Arguments against FCC's Net Neutrality rollback miss that regulation incurs opportunity costs and more attention should be paid to inter-ISP competition
Context & Ripple Effects
The FCC has spent 2017 moving toward repeal: Ajit Pai's full proposal text landed in April, comments ran through the summer, and the vote is now imminent. The opposition camp splits two ways — Techdirt concedes the anti-Title II argument had merit a decade ago but says developments since make repeal a mistake, while The Verge's coverage argues the real problem is the near-total lack of ISP competition.
Thompson's entry cuts across that split: he accepts the rollback while redirecting the critique — regulation carries opportunity costs, and the attention spent defending Title II would be better aimed at building inter-ISP competition. That makes his piece a bridge between the pro-regulation camp and the competition-focused critique, arriving just as responses from nine ISPs show few firm commitments not to block, throttle, or prioritize traffic.
First-order effects
- ISPs emerge from repeal with no binding conduct rules and, per their own responses, mostly non-firm voluntary commitments — so Thompson's argument lands at the exact moment the conduct-versus-structure question becomes live.
- FCC chairman Ajit Pai gains an articulate market-oriented defense of the rollback from outside the usual industry-aligned voices, strengthening the repeal coalition against the Techdirt-style rebuttal.
Second-order effects
- If Thompson's framing takes hold, pressure shifts from the FCC's conduct rulebook toward antitrust and municipal-franchise levers for broadband competition — a harder political fight that neither party has prioritized.
- Content providers and edge services lose the Title II backstop while gaining nothing on the competition front in the near term, pushing them toward contractual peering arrangements and public commitments as substitutes.
Third-order effects
- The episode frames a durable fork in US broadband policy: conduct regulation of a concentrated ISP market versus structural intervention to de-concentrate it — and Thompson's position implies the latter is the only path that doesn't trade one monopoly's abuses for a regulator's costs.
- If repeal proceeds without a competing competition agenda, expect recurring cycles of throttling disputes and state-level patchwork rules until either ISP concentration falls or conduct regulation returns in another form.
The trend: US broadband policy is splitting into a conduct-regulation camp and a competition-structure camp, with the FCC's repeal forcing advocates to choose which lever they actually believe in.