The FCC is Lying When It Claims Net Neutrality Hurt Investment

The FCC is Lying When It Claims Net Neutrality Hurt Investment

As ISPs have poured millions of dollars into killing net neutrality protections, they have made one common refrain: that the FCC's fairly modest net neutrality rules somehow destroyed network investment in the United States. Never mind that any time a journalist fact checks these claims they find they're indisputably false. ISP lobbyists, lawyers, executives and hired mouthpieces continue to repeat the claim -- as if redundancy somehow creates truth itself.

In fact there's nearly a half-dozen different ISP executives on public record admitting to investors that this claim net neutrality hurt sector investment is false.

If that's not enough for you, you can check out any publicly available SEC filing or earnings report from the last two years (several journalists have, and found the industry's claim here to be utterly unsubstantiated). The fact that companies like Altice are still investing in massive fiber to the home projects, and wireless carriers are breaking spending records as they hoover up spectrum for 5G also clearly contradict this claim.

If investment is stalling anywhere, it's in uncompetitive parts of the country -- an issue that won't be fixed by gutting regulatory oversight of one of the least liked, and least-competitive business sectors in American industry.

And yet, the claim that net neutrality killed investment continues to play a starring role in Ajit Pai's quest to dismantle popular net neutrality protections, and countless media reports on the subject. That's in large part because large ISPs like Verizon, Comcast and AT&T hire economists, academics, and other policy parrots to actively cherry pick CAPEX data (by say, taking a dip in CAPEX tied to Charter ending its deployment of digital adapters and blaming it on net neutrality) until it supports this false assertion.

Pai bandied about the claim again this week as he rushed to defend himself from criticism that he's selling out consumers and the health of the internet for his former employers at Verizon. It played a starring role on a fact sheet (pdf) released by the FCC this week.

"Following the adoption of the Obama Administration’s 2015 heavy-handed Internet regulations, broadband investment has fallen for two years in a row -- the first time that's happened outside of a recession in the Internet era," claims the agency.

Except again, that's a flat out lie. And when reporters capable of actually fact-checking the numbers discover that (as the folks at Business Insider did this week), the FCC isn't capable of providing an adequate answer. Instead, hysterically, the agency is directing reporters that question their math directly to US Telecom, a lobbying organization spearheaded by AT&T:

quote: During a conference call FCC officials held with reporters last week, I asked about this discrepancy between Pai's assertion that investment is declining and what the actual data shows. The officials dismissed my question, saying I had my facts wrong. But they didn't offer any data that would prove Pai's argument.Reached later, an FCC representative pointed to the USTelecom data (posted above) that Pai previously referenced. The representative declined to make the chairman or anyone else on his staff available for an interview.

For those playing along at home, that's a government agency, pressed to support its attack on popular consumer protections with hard data, directing reporters to. When informed that this datamanipulated for PR purposes, the FCC is only capable of shrugging. The fact that there's countless people that think this ismakes it clear just how far down the post-truth rabbit hole we've fallen.