Coronavirus Crisis Vindicates the FCC’s ‘Net Neutrality’ Rollback is the title of a Wall Street Journal op-ed. The subtitle is: In Europe, meanwhile, heavy-handed regulation is forcing internet providers to throttle video speeds.
The article is behind a paywall. The title and subtitle summarize it nicely. The following excerpts tell more.
The widespread imposition of stay-at-home orders has underscored the critical role that access to the internet plays in modern society. In Europe, networks have struggled to meet bandwidth demand. U.S. networks have faced fewer problems adjusting to the increase in demand. The European Union has embraced a heavy-handed regulatory scheme designed to allocate access to the existing network, while the U.S. has emphasized private investment to expand network capacity.
European regulators were guided by the legal system developed to govern traditional telephone service largely built with taxpayer funds. Rather than fold the internet into an outdated legal regime developed for a different era, the American vision concentrates on encouraging telephone and cable companies to compete by investing to increase their bandwidth. The only major deviation from this pattern occurred in 2015, when the Federal Communications Commission adopted a “net neutrality” rule applying legacy telephone regulation to the internet for the first time. The agency returned to its longstanding investment-oriented policy in 2018.
The U.S. and EU have seen dramatically different investment and utilization. Between 2010 and 2016, American providers invested on average annually 2.35 times as much per household as their European counterparts. This allowed the average U.S. household to consume more than three times as much data as the average European household in 2017, according to Cisco. [End].
The article doesn't say what net neutrality is. Wikipedia and Investopedia say more.
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