FCC chairman Ajit Pai is fond of saying that “the internet was not broken in 2015” when he argues for repeal of our nation’s net neutrality rules. This is particularly funny to me, because in 2014 I literally wrote an article called “The internet is fucked.”
Why was it fucked? Because the free and open internet was in danger of becoming tightly controlled by giant telecom corporations that were already doing things like blocking apps and services from phones and excusing their own services from data caps. Because the lack of competition in the internet access market let these companies act like predatory monopolies. And because our government lacked the will or clarity to just say what everyone already knows: internet access is a utility.
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If Ajit Pai and the other critics of net neutrality were out there promising that rolling back Title II would somehow result in every American having 20 choices of ISPs all engaged in vigorous competition, I’d be cheering them on. We’ve already seen what a tiny amount of competition can do in the wireless market: T-Mobile wandered up to the line of violating net neutrality by zero-rating various services, Verizon and AT&T responded in kind, and eventually the arms race ended up in all four major wireless providers offering unlimited data plans — effectively zero-rating everything and offering consumers something that looks an awful lot like net neutrality. It turns out the American people want net neutrality, and when they speak through the market, they get it.
That’s with just four major competitors in the wireless market, and Pai refuses to say whether he thinks that number should remain at four or get smaller by some combination of T-Mobile and Sprint. Of course. Because his north star isn’t healthy consumer outcomes, it’s healthy corporate outcomes. Rolling back Title II is a massive corporate handout that will line the pockets of Comcast and AT&T, while doing nothing for the average American.
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This is just a fact: the United States has a stunningly uncompetitive market for wired internet access. Fifty-one percent of Americans only have one choice of broadband provider, according to the FCC’s own 2016 data. Thirty-eight percent of Americans only have two choices. Add it up, and 89 percent of Americans have but one or two options for broadband, and one of them is often much slower than the other. This is not a situation ripe for fierce competition and lower prices.
In fact, the lack of broadband competition means that Americans pay more for slower internet access than in most other developed nations. We are not in the top 10 when it comes to average speeds. We are not in the top 10 when it comes to lowest prices. You can argue that the geography of the United States is such that covering the entire country with fiber is difficult, or that Europeans actually pay more because of VAT. At the end of the day, however, the question is simple: why don’t people in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago have more options for faster, cheaper internet than Seoul or London?
Outside big cities, the situation is dire: TheWall Street Journal just ran a lengthy, excellent piece about the many rural Americans who still only have dial-up internet access, locking them out of the modern economy. “Rural broadband, we need that quite honestly more than we need roads and bridges in many of the counties I represent,” said Austin Scott, a Republican congressman from Georgia...
