Neutrality is a great idea. The FCC should try it.

[Commentary] Neutrality is a foundational idea in telecommunications regulation. At the core of this concept is the expectation that regulators don’t take sides — not among competing firms, and not among complementary services in technological ecosystems such as the Internet.

The 10th Anniversary Regulatory Handbook, recently published by the international business incubator infoDev, describes how the idea of neutrality should be applied. According to the handbook, the goal of the regulator is to ensure that market participants have an opportunity to compete based on the merits of their services. Based on its recent behavior, however, it seems the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is selective in its application of neutrality. A review of some of the agency’s recent decisions regarding municipal broadband, the Open Internet, privacy, and set top-box rulemaking provide plenty of evidence for this idea.

[Layton studies Internet economics at the Center for Communication, Media, and Information Technologies (CMI) at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, Denmark]