Did the repeal of net neutrality ruin your life? What, you didn’t notice?

The Federal Communications Commission voted to nix network neutrality, effective June 2018. A year-plus later, broadband download and upload speeds have quickened rather than slowed. Internet providers haven’t bifurcated service into different speeds for rich and poor households. Mobile networks, too, move data more swiftly than before. Broadband investment in better technology again has accelerated. Who knows, maybe the internet providers are lying in wait to pounce on their customers. Where’s the internet Cybergeddon the naysayers predicted, and predicted, and predicted?

That silence you hear in response is the sound of free-market incentives improving internet services at a steady pace. Companies are competing to increase rather than decrease data speeds. And, thus far, internet providers haven’t adopted exploitative service and pricing policies that would drive angry customers to rival providers in a heartbeat. And if companies do take unfair advantage of life after net neutrality, the federal deregulation can be modified, or reversed by regulators, or overridden by Congress. America’s web users, then, are back to where they were before net neutrality, when the internet operated without much government interference — and without adverse effects. Government regulation does have its place. But on the internet as in so many other realms, consumers’ demands and decisions are the most powerful regulators. Americans are the living, breathing free market forces that drive companies to make their internet services better — and increasingly faster — than ... one ... word ... at ... a ... time.