The call for comments on the Net Neutrality policy up for debate is open and has received almost 350,000 comments in the two weeks since it opened on April 26th, 2017. Here’s my response:
FCC 17–108, “Restoring Internet Freedom,” is a draft proposal put forward with two principal tenants that are unsupportable. The first unsupportable tenant is that the previous billl, FCC 15–24 “Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet,” has had a negative impact on “the healthy and competitive development of the enhanced-services industry.” The second unsupported claim is that the examples given in FCC 15–24 do not represent sufficient evidence to justify that it passed in 2015.
1) Did FCC 15–24 “Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet” have a negative impact on the market?
The authors of FCC 17–108 claim that FCC 15–24 is disrupting the market by discouraging broadband investment rates of large companies. That claim is based on a blog post from March 1st, 2017 by Hal Singer, a professor of economics.
This post, a screenshot of a chart with footnotes, concludes investment has decreased by 5.6% in the two years after FCC 15–24 was enacted. This is based on a survey of the 12 largest telecom companies in the country. The lion’s share of the drop in investment came from two companies, AT&T and Sprint. Besides AT&T and Sprint, investment actually grew by around 2%. The claim of market disruption is not convincingly supported by this thin evidence.
2) In section 50 of FCC 17–108, the authors ask, “Do these isolated examples [from 15–24] justify the regulatory shift that Title II reclassification entailed?”
I’m sure the authors of FCC 15–24 would emphatically say “Yes.” Footnote 123 of FCC 15–24 references verbal testimony “describing the situation where Comcast exempted its own online video service from data caps when streamed to an Xbox.” The authors of FCC 17–108 should address the specifics of these examples rather than dismissing them without analysis.
It’s inprobable that anyone will be able to mount substantive defense of the claims made in “Restoring Internet Freedom.” I urge the FCC to end discussion on the possibility that FCC 17–108 will be adopted in the very near term and with a resounding “No.”
