In case anybody longs for the days of well-regulated utilities which saved us from the depredations of the free marketplace, consider how well served we were by allowing a utility to monopolize telephone service.
The FCC was created by the Communications Act of 1933, in part to regulate the monopoly phone utility. AT&T was broken up in 1984. During that 50 year period, which included some of the most remarkable technology innovations in human history, the customer experience for US phone customers changed remarkably little.
* Remember party lines, where 5 or 10 houses shared one phone line? They survived into 1970s and 80s in many places, thanks to regulated phone service.
* Remember waiting until 11pm to call grandma, because long distance rates went down at night? Once those wonderful utilities were deregulated in the 1980s, long distance rates dropped by a factor of 10 almost overnight.
* Remember rotary phones? Remember having to pay a monthly rental charge to the phone company? Remember being prohibited from connecting a phone or an answering machine to the line in your own home? Cheap cordless phones, faxes, answering machines and modems, in a vast assortment of varieties and colors, only became available after the utility-idea was killed.
* Do you like your wireless phone? Regulated phone companies had a great version. If you were lucky enough to live in New York and you were wealthy enough and waited long enough, you might be one of the few hundred customers who were permitted to have a wireless telephone in 1970s.
* In one of my favorite examples of the benefits of well-regulated utilities, technical research papers on the CDMA technology that has enabled cheap wireless service were not even permitted to be published in any of the leading communications technical journals in the late 1970s and early 1980s. CDMA was not AT&T’s favored technology and Bell Labs employees controlled the editorial process.
If you want to freeze the Internet in place and make certain that our grandchildren in 2067 will enjoy the exact same browsing experience that we have today in 2017, then by all means let’s go ahead and regulate the Internet as a utility.
And let’s not forget the Fairness Doctrine and “equal time” and FCC regulation of content. It was empowered by the idea that communication infrastructure is a natural monopoly so therefore the governemt must intervene to promote fairness and goodness.
The goal of net neutrality was to assure that all prog and liberal speech was heard and that all hate speech was closed off. Anyone want to guess where that was going to take us? That some Freepers were more concerned about their movie stream then letting the Fed have more power was astounding.