Appeals court upholds FCC's net neutrality order
How we got to the point where utility-style regulation is seen as the key to ensuring a free and open internet is a true puzzle.Utility-style regulation gives regulators plenary authority over the internet - meaning full and complete. Their power to do this or to forbid that is highly discretionary and essentially boundless.This in turn gives a gatekeeper role to the regulators: you play by their rules or you don't play. And that means they have final say over what happens across the internet, at least within U.S. jurisdiction.So today they say net neutrality rules.Tomorrow maybe it is price controls in the name of consumer fairness. Or maybe it is mandated compliance with government snooping orders in the name of national security. Or who knows what not?Why not? With a utility-style regulatory framework, you essentially have a form of administrative law run wild, legally speaking. Standards are exceedingly vague, power is wildly broad, and (in the end) he who has the most power and pull to control the regulators winds up having the final say over what the law is or is not as it affects the internet.This is the exact antithesis of the largely hands-off idea of what the government could do with respect to the internet over the past several decades.Of course law tends to conform in the short term to what people want and, today, most people truly do want a free and open internet. Therefore, the risk of any existential threat to internet freedom is either minimal or non-existent in the short term.But if your idea of preserving maximum internet freedom is in effect to place a loaded gun to its head and then declare it is not a problem because it is the good guys who control it and who therefore will use it only for good purposes, then you have what you want with utility-style regulation of the internet.It might just work great as long as the good guys are in control. But what happens when it changes some day? And, if you think it cannot, then you have far, far more faith in human nature than I can possibly summon.Welcome to the brave new world.