EDITORIAL: Federal regulation of Internet a terrible idea

Net neutrality sounds like a great thing.

As President Obama said last week, an open Internet is “essential to the American economy, and increasingly to our very way of life.” Without net neutrality, the president says, Internet service providers will “pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas” by connecting customers to some sites more quickly than others. In order to maintain online fairness and freedom, he says, the FCC needs to “implement the strongest possible rules to protect net neutrality.”

So, if net neutrality rules can help preserve the Internet as we know and love it, what’s the problem?

They won’t. That’s the problem.

To the president, net neutrality rules are about pushing big service providers such as Comcast and Verizon to treat all content providers, even giants such as Netflix and Google, equally. In fact, the rules would allow Washington to tell those ISPs how to run their businesses and how much they can charge for service. The president says net neutrality “has been built into the fabric of the Internet since its creation,” and that “no service should be stuck in a ‘slow lane’ because it does not pay a fee,” but the case can be made that, in fact, net neutrality has never existed.

As reported by Wired magazine, companies such as Google, Facebook and Netflix have been paying for the equivalent of “fast lanes” for years. These companies (and others) have negotiated direct connections to big ISPs and have dedicated servers — called “peering connections” and “content delivery servers” — deep inside them. These connections, the magazine argues, are a vital part of the way the Internet works today, and if we sever them, we risk stifling online innovation.

Also, if net neutrality existed as envisioned by the FCC, the Internet would function horribly. Your favorite websites would take forever to load, and the dialed-back bandwidth would make sites such as YouTube and Netflix lightweights rather than the massive entertainment providers that they are today.

The Internet has changed the world and the way we do business and improved our lives in so many ways because it has remained unregulated by the federal government. Now the president wants to make an agency created to regulate the limited spectrums of broadcast radio and TV control a medium with unlimited reach. This is an awful idea.

In calling for the FCC to reclassify the Internet as a utility, President Obama aims to do to the Internet what he did to health insurance: Make it worse and more expensive. If the president pushes forward, he’ll lose in court, as he did in January when federal judges decided net neutrality rules have no basis in federal law. The president is pursuing this power play because Congress won’t pass net neutrality.

For now, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler — a former telecom lobbyist and one of President Obama’s leading fundraisers in 2008 and 2012 — has (somewhat surprisingly) pushed back on the president’s plans, preferring a “hybrid approach” that would tighten the reins a little on broadband service providers while maintaining room for paid prioritization agreements.

Why? Maybe he wants a solution that will stand up in court. Or maybe he knows that instead of attacking fast-lane agreements, Washington should be pushed to explore ideas that actually promote competition among ISPs.

If we want a truly free and open Internet, that is.