Want Real Choice in Broadband? Make These Three Things Happen

REGULATORS ARE NOW off the backs of big internet providers. Thanks to a resolution signed by President Trump earlier this month, consumer-friendly privacy rules passed by the Obama-era Federal Communications Commission won’t take effect. Rules designed to protect net neutrality—the idea that internet providers shouldn’t be able to give certain content preferential treatment—seem likely to fall next.

Republicans argue that the government should stay out of regulating the internet. And, in a perfect world, they’d be right. Ideally, if your internet service provider slipped permission to use your browsing history for ad targeting into its fine print or decided to charge you more to access Netflix than Hulu, you’d just switch to a different provider that offered better terms.

But that’s not an option most people in the US have.

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The problem is an almost total absence of political will to force broadband providers to share their infrastructure. “Even in the Obama-era FCC, which was the most bullish on competition, there was not receptivity to going to this model,” says Dane Jasper, founder of the San Francisco-based internet provider Sonic. Regulators seem to believe that this is too radical an idea for the US, despite the fact that until 2005, DSL internet providers had to lease their wires.