I was interviewed by the New York Sun on the FCC’s plan to re-introduce net neutrality and Title II:

“Generally the left-leaning view is that the Internet is a public good and it should be regulated and allocated by the public sector. It should be just like your water utility or your telephone company,” the deputy director of the Consumer Choice Center, Yaël Ossowski, tells the Sun. Yet others, including Mr. Ossowski, say the internet is competitive, robust, and evolving as is. 

“We don’t need to use a 1934-era rule or legislation to try to understand how to regulate the internet in 2023,” he notes.

The rules implemented under President Obama made “the market much more rigid” and led to “less competition,” Mr. Ossowski says, noting that when companies are classified as public utilities that are “scrutinized by the FCC,” they become more wary of investing and developing. 

The extra steps of doing business for the internet are “always passed on to consumers who have to pay more,” Mr. Ossowski says, and the new regulations are likely to “come at a higher price to people who use the Internet.”

Additionally, the allegations that have surfaced in the Missouri v. Biden case about the Biden administration’s attempts to force tech giants to suppress information and free speech pose a “new concern” about the power the FCC would have in regulating internet providers, Mr. Ossowski says. 

The last few years of government interference in tech raises the specter that neutrality regulations could “include things like misinformation, or things that the government deems is misinformation, and we don’t really know how that would go,” Mr. Ossowski adds.

Published in the New York Sun (archive #1)