealed.
The internet, most people would agree, has been a fairly successful invention since its public rollout in the 1990s. If you agree with that, then you agree that Title II regulation is not essential to its survival — indeed, it might even be detrimental.
The internet’s success without Title II is all the proof anyone needs. It highly recommends the same sort of unregulated freedom and growth that the internet experienced without any serious problems for the first 20 years of its existence — before large corporations providing online services started funding activists to make net neutrality into a thing so that they could get a free ride from service providers.
Net neutrality was always a solution in search of a problem. The case for its necessity stems entirely from a theoretical possibility, never realized on any large scale, that some internet service providers might decide to block or throttle the use of specific websites or services.
Aside from a handful of minor incidents, this has never happened in the real world. Absolutely no one, not a single human being on Earth, is worse off for the fact that the FCC under President Donald Trump kicked aside Title II internet regulation.
Over time, ISPs have generally realized that it is in their interest to serve the community without discriminating against specific websites. Everyone who pays attention to the issue knows this.
The question, then, has to be put to those who would try to justify a return to this unnecessary policy: Why?
Logic is a powerful force. The logical rule of modus tollens says that when a conclusion is as catastrophically false as the one that said the internet would suffer serious damage from the repeal of net neutrality, it proves the falsity of the original premises that supposedly implied it.
So why on earth would anyone want to go back to a policy so thoroughly discredited by real-world experience? There is no good answer.
