Looking Back at the Net Neutrality Order

Chairman Ajit Pai used three arguments to justify ending net neutrality. First, he claimed that the net neutrality rules in effect were a disincentive for big ISPs to make investments and that ending net neutrality would lead to a boom in broadband investment. He also argued that ending net neutrality would free the big ISPs to make broadband investments in rural parts of the US that were underserved. Finally, he argued that the end of net neutrality would spark the growth of telecom jobs. It’s been two years since he used those arguments to justify the repeal net neutrality and it’s easy to see that none of those things have come to pass.

The investment claim is easy to check. The big ISPs are starting to release their 2018 financial results and it looks like capital spending in 2018 – the first year after the end of net neutrality – are lower than in 2017. We’ve already heard from Comcast and Charter and that capital spending was down in 2018 over 2017. The industry analyst MoffettNathanson has already predicted that capital spending for the four biggest cable companies – Comcast, Charter, Altice, and CableONE is expected to drop by 5.8% more in 2019. Anybody who watches the cable companies understands that they all just made big investments in upgrading to DOCSIS 3.1 and that capital spending ought to drop significantly for the next several years.

MoffettNathanson also predicts that wireline capital spending for Verizon and AT&T will drop from $20.3 billion in 2018 to $19.6 billion in 2019. The press is also full of articles lamenting that investments in 5G by these companies is far smaller than hoped for by industry vendors. It seems that net neutrality had no impact on telecom spending (as anybody who has spent time at an ISP could have told you). It’s virtually unheard of for regulation to drive capital spending.

The jobs claim was a ludicrous one because the big companies have been downsizing for years and have continued to do so after net neutrality was repealed. The biggest layoff came from Verizon in October 2018 when the company announced that it was eliminating 44,000 jobs and transferring another 2,500 to India. This layoff is an astronomical 30% of its workforce. AT&T just announced on January 25 that it would eliminate 4,600 jobs, the first part of a 3-year plan to eliminate 10,000 positions. While the numbers are smaller for Comcast, they laid off 500 employees on January 4 and also announced the close of a facility with 405 employees in Atlanta.

Pai’s claim that net neutrality was stopping the big ISPs from investing in underserved areas might be the most blatantly false claim the Chairman has made since he took the Chairman position. The big ISPs haven’t made investments in rural America in the last decade. They have been spending money in rural America in the last few years – but only funds handed to them by the FCC through the CAF II program to expand rural broadband and the FCC’s Mobility Fund to expand rural cellular coverage. I’ve been hearing rumors all over the industry that most of the big ISPs aren’t even spending a lot of the money from those two programs – something I think will soon surface as a scandal. There is no regulatory policy that is going to get the big ISPs to invest in rural America and it was incredibly unfair to rural America for the Chairman to imply they ever would.

Chairman Pai’s arguments for repealing net neutrality were all false and industry insiders knew it at the time. I probably wrote a dozen blog posts about the obvious falsehoods being peddled. The Chairman took over the FCC with the goal of eliminating net neutrality at the top of his wish list and he adopted these three talking points because they were the same ones being suggested by big ISP lobbyists.

What bothers me is this is not how regulation is supposed to work. Federal and state regulatory agencies are supposed to gather the facts on both sides of a regulatory issue, and once they choose a direction they are expected to explain why. The orders published by the FCC and other regulatory bodies act similar to court orders in that the language in these orders are then part of the ongoing record that is used later to understand the ‘why’ behind an order. In later years courts rely on the discussion in regulatory orders to evaluate disputes based upon the new rules. The order that repeals net neutrality sadly repeats these same falsehoods that were used to justify the repeal.

There are always two sides for every regulatory issue and there are arguments that could be made against net neutrality. However, the Chairman and the big ISPs didn’t want to publicly make the logical arguments against net neutrality because they knew these arguments would be unpopular. For example, there is a legitimate argument to made for allowing ISPs to discriminate against certain kinds of web traffic – any network engineer will tell you that it’s nearly mandatory to give priority to some bits over others. But the ISPs know that making that argument makes it sound like they want the right to shuttle customers into the ’slow lane’, and that’s a PR battle they didn’t want to fight. Instead, telecom lobbyists cooked up the false narrative peddled by Chairman Pai. The hoped the public would swallow these false arguments rather than argue for the end of net neutrality on its merits.