Net Neutrality Or Continued Innovation? Can't We Have Both?

[Commentary] The General Conduct standard and the advisory opinion process ended what Mercatus Center scholar Adam Thierer has described as the “permissionless innovation” standard that has governed the Internet ecosystem since at least 1996, when Congress passed a law declaring the policy of the US to leave the Internet “unfettered by Federal or State regulation.” The Federal Communications Commission’s wide-ranging, 400-page order instead opted for precisely the opposite, demanding that Internet service providers and their immediate business partners apply for permission for any improvement to the network—permission that wasn’t permission at all, and which might never actually arrive. These needless and dangerous innovation-killers, in addition to the other legal and economic problems caused by the hastily-crafted 2015 Open Internet order, justify FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal to reverse course and return ISPs to full participation in the Internet ecosystem, where they operated without violating even a strict definition of “net neutrality” for twenty years.

Neutrality was never seriously at risk, nor is it now. But if it is, legislation proposed by Republicans before the FCC swallowed the bitter public utility bill remains the only viable solution, if only to avoid another decade of see-sawing decisions. Chairman Pai is right to be undoing the damage done as quickly as possible.

[Larry Downes is the Project Director at Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy.]