April 2017

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Pai brings with him a love of broadcasting, a love of small businesses, a love of Kansas, and so much more. His selection may prove the catalyst for the regulatory golden age of our nation’s broadcasters.

In the grand scheme, whether to jettison the FCC is not for any of us to ultimately decide. Hearty discussions are important and should continue to be had as they can inform policymakers, in this case Congress. But the hopes for any real fundamental restructuring of the agency’s duties – or even if it should exist – will require legislation, which has proven difficult to enact for many reasons. In the meantime, the agency can address many of its flaws on its own. Better protecting the airwaves would demonstrate our commitment to a key original obligation. Additionally, reorganizing the internal structure and removing unnecessary burdens on broadcasters would line up nicely with the policy goals of many of us at the Commission. In closing, let me suggest that the new Executive Branch and Legislative Branch provide you with a wonderful opportunity – use it wisely!

[Commentary] The network neutrality activists won a bigger victory than they ever expected when the Federal Communications Commission dropped the hammer of Title II telephone regulation onto the internet. It may therefore be useful to recount a little history as an inoculation against the coming fever. Here are some of the empty stories that led to Title II, which will likely be repeated in various forms in the coming months.

To change the nation’s bipartisan internet policy, the activists had to manufacture a story of US broadband failure. In service of the failed-broadband argument, the FCC in 2009 commissioned a report from Harvard’s Berkman Center on the state of US broadband. After withering critiques by eminent economists, Berkman excised some of the most egregious mistakes and issued an updated version, but the report was so compromised that the FCC quit citing the research. The false Netflix narrative: Perhaps no event over the past 15 years advanced the effort to regulate the internet as much as the supposed throttling of Netflix in the winter of 2013–14.

Net neutrality was never about anything so technical as “treating all bits equally” or anything so economic as protecting “innovation at the edge.” It was about gaining bureaucratic and political control of the digital economy – and thus, increasingly, because of the centrality of information networks, the physical economy, too. A rollback of this short-lived, unnecessary policy will thus ensure the internet’s continued upward trajectory.

[Swanson is president of Entropy Economics LLC]