In early 2015, the FCC decided three things in its net neutrality order: 1) Cable and
phone companies can’t block any websites 2) They can’t discriminate against some
websites, and third, no paid prioritization, or what the average person would call fast
lanes on the internet.
If you look at how the internet and America operates previous to these net neutrality
regulations, there was no digital dystopia.
We didn’t see cases of ISP’s engaging in any competitive conduct such as blocking
lawful content from being delivered over the internet.
And if there were evidence of systemic failure, I would be the first one as an FCC official,
to stand up and say “this is wrong” but that’s simply not what we saw.
To the contrary, we have the internet economy that is the envy of the world precisely because,
unlike many other parts of the world, we have decided to take a market-based approach.
If you look at how innovation has happened and you can think of pretty much every company
that comes along and disrupts a previous company, Google and Facebook are good examples, they
would not have been able to do it without internet neutrality, and I think that you
would stifle innovation in any of those new sectors, Bitcoin, Internet of things, autonomous
vehicles, robotics, all of those things rely on an open internet.
You can have innovation without permission very rapidly, unless you force all of those
guys to go get permission from AT&T and Verizon and Comcast, that’s not how it should work,
that’s not how to ensure innovation.
Historically, the internet has become one of the most open spaces for innovation and
investment, precisely because there was no central authority deciding what was neutral,
what traffic could flow over the network, how the networks were constructed, and that
was in part due to a bipartisan consensus started in the Clinton administration, that
the internet would be a testbed for market-based innovation
Net neutrality ensures competition among internet services.
Comcast cannot block Netflix, cannot block YouTube, cannot treat YouTube better than
Netflix no matter how much YouTube pays Comcast.
There is a virtuous cycle, they call it, where innovators will create applications, that
generate demand, then users will get on the internet because they want to use those applications.
And so when people create more applications, more people will sign up and when more people
sign up the cable companies will invest and build more capacity to lead to more applications
to more users.
These regulations would have negative impact on internet service providers’ willingness
and ability to invest in next generation networks.
When it comes to large broadband providers for example, in the first six months of 2015,
we saw 12 percent reduction in the amount of capital they were willing to spend on broadband,
and that’s notable for one significant reason, this is only the third time in the internet’s
history that this has happened.
The first time was in the wake of the tech bubble bursting in 2001, and the second time
was in the wake of the Great recession in 2007 and 2008.
So we’re really in uncharted territory here in a lot of ways.
What you’ll hear the phone and cable industry and their defenders say is “you know, we
would lower the price of broadband if only we could charge Netflix and Google some extra
cash, and then we would lower the prices for consumers, wouldn’t that be amazing.”
That would never happen.
That would never happen because there is no competitive pressure for the cable companies
to lower their prices.
They would take the money from Google and Facebook and Amazon and therefore create fast
lanes for them, destroy startups and the innovation we’ve had on the internet and then not even
lower your prices because they don’t have to.
The broadband marketplace is anything but a monopoly.
We have 4,462 internet service providers today, some are big, some are small, some are innovative,
some might not be, but the way to discipline those companies, the way to regulate this
entire marketplace, is to allow the aggregated decisions of millions of American consumers
to drive the future of the internet.