Anyone who followed the 2017 debate over so-called “net neutrality” regulations, the rules that bind internet service providers, will remember countless dire warnings about how the Trump administration’s rollback of the rules supposedly endangered the internet as we know it.
Official accounts for the Democrats tweeted out absurdities such as this:
Meanwhile, elected officials such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said that rolling back net neutrality would mean that “the internet and its free exchange of information as we have come to know it will cease to exist.” Legacy media “news” articles, not opinion pieces, breathlessly repeated these warnings, with CNN even making such hysteria its homepage banner.
None of this has aged particularly well.
In the roughly six years since Trump repealed net neutrality, we haven’t seen internet service providers throttle speeds or charge us for every tweet. In fact, internet speeds have only increased, as has investment into broadband access. Yet, for some reason, the Biden administration is nonetheless bringing back net neutrality regulations.
Last week, the Federal Communications Commission voted to reinstate the rules along party lines.
“I think in a modern digital economy, we should have a national net neutrality policy and make clear the nation’s expert on communications has the ability to act when it comes to broadband,” Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, a Biden appointee, said. “This is good for consumers, good for public safety and good for national security.”
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, a Republican appointee, voted against the reinstatement and blasted it as a “power grab.”
“My concern is that there’s no reason for the government to go down this path of granting itself more powers to second guess all the decisions about the internet functions,” Carr told Fox Business. “So my worry is that it’s a power grab without any need or justification, and it’s very difficult to predict the harms that could ultimately flow from that.”
Carr is exactly right.
The blunt tool of government intervention is only ever justified when there is a glaring problem — real people are being harmed — that the free market and civil society simply cannot address for some reason. In this instance, there are simply no pressing problems that could possibly justify the imposition of these drastic, costly regulations on businesses. After all, the lack of real victims is why defenders of net neutrality had to speculate about hypothetical harms rather than point to tangible ones, and now we know that this speculation was all baseless.
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If the Biden administration had actually made policies with America’s best interests in mind, it would’ve simply taken the L, learned its lesson, and left the internet alone after seeing that net neutrality rules weren’t needed after all. But instead, it’s reimposing these rules anyway, and there’s only one explanation: a thirst for power and control.
From trying to start an Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board” to usurping the Constitution to try to bribe young voters to commandeering the national rental market via fiat and so much more, the Biden administration has time and time again shown its disdain for restraints on its power. And, if left unchecked, that’s something that actually could jeopardize the future as we know it.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.
