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AEIdeas

Much time has been spent trying to calculate the potential impact of tax reform. With every change in the House and Senate proposals comes more modeling. Lots of guesses, albeit educated ones.

But net neutrality — another complicated and controversial public policy issue — would at first glance appear to present an easier forecasting task. On Thursday, the FCC is expected to approve Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal to repeal the agency’s 2015 Open Internet Order. It’s not unreasonable that a first-take analysis might simply look at what the internet was like before 2015 and make some observations about a post-repeal world. The internet provided ever-greater amounts of eagerly consumed content. Instances of net neutrality violations were few and far between. Things seemed to work pretty well. So back to the future, right?

See also: John Oliver's net neutrality rants aren't helping

Probably not. There will likely be changes in how tech businesses operate. Repeal “would clear the way for a range of new deals between internet-service providers and online media and other services, in a victory for cable and wireless firms,” notes The Wall Street Journal. Much of the swirl will happen around paid prioritization. Internet service providers might strike deals with web sites for faster delivery of their content. Maybe this will mean lower prices for consumers. But maybe it will hurt innovation by raising barriers and costs for smaller firms and startups.

We’ll see. So will the FTC, which will be on the lookout for anticompetitive and anticonsumer behavior. And also the tech media, which doesn’t much like the Pai FCC, will certainly be closely monitoring developments.

But the pre-2015 internet gives some reason for optimism. As analyst Ben Thompson has argued, “There is evidence that pre-existing regulation and antitrust law, along with media pressure, are effective at policing bad behavior.” That’s a good point, as is another one Thompson makes. Regulations don’t just deal with potential harms. They also affect potential positive developments as the internet and its uses continue to evolve. More from Thompson:

The question that must be grappled with, though, is whether or not the Internet is “done.” By that I mean that today’s bandwidth is all we all never need, which means we can risk chilling investment through prophylactic regulation and the elimination of price signals that may spur infrastructure build-out (that being the elimination of paid prioritization). . . . But what if we aren’t done? What if virtual reality with dual 8k displays actually becomes something meaningful? What if those imagined remote medicine applications are actually developed? What if the Internet of Things moves beyond this messy experimentation phase and into real-time value generation, not just in the home but in all kinds of unimagined commercial applications? I certainly hope we will have the bandwidth to support all of that! Who, though, will build that bandwidth?

And who will pay for that bandwidth? That may really be what this entire debate is about. There will likely be litigation, when what’s really needed is legislation. And more competition.