Did President Obama Break the Internet with His Call for Net Neutrality?

So President Obama has announced that the
Internet should effectively be regulated as a public utility along
the lines of the old-time Ma Bell phone system. He’s
asking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to
reclassify internet traffic from information services (or Title I
services under current Communications Act rules) to
telecommunication services (or Title II services).

Obama is old enough to know better. If you think cable
companies and internet service providers (ISPs) absolutely suck at
customer service (and they pretty much do), they’re simply faint
echoes of the old Bell system, which set the standard for
awfulness. “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone
company,” joked the
comedian Lily Tomlin back in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Public
utilities and government-granted monopolies — the only sort that
actually stick around for very long — are rarely famous for their
customer service and innovative practices. “The Phone Company” was
enough of a cultural shorthand for all that was bad, rotten, and
bureaucratic in American life that it was the
super-villain in the 1967 black
comedy The President’s
Analyst. 

That’s from my new
Time column.

One of the
main arguments undergirding calls for reclassification and Net
Neutrality more generally is the idea that ISPs are monopolies and
thus immune to market forces that increase customer choice and
satisfaction. That’s simply not true.

According to the FCC’s own
findings, the speed and variety of American Internet
connections are growing substantially every year. Despite claims
that monopolistic ISPs don’t have to listen to customers, 80% of
households have at least two providers that can deliver the
internet at 10Mbps or faster, which is FCC’s top rating. It’s in
the increasingly intense battle over customers that a thousand
flowers will bloom; all sorts of interesting, stupid, and dumb
innovations will be tried; users will be empowered; and tomorrow’s
Internet will look radically different from today’s.

And maybe, just maybe, customer service will be light years
better than what was offered by the phone company of Obama’s
youth.

Read the whole thing here.