Commissioner Carr: The Title II Debate Was Settled When The Internet Didn't Break

The Federal Communications Commission will begin implementing President Biden’s plan for increasing government control of the Internet. There will be lots of talk about “net neutrality” and virtually none about the core issue before the agency: namely, whether the FCC should claim for itself the freewheeling power to micromanage nearly every aspect of how the Internet functions—from the services that consumers can access to the prices that can be charged. The entire debate over whether Title II regulations are necessary or justified was settled years ago. Indeed, when my FCC colleagues and I voted in 2017 to overturn the Obama Administration’s failed, two-year experiment with Title II, activists and politicians alike guaranteed the American public that the Internet would quite literally break without it. They predicted that prices for broadband would spike, that you would be charged for each website you wanted to visit, and that the Internet itself would slow down. Did any one of those predictions come to pass? Of course not