Nationalize the internet

The biggest trend in administrative law over the last few decades has been reductions in the degree to which the government micro-manages the economy. In both the U.S. (with bi-partisan support) and the EU, industries have been privatized, invasive regulatory regimes have been replaced with light-touch ones, etc. Germany energy law post-1998, for example, is pretty recognizable to someone familiar with American energy law. There was a time when the government either owned major industries, or micro-managed things like the routes airlines or trucking companies ran and the prices they charged. Pretty much the whole developed world has agreed to get rid of most of that.

By and large, these reforms have been overwhelmingly successful. In the U.S. and EU, you can go almost anywhere and get a 4G mobile wireless connection, using networks built almost entirely with private money. UPS and FedEx--and services like Amazon built on them--are the direct outgrowth of the deregulation of air freight. Consumer airline ticket prices are a fraction of what they were a few decades ago (even though airline technology has evolved very little in that time!).

If you look at hiccups like wireless data caps or airline seats getting smaller as signs that deregulation has "failed," frankly you're off the reservation. Just look at areas of the economy that haven't been subject to deregulation. Some of the worst environmental effects are caused by public water utilities, which have for decades failed to make investments to improve their infrastructure. In most places, public water utilities freely dump untreated sewage into rivers when obsolete combined sewer/rainwater systems overflow, they poison kids by pumping water through ancient lead pipes, etc.

Re-regulation and nationalization is on peoples' tongues here in the U.S., but I'd suggest looking over the pond to see what they're doing. How did Sweden wire up its country with fiber? It wasn't through massive government investment, or by forcing private companies into the charity business through universal service obligations. Stockholm empowered to municipal operator to lay dark fiber, with no government subsidies and no mandate to cover any particular portion of the population: https://www.stokab.se/Documents/Stockholms%20Stokab%20-%20A%.... The network was built out not based on "public interest" considerations or trying to fight urban poverty, but simply by building in a demand-driven basis to high-value customers first.

And unlike the U.S., Sweden didn't wire up rural areas by forcing private operators to subsidize rural customers. Instead, it simply gave rural residents a 50% tax break on the cost of hooking up their own fiber: http://www.ftthcouncil.eu/documents/Opinions/2013/Rural_FTTH....

The US government spends about the same on healthcare as others do, the difference is in the amount of private healthcare spending.

If you look beyond the crisis de jour, the FCC over the last 20 years has largely followed the same path as the other telecom regulators in the developed world. Denmark, for example, deregulated telecom until recently getting rid of its version of the FCC: https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/mercatus-layton-altern... (warning: PDF).

The biggest impediment in the U.S. has been state and local governments, which have frustrated Congress's efforts. While Congress, for example, made it illegal to grant local telecom monopolies in 1994/1996, state and local governments responded by imposing such onerous terms on potential new entrants that nobody but incumbents wanted to invest. In Baltimore, for example, Comcast has a de facto monopoly. The press, which is largely ignorant of the nuances of telecom regulation, paints it as Baltimore giving Comcast a monopoly contract: https://baltimorebrew.com/2016/10/18/city-set-to-approve-10-....

In reality, there is no exclusivity in Comcast's franchise. Rather, the franchise requirements are so onerous that no other company has even applied to build a network in Baltimore. That's despite Baltimore actively trying to solicit Google and other companies to come in and compete with Comcast: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/snubb....

What few people in this debate appreciate is that telecom is monumentally capital intensive, and that money has to come from somewhere. Moreover, that money is always the subject of competition from other needs. If we depend on private industry, investing in telecom has to be sufficiently attractive in comparison to other investments. If we depend on the government, money spent on maintenance and upgrading telecom infrastructure is money we don't spend on schools, public transit, etc. There is no "free lunch" where you get private companies to spend tens of billions of dollars a year while simultaneously adhering to a raft of government-set public interest objectives.