This year’s net neutrality debate has completely missed the point

[Commentary] Despite the doomsday scares of a technology apocalypse, the current fight over who and how to regulate the Internet is not about the future of innovation, Internet access, broadband pricing, competition, fairness, or motherhood. It’s something much less exciting, though, depending on the outcome, much more dangerous.

At best, a full or partial government takeover of Internet access would almost certainly slow future network evolution. And in a bit of irony lost on advocates, such a radical move, assuming it passed legal muster, would actually make “fast lanes” easier, not harder, for Internet service providers to market. There’s simply no benefit -- and enormous cost -- to turning the Internet over to the Federal Communications Commission. Indeed, given the dearth of serious technical or legal problems in nearly 20 years of an unregulated Internet, it’s not clear that any new FCC rules are required. But in no sense is the Democrats’ proposal designed to “kill” net neutrality or otherwise destroy the Internet. As far as the Internet is concerned, Congress and the White House got things very very right in 1996. A million piece of hate mail to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and new terminology can’t change the past. Let’s hope it won’t change the future either.

[Downes is Project Director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy]