As Biden Tries to Revive Net Neutrality, Remember Proponents’ Bogus Claims

S ix years ago, the internet was ablaze with fires of debate over the Federal Communications Commission’s net-neutrality rules. The promise of these 2015 regulations, adopted through the Open Internet Order, was to create an open, free, and fair internet, but with Ajit Pai leading the FCC, net neutrality’s days were numbered. The idea behind net neutrality is to require internet service providers to treat all internet traffic equally, disallowing preferential treatment for websites or services. This was done by categorizing ISPs as Title II common carriers, much like phone utility companies, giving the FCC much more power over what ISPs can do.

Leading up to the dismantling of these rules in 2017, pundits and techies from John Oliver to Tim Berners-Lee took to the news to spread hyperbole about the looming disaster that would destroy the internet as we know it. Today, none of these doomsday predictions have come to pass. That hasn’t deterred current FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel from announcing a plan to reinstate the rules, but it does make you wonder if they’re really necessary.

Based on the past few years, it seems not to be the case, and reinstating them could in fact bring future harm, as pointed out by FCC commissioner Brendan Carr. The possibility of rate regulation and government overreach through these rules would negatively impact consumer prices, infrastructure investment, and the quality of internet access for many.

In her remarks last month, Rosenworcel lamented that we currently have no agency dedicated to ensuring a “fast, open, and fair internet” — a role she claims the FCC has played since the “birth of the internet.” It’s hard to see how that’s a compelling argument for net-neutrality rules, however, as those were instituted only in 2015, by which time the internet had already been thriving for decades.

Regardless, Rosenworcel claimed Covid made it clear that internet access is a necessity for modern life and that the rollback of net-neutrality rules has had consequences that infringe on that right, citing the thoroughly debunked Verizon/Santa Clara Fire Department debacle, among others. She then immediately doubled back by saying that the lack of consequences has been because of a patchwork of state policies, which have barely held ISPs at bay in the meantime.

Rosenworcel isn’t the only proponent trying to resuscitate dead talking points. Others have picked up the script from six years ago and continued to echo wild claims of discrimination and civil violations, without any new evidence to back them up.

Here’s a short list of the most popular doomsday predictions from 2017 that you might hear cropping up again as we approach the FCC’s October 19 vote over whether to adopt the rules. As the last six years have shown, these claims don’t hold water.

“Consumers will have difficulty accessing content online, and political voices will be stifled.”

One of the most commonly repeated lines was how minority political voices would be silenced without net neutrality. Censorship of political speech has been a hot topic in the past few years, but most of the complaints of censorship are targeted at platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter (now X) or at the government itself for encouraging censorship through these platforms. Freedom House’s most recent internet-freedom score for the U.S. was high — and though the organization mentions the removal of net neutrality as a reason to lower the score, it doesn’t cite any specific examples to justify this penalty. In spite of the fearmongering, it seems we’re nowhere near censorship like communist China’s. Moving to adopt net-neutrality rules wouldn’t have stopped any of the actual censorship we saw being encouraged by the government.

“Small businesses will have to pay more to reach consumers.”

Like with many of these sweeping claims, there is no silver bullet to disprove this type of claim, but when looking over the small-business openings in the past decade, the numbers of business starts have continued to climb since 2015, from 3.2 million in 2017 to 5 million in 2022. The Covid pandemic caused unprecedented upheaval of the economy and an extra reliance on internet services, but small-business openings are still on the incline. This doesn’t singularly prove there haven’t been added costs due to the repeal of net neutrality, but with growing small-business openings and no positive examples of gouged prices, it’s a hard claim to support.

“Internet service providers will start charging users more to access websites.”

One of the most popular claims stated that the broadband-internet landscape would start adapting packages of extra-payment plans to access certain websites or apps. A screenshot from Portuguese provider MEO showing different app-bundle payment plans was widely shared and is still highlighted on the net-neutrality Wikipedia page. People pointed to this as an example of what a country without net neutrality would offer. The comparison isn’t quite right, however, as the MEO image shows options for mobile-data plans, giving users an option to unlimited data for a particular bundle of applications they might use more than others. So far, no additional payment has been necessary to access Facebook, YouTube, or other websites.

“Services such as Netflix, Hulu, and others will charge more for new features.”

This one is partially true but has little to do with the net-neutrality rules. In 2014, Netflix started offering two tiers for its subscription service, including a premium tier that allowed content-streaming at 4K resolutions. This was before net-neutrality rules were implemented, but this plan split has continued all through the years of its implementation to this day. While costs have increased for streaming services, the repeal of net neutrality has no demonstrable effect in adding to those increases. The company has been trying to balance its up-and-down net income for a while, with no apparent pattern tying it to ISP charges.

“ISPs won’t reinvest additional profits from charging more for demanding services.”

Allowing internet service providers to charge more for premium traffic was one of the purported benefits of net neutrality, and this makes sense — a service that is accessing only static Web pages is less demanding than a streaming service needing greater bandwidth. It makes sense to charge more for demanding services, and the promise of net-neutrality regulations was that ISPs would reinvest those profits into building out better, more accessible networks. Proponents claimed this wouldn’t happen without the regulations, but that hasn’t been true. Over the past six years, investment in broadband has increased, and by greater percentages than during the net-neutrality years.

Net-neutrality proponents do bring up some legitimate concerns. The relative lack of competition in ISPs means there’s less accountability to consumers for any negative actions that net neutrality tried to fix, though there has been an increasing number of options for consumers in the past few years. The importance of internet infrastructure has dramatically increased in the post-Covid world, and there is a possibility that down the line, ISPs could take advantage of that. What we’ve seen empirically, however, is not the doomsday predictions that electrified the public back in 2017, but rather a freer, more invested internet that is continuing to grow in speed, capacity, and access. Before we rush to reintroduce the net-neutrality rules, it may be prudent to consider the growth we saw before they were implemented and after they were removed.