FCC’s Internet rules are already working

[Commentary] In her recent column “Congress must protect health of the Internet,” Pat Fong Kushida trots out a litany of allegations against the Federal Communications Commission’s Network Neutrality protections. The FCC rules will “dramatically curtail investments in new networks,” she claims. She adds that the FCC ruling “abandons the longstanding bipartisan agreement on light Internet regulation.” In reality, the rules haven’t hurt investment in the slightest, and there’s no plausible reason to suspect they will.

Since the FCC restored these protections for Internet users in February, we’ve seen Comcast begin to roll out new gigabit fiber services to 18 million locations. Time Warner Cable has accelerated its network upgrades. And AT&T recently announced plans to double its deployment of next-generation broadband services. The Title II protections that Kushida disdains were actually authorized by a bipartisan vote of Congress in 1996. The FCC followed congressional guidelines when it restored them in 2015 -- after millions of people of every political stripe urged the agency to do just that. And it explicitly forbore, or prohibited itself from, the type of heavy-handed rate regulation she now claims the FCC intends to implement. The rules are working. Broadband providers and Internet content companies are investing, and consumers can rest easy knowing that their rights to connect and communicate will be upheld.

[Timothy Karr is senior director of strategy for Free Press]