A week ago we passed five years without “Net Neutrality.” The sun has been coming up every day since June 11, 2017.
During a speech about the economy, then President Obama said (with a straight face, shows he is an accomplished sociopath) “When it comes to regulation, we prefer a light hand.” Ranks up there with, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor…”
In the latter part of the Obama years, he inflicted upon one of the most active parts of the economy, the Internet, “Net Neutrality.” Supposedly it would ensure all users get equal access to the Web, without throttling, blocking, etc. for their points of view. That’s not how it worked out. From Forbes magazine:
The even worse news for consumers is that without the ability to develop new business models, internet service providers have less economic incentive to build infrastructure that would improve the internet and provide the capacity that yet-to-be-seen companies might depend on. If consumers don’t yet know that they want Netflix, we will have no reason to pay for enough bandwidth to deliver it. And since the content provider cannot pay extra, internet service providers have no incentive to build new infrastructure except pure speculation that new innovations will arise that take advantage of more bandwidth.This lack of an incentive, of an ability to provide a special level of service for perhaps yet-to-be-invented internet applications, is why such an internet entrepreneur as Mark Cuban has so strongly opposed net neutrality. He has made a powerful case for future usages of the internet that will only be possible with guaranteed priority delivery of their content. ( Remote robotic surgery might be a bit higher priority than your email or that photo of a cute kitten.) Now those fast lanes cannot exist and many innovations will die at the idea stage because implementation is impossible under the FCC’s regulation.Net neutrality supporters won in the battle for public opinion by simplifying their argument and making net neutrality seem like an issue of equity and rights for the little guy. Unfortunately, of the many approaches to maintaining equitable access to the internet, government regulators have chosen the method that makes the internet equitably slow and expensive for all of us.
On June 11, 2018, Ajit Pai, the new FCC Chairman under then President Trump announced the end of Net Neutrality. And the usual suspects screeched the “wild wild web” with unlimited free expression was over, people (saying leftists) would not be able to get viewpoints out or sell items on the market.
As usual, their disastrous predictions didn’t come to fold.
The Death of the Internet, Five Years Later
Ajit PaiJune 11, 2023
…In January 2017, times changed with the new Trump administration. The new president designated me chairman of the FCC shortly after Inauguration Day. In May of that year, we proposed to repeal these regulations. In December, we voted to do so. And on June 11, 2018 — five years ago today — that repeal took effect.
Going only on press coverage, social media, and political rhetoric, you would have been justified in preparing for civilization’s demise.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) proclaimed, as did “news” outlet CNN, that this was “the end of the Internet as we know it.” Not to be outdone, a columnist at the New York Times moaned that “the freewheeling internet has been dying a slow death,” and that repealing net neutrality rules “would be the final pillow in its face.” The Senate Democratic Caucus’s Twitter account proclaimed, “If we don’t save net neutrality, you’ll get the internet one word at a time” — putting each word on a separate line to emphasize the danger. Famed telecommunications regulatory experts like anonymous street artist Banksy and Silicon Valley representative Ro Khanna predicted that internet applications would become pay-per-view, with consumers having to pay $1.99 per Google search or to purchase them in packages. And for good measure, multiple U.S. senators called the decision “un-American…”
Read the rest of the article, it’s funny.
So, what has happened over the last five years. The only person I’ve known kicked off a social media platform is the former president who pushed to remove “Net Neutrality,” Donald Trump. Twitter still hosted the Iranian terrorist in Tehran, and domestic terrorist groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa. Plus being used by criminals for illegal activities, like flash mobs. So how has the general public fared without “Net Neutrality?” Pretty well all in all.
“…In an era defined by the paranoid style of American political argument, it may not surprise you to learn that they were not. In fact, they were diametrically wrong. The evidence is indisputable today that in the five years since the FCC’s decision to repeal net-neutrality regulations went into effect, American consumers are benefiting from broadband networks that are stronger and more extensive than ever. According to independent measurement service Ookla, average fixed broadband speeds in the U.S. are 287 percent faster today than they were in June 2018 (269.28 Mbps download speeds today versus 93.98 Mbps in 2018). Average mobile broadband speeds have increased even more, at 570 percent (156.51 Mbps versus 27.47 Mbps). Millions more Americans have access to the internet today compared with 2018, thanks in large part to private investment in digital infrastructure.
