That is the topic of a recent Bloomberg column. Here is the opening bit:
One of the longest, most technical and, as it turns out, most inconsequential public-policy debates of the 21st century was about net neutrality. Now that a federal appeals court has effectively ended the debate by striking down the FCC’s net neutrality rules, it’s worth asking what we’ve learned.
If you have forgotten the sequence of events, here’s a quick recap: In 2015, during President Barack Obama’s presidency and after years of debate, the Federal Communications Commission issued something called the Open Internet Order, guaranteeing net neutrality, which is broadly defined as the principle that internet service providers treat all communications equally, offering both users and content providers consistent service and pricing. Two years later, under President Donald Trump, the FCC rescinded the net neutrality requirement. It was then reinstated under President Joe Biden in 2024, until being struck down earlier this month.
Hardly anyone cares or even notices, and the rest of the column explains why. Here is one part of that argument:
The actual reality has been somewhat different. Bandwidth has expanded, and Netflix transmissions do not interfere with Facebook, or vice versa. There is plenty of access to go around. That has been the case during periods with net neutrality and without.
So one lesson of the net neutrality debate comes from economics: Supply is elastic, at least when regulation allows it to be.
Internet experts Tim Wu, Cory Doctorow, Farhad Manjoo and many others were just plain, flat out wrong about this, mostly due to their anti-capitalist mentality.
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