The most surprising thing about net neutrality is that the Internet policy community is still debating it 15 years after the idea was born. If it were the magic bullet it’s alleged to be, by now we all would have seen the light, embraced it, and moved on to more pressing issues such as privacy and cybersecurity.

Net neutrality is essentially the belief that intelligence inside the Internet is detrimental to innovation at the network’s edge. This misguided faith leads advocates to demand lobotomies for Internet service providers in the vain hope of maximizing the Internet’s potential.

While most people who are aware of net neutrality believe it to be a good thing—even if they can’t define it—it delivers the opposite of its promise.

Net neutrality hasn’t extended high-speed broadband networks to all corners of the nation and the globe, for example. In fact, it hasn’t even made the networks we have any faster or more reliable. Networks have indeed improved at an awesome rate since the 1990s, but net neutrality has had nothing to do with this progress.

Likewise, net neutrality has not made the Internet safer or more secure, nor can it. Progress toward greater security depends on technical and regulatory enhancements that we haven’t even had time to discuss because net neutrality has sucked all the oxygen out of the room.

And net neutrality has not made networks any less expensive—nor can it, because it requires costly investments in network infrastructure to deal with trivial engineering issues such as fleeting moments of network overload.

Worst of all, net neutrality is not actually enforceable. This question was studied by British computer scientist Neil Davies for Ofcom, the U.K.’s FCC, in 2015. Davies looked at the six best methods of “traffic management detection” described in the academic literature and found all of them wanting in some important way.

Net neutrality enforcers need the ability to detect unfair treatment of Internet sites; without this capability regulations banning such conduct are meaningless. But Davies declares “no tool or combination of tools currently available is suitable for practical use” in this endeavor.