What’s Jeb Bush got against net neutrality, anyway?

[Commentary] Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor contending for the Republican presidential nomination, says he’d repeal a raft of government rules on taking office. In particular, Bush says network neutrality is a bad idea. His opposition comes couched in the language used by cable companies that oppose net neutrality: He argues that the rules will kill investment in the industry, noting that two tiny broadband companies have “declared under penalty of perjury” they must cut back under the rule. Presidential politics has turned an argument over market structure between competing business interests -- reductively, those that build and maintain the internet’s physical infrastructure, and those that make the software that runs on that infrastructure -- into a fight between the political parties, with Democrats backing the net neutrality rules.

When Jeb Bush argues that all of President Barack Obama’s rules “cost” Americans $1.9 trillion a year, it’s worth remembering that the number under his brother’s administration was $1.75 trillion -- and that the oft-questioned estimate he relies on doesn’t even attempt to take into account any of the benefits of regulation. The Office of Management and Budget’s latest estimate of the net benefit of regulations passed during the Obama Administration is $200 billion.