By now, we know that many ISPs are not upgrading the connections or “ports” over which Netflix traffic enters their network because they want Netflix to pay a fee for that traffic. Thus, users who were paying for Internet service plans that provided more than sufficient bandwidth to view online video were unable to use their Internet connections to do what they wanted because their ISP was forcing Netflix to pay up. When Netflix finally caved and agreed to pay Comcast for interconnection, Netflix’s quality quickly improved.

Tough Lessons From Mobile and Music

Just as American users have experienced the power of user choice, U.S. Internet companies have experienced the power of being able to innovate without permission, without fear, and at low cost.

Since the Internet’s inception, Internet access in the U.S. has been guided by one basic principle: Internet service providers that provide the on-ramps to the Internet should not control what happens on the Internet. Originally, this principle was built into the architecture of the Internet. In the mid-1990s, however, technology emerged that allows ISPs to interfere with the applications, content, and services on their networks. In the face of this threat, the FCC has taken numerous actions to preserve this earlier principle by, for example, taking enforcement actions that stopped discriminatory conduct, imposing merger conditions, attaching requirements to stimulus grants for broadband services and to certain parts of the wireless spectrum, and, in 2010, promulgating enforceable rules.

The FCC’s commitment to and enforcement of this basic principle—that ISPs don’t get to pick winners and losers on the Internet—means Internet users in the U.S. haven’t had to worry about whether ISPs might block or discriminate against certain kinds of content or applications. Innovators who have an idea for a new application have not needed permission from Internet service providers in order to innovate and have been able to realize their ideas at low cost. This is a well-oiled free market at work.

But entrepreneurs and investors have experienced a very different world in mobile, and they don’t want to live in that kind of world again.

They remember with horror what the mobile Internet in the U.S. was like before the advent of the app stores—back when only a select few were able to get the carriers’ blessing that allowed them to realize their idea for an application. And they got a taste of things to come in December 2011 when AT&T Wireless, Verizon Wireless, and T-Mobile all prevented Google Wallet—a mobile payment application that was first to market in what was predicted to be a $56.7 billion market by 2015—from getting to its subscribers.

Those carriers’ actions not only deprived 75 percent of mobile users in the U.S. of the ability to use an innovative new payment technology; they also prevented Google from realizing its first-mover advantage. While the carriers were mostly silent about their motivations, analysts were quick to point out that AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile had partnered to develop a competing mobile payment service called ISIS, which was not ready to launch. For many, this was a wake-up call. Innovators and investors were already concerned about the lack of strong network neutrality rules for the mobile Internet in the United States. If even Google, one of the nation’s largest corporations, could be blocked by wireless carriers, every mobile innovator and investor in the country was at the mercy of the carriers.