Big ISPs Argue Against Regulation

Big internet service providers (ISPs) have been using the same arguments against being regulated for the last decade. These arguments were used to justify killing Title II regulation under the Ajit Pai FCC and have been resurrected today to try to get Congress to override the FCC’s decision to reimpose broadband regulation. From my perspective, their arguments have gotten stale and out of touch with the way the market really operates. The big ISP trade associations have been telling the public for years that broadband prices have been falling in ‘real terms’. But anybody buying broadband from a cable company over the last decade knows otherwise. Big cable companies have raised prices year after year at a rate faster than inflation. The ISP argument rests on slight of hand that measures broadband price per megabit of speed. By that logic, when the cable companies unilaterally increased download speeds a few years ago from 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps, customers saw an instant 50% rate reduction. In ‘real terms’, that customer undoubtedly got another rate increase that same year and paid more for the faster speed.