And on top of that, consumers are benefiting from more choice than in 2018. Indeed, competition has not just increased but transformed since then. Residential fiber deployment hit an all-time high last year. Wireless companies like T-Mobile are providing high-speed 5G fixed wireless service to millions of customers. Companies like Starlink are launching low-Earth-orbit satellites to support residential-broadband service, especially in harder-to-reach rural areas. And cable companies are expanding their footprint and upgrading their systems to enable much faster speeds.
The contrast between America’s broadband consumers and their European counterparts during the Covid-19 pandemic is telling. Americans with internet access largely were able to rely on broadband networks to do videoconference calls, stream in high-definition, and otherwise stay connected. Abroad, however, a key European commissioner felt compelled to ask streaming services to throttle video content to standard definition. Why? Because he feared that otherwise digital “infrastructures might be in strain.” I’d argue they were “in strain” partly because the European Union has had quite strict net-neutrality regulations that meaningfully undermine the incentive for investment in high-capacity broadband infrastructure. Fortunately, neither I nor any other public official in the United States had to make a similar request, then or since…”
The bureaucracy has no desire for efficiency, only continued existence. And competition will always improve goods and services. Iron sharpens iron, to use an expression. And this is not the only example of the Federal Communications Commission throttling success and improvement.
Obama et all said the Internet should be regulated like a public utility. Perhaps younger people can be excused for their ignorance, but older Americans remember the great days of having one company for their phone service, one company for electricity, one company for cable.
I’m almost 60, and I remember having to change my phone number when I moved across town. Today many people don’t have home phones, only cell phones, and they take them from one state (or country) to another, keeping the same phone number for decades. But this is a relatively new phenomenon. What took so long? I’ll give you three guesses, but you will need only one.
For decades the FCC put a stranglehold on use of the digital broadcast band, from not allowing competition in local markets on radio to refusing sales to communications companies for goods and services. If you want an excellent example, many people believe the first mobile phone was used in 1973, a Motorola DynaTAC 8000X in New York City. While it was the first handheld phone, the first cellular phone call was made on June 17, 1946. Granted, it was a car phone that took up half a trunk, it was an analog mobile phone. Just as we were coming out of World War II.
Why did it take ages to get to handheld phones? The FCC would not sell digital bandwidth to this startup company, and it died. There was a similar blocking of the FM (frequency modulation) by the FCC. We could have “FM…for a better sound all around,” decades before the 70s if the FCC had gotten out of the way.
If you want an excellent review of the FCC and it’s incompetence, read The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone, by Thomas Hazlett. Goes over one failure after another, and how many politicians bought out the FCC staff to ensure their radio stations, etc. would not face competition. Thankfully the FCC is more business friendly than 100 years ago. And more business means more competition and better goods and services for the consumer.
A classic example. Early in his administration, Ronald Reagan deregulated oil, and the price of gas did rise. For six months or so, then started to decline as companies brought more supply onto the market. Let the market provide for the customer, and you get better products and services. Or Uber and the cab companies? Airbnb and other lodging services?
Why do we have to keep relearning this?
Michael A. Thiac is a retired Army intelligence officer, with over 23 years experience, including serving in the Republic of Korea, Japan, and the Middle East. He is also a retired police patrol sergeant, with over 22 years’ service, and over ten year’s experience in field training of newly assigned officers. He has been published at The American Thinker, PoliceOne.com, and on his personal blog, A Cop’s Watch.
Opinions expressed are his alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of current or former employers.
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Net neutrality was pushed by two groups of people, the equity politicians and their agents in the agencies and the high-bandwidth using companies like Netflix that didn’t want to properly design their own systems to minimize impacts to the ISP partners that carried their service. Net neutrality was just an attempt by the intellectually lazy and financially greedy companies to not put in the intellectually effort needed to make their services viable.
Thirty years ago large businesses supplying services to other businesses that depended on intermediaries like the telecommunication companies understood the need to design their service delivery systems properly so that services worked with what existed. Like good engineers they designed a service topology accordingly; distributing the network load by negotiating dedicated connections and placing server farms at strategically important locations and caching often-used images to minimize access and delivery times. Using good design principles they managed sub-second delivery times on systems that mostly used DSL lines supplying 50k speeds (compared to gigabit speeds today).
Because of the two groups’ ignorance (politicians) and greed (streaming service providers) they ‘invented’ the idea of net-neutrality, an idea that ultimately pushed the cost of building out the infrastructure to the low-bandwidth using, relatively poorer local subscribers like grandma and other poorer people.
I remember the discussions around net neutrality when it was being proposed, even in the ‘conservative’ blogs and, sadly, much of the discussions involved much the same talking points as the people pushing net-neutrality used without using truly unbiased analysis.