UK Eyes Scaling Back Net Neutrality Rules For No Coherent Reason

Broadband

from the policy-purgatory dept

Tell me if any of this sounds familiar: UK telecom regulator Ofcom is proposing that the country scale back popular net neutrality rules under the claim that the rules are harming innovation.

The UK had adopted net neutrality as part of its membership in the EU. With that membership discarded, Ofcom is now claiming the rules should be rolled back. But the reasons they provide, that the basic rules were somehow preventing ISPs from innovating and providing price cuts, are bullshit.

You wouldn’t know that from reading this Bloomberg report on the proposal, which stenographs the following industry claim completely without context or skepticism:

Internet service providers should be allowed to offer a broader range of premium packages on a wider variety of parameters such as latency, and could include discounted tariffs during off-peak hours, according to proposals from the watchdog published Friday.

“The net neutrality rules constrain the activities of broadband providers, and could be restricting their ability to develop new services and manage their networks,” Ofcom said in the report. 

As we’ve covered extensively, net neutrality rules are stopgap measures designed to stop telecom companies from abusing their uncompetitive market power to harm competitors or rip off captive subscribers. You wouldn’t need such rules if these markets had healthy broadband competition, but we don’t have competition thanks to rampant regulatory and political corruption.

There’s absolutely nothing about the EU and UK net neutrality rules preventing ISPs from innovating or offering price cuts. They don’t innovate or offer price cuts because of a lack of competition. It’s all a big dumb corrupt purgatorial policy loop, and a lovely example of regulatory capture, all framed by outlets like Bloomberg as serious adult policymaking, despite being brutally unpopular with the public.

As we’ve been covering, UK and EU ISPs alike have also desperately glommed on to the telecom industry talking point (started here in the US) that Big Tech should give Big Telecom billions in additional dollars for no coherent reason. That’s also parroted again here by Bloomberg un-skeptically and with absolutely no context:

UK internet service provider TalkTalk Telecom Group Ltd welcomed the guidance.

“We think the rules can and should support innovation and network efficiency,” a spokeswoman said. “In addition, content providers should in some cases be able to support network capacity growth while also ensuring consumers continue to have unrestricted access to content.”

This claim that “Big Tech” gets a free ride on the internet and should throw billions of dollars at the telecom industry is very hot right now. Telecom lobbyists have exploited legitimate animosity against tech giants to convince captured lawmakers that a Big Tech tax is a great idea. Despite the fact that corruption means telecom subsidies very often wind up being thrown in the toilet without subsidy reform.

Again, western governments aren’t willing to stand up to telecom monopolies due to corruption. The best we got were some very basic, imperfect stopgap measures to try and rein in telecom monopoly power. But corruption and regulatory capture ensured those rules were short lived in the US. And now, apparently, a scaling back is planned for the UK that’s not based on any coherent logic.

Of course the public and press are generally bored by net neutrality, so nobody much cares. I’d doubt that more than a small handful of readers ever made it to this point in this story, their eyes having glazed over in the first paragraph. I might as well write gibberish like stinky pony lollipop farts in this sentence, since telecom policy has become too boring for anybody to care much about in the Big Tech era.

So we continue to get what we get in the US, Canada, and UK. Monopoly telecom domination, poor service, high prices, spotty availability, slow speeds, with atrocious customer service, all overseen by captured regulators that genuinely could not give any less of a shit about consumer welfare or the litany of obvious harms caused by concentrated telecom monopoly power.

Filed Under: fcc, high speed internet, monopoly power, net neutrality, ofcom, telecom, uk