Today marks two years since the Federal Communication Commission's historic vote to roll back the Obama-era internet regulations misleadingly known as “net neutrality.” As we hit this anniversary, it’s important to remember the apocalyptic predictions Democratic politicians and special interest groups made — and how their warnings never came to fruition.
First, let’s take a quick trip down memory lane. In 2010, the Obama-era FCC applied net neutrality to internet service providers across the country. For the 20 years of commercial internet history up until that point, almost every major provider had offered open access to the internet without throttling. The FCC nonetheless offered a solution meant to prevent this problem, even though it had never really existed.
Four years later, a federal court overturned the order, ruling that the FCC had no authority to enforce net neutrality on service providers so long as they were not considered “common carriers” under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. So in 2015, the FCC, in its infinite wisdom, responded by reclassifying internet service providers as common carriers to enforce net neutrality — applying an ancient piece of legislation passed a half-century before the advent of the internet.
This all changed two years ago this week, when the Trump administration’s FCC, under Chairman Ajit Pai, voted to repeal the Obama-era net neutrality regulations and restore the light regulatory climate that allowed the internet to thrive for more than 20 years. The debate leading up to the vote and its ultimate implementation in 2018 was surprisingly mainstream. Despite how wonky the technical details of internet regulatory policies such as net neutrality may be, it seemed as if every left-leaning major corporation, special interest group, and politician attempted to convince the masses that the sky was falling.
Senate Democrats published an attention-grabbing, line-by-line tweet: “If we don’t save net neutrality, you’ll get the internet one word at a time.” Meanwhile, the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union made an odd culinary analogy: “Imagine if your service provider could stop you from ordering Domino’s online — by slowing down your connection or crashing your browser — because Pizza Hut is paying them.”
Still, special-interest groups seemed to offer the most dystopian visions, with Battle of the Net alleging that ISPs will “control and see what we do online” and Color of Change claiming that “without #Net Neutrality, companies like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T would have the power to stop online movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo.”
Sadly, the Democrats’ scaremongering continues to this day.
Since March, Senate Democrats have been crying wolf in a desperate attempt to pass the Save the Internet Act to codify net neutrality into law. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has claimed, ‘Without #NetNeutrality, internet providers can slow down or block the web content you want while favoring other stuff that makes them more money.” And Sen. Chris Coons tweeted that unless we restore net neutrality, the internet will belong to "major corporations.”
On the contrary, in the two years since the repeal of net neutrality, more than 6 million people have gained access to the internet. Internet speeds have increased as well. According to the FCC, “The number of Americans lacking access to a terrestrial fixed broadband connection meeting the FCC’s benchmark... has decrease[d] more than 18%.”
That’s not to say that regulatory improvements can’t be made. The ping-pong policy landscape that has existed since 2010 with net neutrality going in and out of enforcement is certainly not ideal. Bipartisan legislation to end the debate once and for all is most certainly warranted. But the emphasis should be on the bipartisan aspect — we should reject lazy attempts at scoring political points, such as the hyperbolically named “Save the Internet Act,” out of hand. The fearmongering about deregulation aside, the internet as we know it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Casey Given (@CaseyJGiven) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is the executive director of the nonprofit organization Young Voices.
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