Pros And Cons Of Net Neutrality Regulation

When reduced to its economic essentials, most supporters of net neutrality regulation argue that there is insufficient competition in the market for broadband Internet access and that the government should step in to prevent abuses of the resulting market power. If each American consumer had several choices for broadband Internet service, there would be no sound basis for governmental intervention: market competition would ensure ISP responsiveness to consumer choice. Instead, the underlying fear is that the broadband internet market is essentially a monopoly dominated by ISP’s; that it will remain so indefinitely; and that each ISP has an incentive to abuse its market power in ways that harm the internet. Net neutrality supporters are particularly

The FTC report analyzed the competing views on net neutrality and concluded that the FTC would adopt a deregulatory wait-and-see approach. The Report found that the broadband Internet access industry is “young and dynamic” and is “moving in the direction of more, not less, competition, including fast growth [and] declining prices for higher-quality service. . . .” The FTC further explained that it was aware of the harms and failures associated with ISP network management principles such as throttling. The FTC warned policy makers to be careful when enacting regulations to protect from future potential harm because there is no current demonstrated need for such regulation and because there may be unintended adverse effects to the industry that may well ultimately negatively affect end-users. Nonetheless, the FTC added that it would still dedicate substantial resources to ensure competition and protect end-users in the area of broadband Internet access and would maintain antitrust enforcement and consumer protection laws in evaluating ISP network management principles should any market failures occur.

Fast forward to October 28, 2014, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) sued AT&T, one of the largest providers of mobile broadband and cellular services for slowing internet speeds on end-users that were promised “unlimited” data plans. The FTC relied on

In short, the net neutrality debate, properly conceived, is fundamentally about core antitrust concepts: about market power, market failures, market definition, and the costs and benefits of government intervention in a rapidly evolving, high-technology market. Thus for much of the final quarter of the twentieth century, telecommunications competition policy in the United States was dominated by a generalist antitrust agency—the Department of Justice, which had persuaded Judge Harold Greene that the FCC was incompetent for the task. The DoJ not only forced the break-up of AT&T in the early 1980s, but then presided over the implementation of an elaborate, competition oriented consent decree for the next dozen