This is a follow-up blog to the one I posted earlier - there is a link to it in
the original blog I posted.
I’ll let everyone click through to this blog, but highlight one point that I
don’t think people on either side of the Net Neutrality debate have considered.
The anti - TItle II crowd has stated that investment in ISP infrastructure has
declined since the Wheeler FCC Title II decision. There are multiple factors at
work here including the impact (cost) of Title II regulation, the high cost of
deploying FTTH systems, and the prospects for much less costly fixed wireless
over the next few years.
What nobody has paid attention to is the competitive impact of TItle II
regulation on the telcos from the late ‘90s, until 2005, when Telco broadband
was reclassified as an Information service. This is what Thompson say about the
“non-neutral treatment of the telcos relative to the cable companies:
To be clear, I am not posing this study as the end-all be-all in this debate;
what it does suggest, though, is that if investment in broadband is a
priority, then the regulatory approach taken to cable broadband all along —
the so-called “light touch” — is preferable to that taken to DSL. Indeed,
there is at least an argument to be made that one of the reasons cable
companies are so dominant in fixed-line broadband is because of the big
head-start they gained around the turn of the century — that is, it is at
least possible that regulation put us in the situation we are today.