The Never-Ending Neutrality Pageant

More than two decades after we first opposed "net neutrality" and Title II, the government's attempted Internet take-over is back, with implications more ominous than we ever envisioned.

Everything old is new again. Yesterday, the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to reclassify broadband Internet links as old Title II telephone services.

You may be thinking, haven’t we heard this before? Didn’t we rubbish the telephone rules after, in the late 1990s, they were misapplied to very untelephone-like Internet technologies, depressing broadband investment and helping to cause the 2000 technology crash? Didn’t activists then propose another form of regulation known as “net neutrality” some two decades ago? And didn’t we finally dispense with the overhanging regulatory threat five years ago? Or was it 10? It’s difficult to remember.

We spent the better part of the 2000s and 2010s at the very center of the net neutrality wars, fortunately beating back most of the varied efforts to place the Internet in government hands. (See our many dozens of articles and reports here.) The result of a mostly free Internet was around $2.5 trillion in private investment in fixed and mobile broadband networks, unleashing the explosive digital economy and culture we know today.

How naive I was. It’s now clear, looking back, “net neutrality” was an early effort to get control of the physical layer in order to censor as they are now doing at the content layer.

Thankfully, we stopped them.

In the late twenty-teens, they then moved to suppress free speech on social media, supposedly to stop “misinformation.”

So we built alternative content platforms — X, Rumble, Substack, podcasts, etc.

Because of our successful evasions, they will now go back to the network layer to block disobedient apps and sites. That’s what the latest FCC effort is all about.

We must therefore build alternative physical networks — Starlink satellites and more. New European, Australian, Canadian, and Brazilian content laws, with gargantuan fines for “misinformation,” are the new levers to circumvent the U.S. First Amendment. If X wants to operate in those locales, it must censor as they say.

A new Administration should re-prioritize global Internet freedom, which had been the U.S. policy until we pivoted violently toward censorship circa 2016.

Sadly, even NATO is now a chief antagonist of free speech, supporting the vast Censorship Industrial Complex, along with partners like the Atlantic Council who pose as defenders of freedom and democracy. Just think about this historic reversal.

People are underestimating the total collapse of support for free speech among pseudo-elites in Washington, London, Brussels, and the broader managerial class.

Will the existing mobile and broadband ISPs defend a “free and open Internet”?

Below we reprint a short article from 2019 (five years ago!) in which we lamented the House’s attempted revival of the zombie telephone rules. The FCC has now yet again revived these undead regs, which the courts will, under the new West Virginia v. EPA major questions doctrine, likely strike down – yet again.

We are in an historic information war. And it must be won.

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The Never-Ending Neutrality Pageant

April 11, 2019

Honey, do we really have to sit through this one again?

We’ve been watching the same performance for nearly two decades. And some of us have tired of the amateur computer science and rehashed melodramatic outrage. We know the ending, too. Despite the act — a bill passed this week by the House of Representatives to regulate broadband networks like public utilities — the internet is already free, open, and prosperous. Most people understand that’s precisely because we didn’t regulate it like a utility.

The Senate won’t pass this bill, and the White House issued a veto threat.

So what’s the point of this exercise?

Fifteen years ago, when all this began, net neutrality was a legitimately interesting academic topic of network architecture and public policy. How would older vertical networks, such as phone and cable, connect to the internet? How would content and conduit interact? Would we treat all bits equally? And would we need new regulation to ensure an open ecosystem? Fair questions.

But something funny happened: Internet service providers had already adopted the fundamental position of their supposed policy rivals, the net neutrality advocates, as their key broadband business model. The corporate policy was one of a “free and open” internet. Broadband, with its limitless access to the widening world of the web, apps, and video, was rapidly overtaking cable TV, telephony, and mobile voice as the fastest growing and most profitable product of the communications providers. The neutrality warriors had won without firing a shot.

Consumers won, too. The internet was so free and open that most of us now search for tools to avoid drowning in floods of data. (See the below chart.)

Yet the war went on. The well-meaning search for “neutrality” morphed into a much more cynical campaign, uniting two seemingly disparate armies. For the political left, the goal was to gain broad governmental control of the internet. Silicon Valley content, software, and web firms, meanwhile, wanted Washington price controls to help reduce their bandwidth bills.

As the years went by, the arguments changed. The internet was growing so fast and Silicon Valley was doing so well that it was difficult to pin down the rationale for a new law. For a while, we needed net neutrality because the US had fallen behind the rest of the world in broadband. Well, not so much. Then we needed net neutrality because the ISPs were going to crush Netflix. Uh, nope.

Everyone in the industry had long agreed on broad principles of openness, but it was never enough. After a while, we didn’t just need neutrality, we needed Title II! Let’s regulate the internet just like monopoly telephones in 1934! And that’s where we are today: The House bill’s imposition of Title II would subject the most thriving portion of the US economy to crushing bureaucracy and price controls.

It was humorous, and vindicating, to see one of the chief activists finally admit this week that “#netneutrality is not about blocking, throttling, et al. it’s about whether there will ‘be a cop on the beat.’”

In other words, they didn’t care about neutrality, they simply wanted broad authority to regulate the internet. Or, as I wrote many times, “Net neutrality was never about anything so technical as ‘treating all bits equally’ or anything so economic as protecting ‘innovation at the edge.’ It was about gaining bureaucratic and political control of the digital economy.”

Ironies, both comic and tragic, abound. First, there already is a “cop on the beat” — the Federal Trade Commission.

Second, after 15 years of empty innuendo that the ISPs would block and throttle your content based on their own financial interests, or even more insidiously, based on your political views, it is the Silicon Valley web and social media firms that are dabbling with politically non-neutral behavior. No one has blocked or throttled content — and done so specifically based on disfavored viewpoints — like the web firms.

I still think with some real leadership, these important and innovative firms can regain their footing and recommit to free speech and open platforms. But imposing Title II on networks would only encourage politicians — left and right — to finish the job and impose novel neutrality rules on speech and search and video and social media, too. Let’s not allow the last act of this sorry saga to be a boomerang on all US technology.