As Net Neutrality Debate Reheats, Remember The Real Problem Is Telecom Monopoly Power

With the Biden FCC now having a full slate of commissioners and a full voting majority, the net neutrality debate has already started to heat back up. That means a renewed effort by broadband giants to try and downplay the need for net neutrality rules, usually via lazy op-eds run in lazy publications like The Hill, often written by organizations with undisclosed financial conflicts of interest.

Like this lovely missive by the telecom-industry funded Innovation and Technology Policy Center(ITPC)," which attempts to claim that the Trump FCC dismantling of popular net neutrality rules saved the internet," and that restoring the rules would harm the vibrant and competitive" U.S. broadband market:

Such regulations are entirely unnecessary in today's vibrant and competitive broadband marketplace, and to restore them would be finding a solution in search of a problem."

That the telecom industry is already using proxy organizations to make up nonsense about a monopoly-dominated, barely competitive U.S. broadband industry being vibrant" speaks for itself. These kind of posts are comically lazy, and mindlessly repurpose false claims like the idea that net neutrality (for the brief window it existed) hurt U.S. broadband investment (which is documented as false):

This decisionhamperedcapital investments with a 20 percent reduction in spending during the two years they were in effect and delayed new broadband deployment and innovation."

The folks making these kinds of posts don't really care about factual reality. They just repeat the same false claims over and over again in the hopes of seeding them into the brains of a lazy public and press. And as we saw with the last two decades of net neutrality bickering, it generally works. Here I am deflating the same claims industry marionettes have been making for twenty straight years.

As noted previously I'm not entirely convinced yet that the Biden/Rosenworcel FCC actually has the backbone to fully revisit net neutrality. I imagine they'll implement something that sounds much like net neutrality, but lacks the full legal backing of the original, 2015 ruling. I expect them to half-ass it. I hope to be surprised.

But instead of spending another decade bickering and debating with telecom-backed proxy organizations paid to be inflexible, I think it's important to keep the conversation centered on the real problem: concentrated, unchecked telecom monopoly power and the corrupt politicians that protect it.

Net neutrality rules were an imperfect, stopgap measure to stop powerful telecom monopolies from abusing their market power to harm consumers and competitors alike. And while the rules were useful, the real underlying problem with U.S. broadband is caused by concentrated regional monopolization, industry consolidation, feckless regulatory oversight, and a pointed lack of competition.

U.S. policymakers aren't actually interested in fixing this problem, in part because companies like AT&T and Comcast wield massive lobbying influence, but also because those monopolies are tethered to our first responder networks and domestic surveillance systems. Companies like AT&T are, in many ways, part of the government itself, making sabotaging consumer protection efforts easier than ever.

Yes, we're keen on throwing untold billions in subsidies at the problem every few years, but when it comes to holding giant telecom monopolies accountable for consumer abuses or even outright fraud, federal policymakers have been napping for the better part of the last decade. Whatever this next round of ridiculous net neutrality bickering looks like, don't let it take your eye off the actual ball.