Net Neutrality, Veterans, and Telehealth: The Beginning of a Regulatory Morass?

California’s net neutrality law, which a federal district court upheld in February, is already wading into the regulatory morass that brought down past regulatory regimes charged with maintaining neutrality in rail transport and energy. Specifically, the California law is likely to generate an endless and costly series of regulatory rulemakings on how to define categories of service that can be zero-rated—that is, used without counting against a data cap—and which applications must be included in those categories, without any evidence that it would generate offsetting benefits. I do not dismiss outright the underlying concerns of some net neutrality proponents. In principle, an ISP with few competitors might be able use zero-rating to engage in anticompetitive practices, like foreclosing competing online services. For example, an ISP might try to benefit its own video streaming service over a competitors’. In practice, however, while ISPs have zero-rated their own services, those actions do not appear to have been particularly profitable or harmed competitors.