Net Neutrality Designed To Fix A Problem That Doesn't Exist

The FCC is preparing to vote Thursday on reinstating net neutrality regulations for the internet, which a new report warns could cause a slowdown in the pace of internet speed increases and price improvements seen in the years since net neutrality's repeal, according to a report at Fox Business.

The FCC, which currently has a majority of Democrat appointees under the Biden administration, is planning to bring back net neutrality rules that allow the agency to regulate broadband internet access as a telecommunications service. That would return the FCC's framework for regulating the internet to what the Obama administration put in place in 2015, which was later rolled back by the Trump administration in 2017 under a framework that classified the internet as an information service.

A Committee to Unleash Prosperity report notes the gains in internet speed and cost decreases that occurred in the wake of the Trump-era deregulation as well as the increased investment by internet service providers. 

"If the Biden administration can look at the experience of broadband in the last seven years and declare it a bad thing, something that needs to be reversed, there's really no regulation that they would ever dislike and no deregulation that they would ever like, because this is about the most stunning success possible, and yet they're going to reverse it," Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, told FOX Business.

The report found that median internet download speeds for wired internet connections increased by a factor of 5.8 between 2017 and 2023, while wireless speeds increased by a factor of 8.7. 

Although the report acknowledges that download speeds would have improved over time even under the net neutrality regulatory framework, the U.S. rose in speedtest.net's average national download speed rankings from 45th in the world in 2017 to 16th in 2022, while the median speed ranking for the U.S. improved from 22nd to 15th between 2022 and 2023.

It also analyzed price changes for wired broadband and wireless internet, which declined by about 15% and 28%, respectively, from 2016 to 2022. For comparison, from 2010, when the Obama administration first proposed regulating the internet as a utility, to 2016, wired broadband prices declined 9% and wireless declined 22%.