Welcome to Your Hungarian Internet

[Commentary] The US has sunk to 25th in a global ranking of Internet speeds, just behind Romania. Why? Because our nation's regulators abandoned an earlier commitment to foster competition in the marketplace for Internet access providers.

In the years that followed the signing of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, lobbyists working for powerful providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon pressured a compliant Federal Communications Commission to tear down all of the important safeguards established by Congress. Under the Bush Administration, the FCC tossed out competitive broadband safeguards such as open-access requirements, which opened lines to other providers. In 2002 the agency declared that high-speed cable Internet access would no longer be considered a telecommunications service that opened the network to competitors, but rather an "information service" that did not. Following a 2005 court decision, the FCC also reclassified broadband delivered by the phone companies as an "information service." These were radical policy shifts that went against the long-held assumption that open communications in competitive markets were essential to economic growth and innovation. While the U.S. blindly followed a path of "deregulation," other nations in Europe and Asia beefed up their pro-competitive policies. The results are evident in our free fall from the top of almost every global measure of Internet services, availability and speed.