With President Obama’s announcement on Monday urging the FCC to regulate the Internet under a 1934 law that managed the old monopoly Bell system as a public utility, the net neutrality debate has officially descended to the ninth circle of hell.

Ever since January, when a D.C. federal court of appeals rejected the FCC’s last effort at passing enforceable “Open Internet” rules, consumers have been whipped into a froth about supposed conspiracies to “end the Internet as we know it” and “kill net neutrality.”

Much of this rhetoric is being stoked by self-styled consumer advocates who have long wanted—secretly and otherwise—to see the federal government take over ownership and operation of the Internet infrastructure, or at least turn it into a public utility—you know, like our beloved power, water, and transportation systems.

But given the obvious lack of appeal of saying so directly, the advocates have evolved over the years to fighting proxy wars, refining their ability to sow discontent and even panic among Internet users. The inflammatory rhetoric reached a high water mark this year with a notorious rant by comedian John Oliver, resulting in millions of comments being filed in the ongoing FCC proceeding—nearly all of them form letters and other spam.

As I have testified repeatedly before Congress, public utility rules are the worst possible regulatory framework for industries characterized by constant technological innovation. The effect of such rules would be to offset the speed and flexibility of entrepreneurial innovation with the plodding rigidity of federal and state bureaucrats, more focused on process than on outcomes.

The advocates of public utility rules—now joined by the White House—clearly don’t see it that way. But it’s worth remembering that they never have. As far back as 1999, at the dawn of broadband Internet access through DSL and cable modems, the same advocates were making the same urgent pleas. Absent immediate nationalization of the Internet, they argued, ISPs were certain to block or otherwise disadvantage start-ups, leaving the Internet in the hands of a few dominant content providers. You know, like AOL, GeoCities, and Blue Mountain electronic cards. (Google search was still in beta.)

Back then, fortunately, the White House, Congress, and the FCC ignored the doomsayers. Instead, a rare bipartisan coalition held fast to the view that for emerging technologies, light-touch regulation was more likely to encourage competition and discipline market participants than the heavy hand of regulators. Broadband providers were left to invest as they saw fit, and to develop services that responded to rapidly changing consumer demands. As wireless networks evolved from voice to data, the light-touch approach was extended to mobile broadband services.

The results, of course, speak for themselves. Despite the lack of any net neutrality rules, Google took over the search market (and everything else), Netflix emerged to provide a serious challenge to traditional cable TV, and AOL became a punchline. Today’s tech giants — think Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce and LinkedIn — didn’t even exist in 1999. Indeed, of the ten most valuable Internet companies today, six of them emerged well after “the Internet as we know it” was said to be facing the immediate and existential threats that, absent enforceable net neutrality rules, are apparently still just around the corner.

Meanwhile, without the regulators there to supervise investments and upgrades, private investors have binged on competing broadband technologies. Since 1996, when Congress and the Clinton Administration wisely chose to leave the Internet out of the utility regulations the President now wants to impose, over a trillion dollars has been spent building new Internet-based cable, fiber, and mobile broadband networks.

Download speeds, which topped out at 56K in 1999, now average over 38 Mbps, an increase of nearly 100,000%. Transit prices continue to fall proportionately. Trillions more in new value has been generated by entrepreneurs and disruptors across industries, much of it in the U.S.

All without the intense oversight of the FCC, or without enforceable net neutrality rules of any kind.

Today, most U.S. consumers have a choice of at least two wired broadband providers. Recent advances in mobile technology—where the U.S. continues to dominate—are making mobile an imminent competitor to wired, adding to market discipline. Most mobile users have a choice of four or more networks.

Europe, by comparison, which kept its Internet providers on a short regulatory leash, still operates largely on DSL technologies, with almost no significant Internet companies having been created.

Of course we don’t have perfect competition in either access or applications, but even the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division acknowledges that perfect competition in capital intensive industries is neither likely nor necessary. Market failures, when they’ve occurred, have been modest, short-lived, and largely self-correcting. They almost certainly cost consumers less than the imposition of regulations, let alone the full monty of public utility rules.

As every consumer knows, in other words, the Internet ecosystem is working better than nearly any other industry and certainly better than our moribund public utilities, which the American Society for Civil Engineers gives an overall grade of D+. It is estimated that over 850 water mains break every day in North America. In California, where I live, the president of the state PUC recently resigned amid revelations of a too-cozy relationship with a power company, in part the cause of a deadly gas pipeline explosion in 2010.

But now, according to the White House, “the time has come” to regulate the Internet under the same plodding, expensive, and often corrupt model. Why? Because, according to the President’s statement, the Internet has become essential, not only to our economy, but to “our very way of life.”

Surely it has, but it is a very strange kind of regulatory logic that concludes that when a technology is wildly successful due to a carefully considered decision not to overregulate it, it suddenly requires intensive government oversight.

What, instead, is a well-meaning regulator to do?

Earlier this fall, as part of its ongoing Open Internet proceeding, Chairman Wheeler hosted a series of roundtable discussions, most of which I attended. One of the last brought together economists of all political persuasions, who argued the case for and against additional FCC oversight of the Internet.

Wheeler, clearly frustrated by the lack of consensus, ended the session by asking if anyone could provide him an economic model that would secure the continued and unique nature of the Internet, where entry costs are low and new entrants can scale rapidly thanks to network effects. (What Paul Nunes and I call “catastrophic success.”)

I have an answer for the Chairman, and for all would-be regulators of the Internet and other Big Bang Disruptors. The answer is to rely on the very economic principle that is driving the technology, and its adoption, ever forward at accelerating speeds. The answer, in others words, is to rely not on regulatory law but on Moore’s Law—Gordon Moore’s prescient prediction in 1965 that computing power would continue to double every 12 to 18 months, with prices falling proportionately.

Low entry costs and rapid scaling are the result of a unique set of economic behaviors. Under Moore’s Law, the core components of computing have continued to grow faster, cheaper and smaller on a predictable basis for an extended period of time—the first time a core commodity has behaved in that manner in the history of industrial economies.

That’s the true driver of the Internet’s success, not the vague and largely apocryphal “principle” of net neutrality—a creation of legal academics and not the network engineers who constantly tweak the network to optimize performance as Internet traffic evolves from data to voice and from voice to video.

It is Moore’s Law that makes it possible for underfunded start-ups with a superior product to sign up millions of users in a matter of months. It’s is Moore’s Law that punishes incumbents that fail to continue innovating—think Alta Vista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and Bing—or to do so fast enough to hold onto users who in other industries might have been locked in.

The best way to ensure that profound and powerful economic principle continues to operate is to continue leaving it alone, having faith that it will keep driving disruptive innovation that generates consumer surplus and economic growth. When it falters—if it falters—we can talk about regulating a slowed or even stagnant Internet using the imperfect and costly tools developed for industries and commodities that became more expensive and less abundant over time.

But until then, regulators should do what they’ve been doing since the dawn of the commercial Internet—leaving governance to the engineers, and trusting that the market, and increasingly empowered consumers, will solve market problems faster and more efficiently than any traditional form of government. To preserve the Open Internet, which has indeed become essential, we should…do nothing.

Such “regulatory humility,” as the FTC’s Maureen Ohlhausen calls it, may be a bitter pill for well-meaning Beltway denizens to swallow. But it’s not impossible. It was, after all, the approach taken by farsighted members of both parties in the critical early days of the Internet.

Rather than undoing their legacy with a single stroke, the President should be celebrating their wisdom, and encouraging his Administration to do the same.