The case for Internet regulation has not been made. As of the date of this filing, it will have been 1,698 days without a 'net neutrality' problem emerging in the nation.

The comments submitted in response to the Commission's Notice of Inquiry ("NOI") illustrate the fundamental philosophical rift in the net neutrality debate -- namely, whether marketplace arrangements between consumers, network service providers, and application and content providers should continue to drive the growth of the Internet, or instead whether pervasive legal and regulatory micromanaging should attempt to dictate completely 'neutral' networks. The comments favoring net neutrality regulation rest on unfounded predictions - which are well past their "sell by" date - that Internet service providers would engage in practices that would relegate customers to "the digital equivalent of a winding dirt road." As exemplified by the submitted comments, the crisis-in-theory outgrowth of these prognostications has not, after more than half a decade, turned into a crisis-in-fact. In short, the broadband access market is not evolving in a way that "end of the Internet" millenarians said it would.

Labels: net neutrality