Net Neutrality Policies and Regulation in the United States

The US debate about net neutrality has been unusually contentious for a telecommunications regulatory issue, most recently culminating in a 2017 reversal of a 2015 decision to apply traditional telephone regulations, written for a monopoly era, to internet service providers. This article reviews this history, beginning 1956 when the government first imposed an industry boundary between transmission of information on the one hand, and the creation and processing of information on the other. This regulatory legacy remains embedded in US law and has led to some of the muddle. This article also examines the academic literature relating to net neutrality. On this, the answers found in the literature vary depending on assumptions made about technology, industry structure, and industry practices. When the answer to the question of whether regulations are beneficial is “it depends,” and the scenarios that give different answers are realistic, it would seem that the policy approach should favor applying competition and consumer protection laws that address problems when they occur rather than ex ante regulations, which would be certain to harm at least in some situations.