Matthew C Klein, Columnist

Stop Whining That the Web is Broken

The arguments in favor of net neutrality only make sense if you think the telecommunications industry is an anti-competitive oligopoly. Maybe so, but in that case drop the "net neutrality" rhetoric and Internet access providers like utilities.

January 15, 2014 at 9:55 PM UTC

By Matthew C Klein

Matthew C. Klein writes for Bloomberg View about the economy and financial markets. He previously wrote for the Economist magazine and its economics blog, Free Exchange. Before that, Klein was a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he spent more than two years studying the history of the Federal Reserve and the intellectual history of monetary economics for an upcoming book by Sebastian Mallaby. He also worked at Bridgewater Associates, where he studied the economies of Central and Eastern Europe and advised institutional investors on asset-liability management. Klein has a bachelor's degree in history from Yale University. Originally from Chicago, he lives in New York.

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The "open Internet" has supposedly been endangered by a federal appeals court's decision Tuesday to override the Federal Communications Commission's so-called "net neutrality" rules. I'm skeptical. Advocates of more intrusive regulation are making some really weird assumptions about the nature of the telecommunications industry.

According to Bloomberg News, "the regulations would have required Internet service providers to treat all online traffic equally, rather than giving preference to companies willing to pay extra fees for faster service." It's hard to think of other businesses that are legally prohibited from offering different products at different prices, as long as they are reasonably transparent and don't discriminate on the basis of things such as race.