Yet another area of unjustified government takeover: the Internet

An article I wrote twenty years ago described the Internet as America's next frontier. And for the past twenty years, it has been a wide-open, innovative, constantly changing – and yes, somewhat unruly – frontier. But all that may have changed with the Federal Communication Commission's recent announcement that it will now treat the Internet as a public utility, regulated under the same laws that once governed the Ma Bell telephone monopoly.

This dramatic change in the government's regulatory oversight of the Internet is the most extreme expression of the "net neutrality" movement. In basic principle, net neutrality is a concept that commands near universal agreement. Net neutrality refers to an open Internet, free of discrimination based on content. There is no disagreement on that principle – just with the definition of open.

To supporters of the FCC's Open Internet Order, open means an Internet regulated in the name of the purported interests of small users vis a vis the cable and telecom broadband providers. To the opponents of the FCC order, open means an Internet free of government regulation and characterized by flexible, adaptive, and vibrant private competition.

The FCC obviously chose the former notion of open. In ruling that the Internet would henceforth be governed pursuant to Title II of the 1934 Communications Act, the agency changed the Internet from a lightly regulated information service to a much more heavily regulated telecommunications service. Because the 1934 Act conferred near total government control over the AT&T telephone monopoly, it now confers a similar degree of government regulatory power over the Internet.

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