Ajit Pai’s net neutrality plan is nonsense

[Commentary] [J]ust conceptually, the idea that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai will get Comcast and AT&T and Verizon and every tiny little regional Internet service provider to put strong open internet provisions in their terms of service agreements is pure nonsense.

First, terms of service agreements change all the time. And people freak out about them, and nothing happens. Do you think the iTunes Terms and Conditions are there to protect you? Facebook’s? Verizon’s? Come on. So what’s to stop Comcast from making this deal today, and then changing its terms a year from now? (It’s certainly not the presence of meaningful access competition in the marketplace!) How will the FTC track every single ISP’s terms of service language, the differences between them, and enforce any sort of consistent, reasonable policy?

Second, let’s say Chairman Pai manages to thread the needle and gets every ISP in the country to agree on the exact same open internet language in their terms of service, and further secures a commitment that the language will remain in their terms in perpetuity. Isn’t that functionally identical to... a law? Shouldn’t we just have... a law? And don’t we already have that law? What specifically is Pai trying to accomplish if he agrees that open internet principles are important?