FCC Title II Ruling

I got an email from the Heartland Institute today, purporting to give an expert opinion about today’s Net Neutrality ruling. The money quote reads: “The Internet is not broken, it is a vibrant, continually growing market that has thrived due to the lack of regulations that Title II will now infest upon it.”

This is wrong both on Internet history, and on the current state of broadband in the US.

It was the common carriage regulatory requirement on voice lines that first enabled the Internet to explode into the consumer world, by obliging the phone companies to allow consumers to hook up modems to their voice lines. It is the current unregulated environment in the US that has caused our Internet to become, if not broken, at least considerably worse than it is in many other countries:

America currently ranks thirty-first in the world in terms of average download speeds and forty-second in average uploads speeds, according to a recent study by Ookla Speedtest. Consumers pay much more for Internet access in the U.S. than in many other countries.

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