Why wireless will escape the FCC’s redefinition

Today (Dec. 4), the Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington will hear oral arguments challenging the Federal Communications Commission’s new Internet regulations. As you’ll recall, the FCC in February reversed long-standing policy and said it would govern the Internet using the Communications Act’s 80-year old telephone rules, known as Title II. Especially surprising was the FCC’s choice to subject mobile broadband to the old rules. Until the final rule was revealed, no FCC net neutrality proposal had included wireless, and for very good reason, as we shall see. 

The policy upheaval was difficult to justify given the extraordinary success of the U.S. Internet economy. Under a two-decade-old, bipartisan consensus of Internet freedom, the U.S. created most of the world’s cutting-edge Internet technologies and content platforms. Residential broadband expanded to reach nearly 100 million homes, while mobile subscriptions grew to some 330 million, more than the American population. The U.S. jumped to the lead in search, social networking, cloud computing, and mobile hardware and apps. U.S. Internet traffic, a rough measure of consumer value, expanded from one terabyte per month to more than 20 million TB per month. And today, the market value of just seven American information technology companies — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Intel and Oracle — totals $2.5 trillion.

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