Ajit Pai is right

* What makes evaluating regulations so difficult is that the benefits are usually readily apparent ... but the costs are much more difficult to quantify Why should that be so? The actual costs of implementing and conforming to a regulation are easier to measure than the benefits. The benefit of NN is harder to quantify than the cost of enforced nondiscrimination.

future innovations ... are far more difficult to calculate Predictions are hard, especially about the future. If some future innovations are difficult to predict consequent to a regulation, others are hard to predict in its absence.

* regulation always has a cost far greater than what we can see at the moment it is enacted Why should that be so? Because we can't know the future? If that's the case, it's equally true for benefits: we can't know the full benefit of a regulation, either, because not all the behaviors it forestalls have been invented yet.

It has been estimated that many EPA regulations have benefits worth 100 times their cost. Those benefits far exceed EPA's original estimates.

A regulation is a law. We hear a lot about them as "bad" because corporations have the money and time to complain about them in the press and to congress. They say the problem is costs, but when it comes to intangible goods like banking and communications, the "problem" is often the regulator's interference with the corporation's ability to exploit imperfect information. If you don't think your phone company or credit card is two steps ahead of you, read your terms of agreement sometime.

Good regulations squeeze out bad actors. Worldcom did significant damage to AT&T and their customers: by publishing fraudulent financials, it pushed AT&T to make deep cuts to services that -- by honest accounting -- were profitable and competitively priced.

A good contemporary example is airline pricing. Not long ago, the price you paid for you ticket was the price for getting from A to B. Then the airlines started charging for drinks, then food, and now bags. The real price can be $100 more than the published price. When searching for fares, there's no way to look for an "all in" price, so all airlines are forced into this deceptive model. Only regulation could successfully return us to a normal system where the price is the price.

The Internet exists because of taxpayer-sponsored research to create standards and place them in the public domain. Anyone who used MCI Mail or Compuserv or Prodigy knows what a privatized Internet would look like.

The idea that the telephone company (or cable company) should be allowed to determine, in any way, how we use their service or what we use their service for has no analog in any other industry, which is why every supporting argument is specious or disingenuous or just false.

An open patch of grass is not automatically a level playing field.

Even the mighty Google couldn't break into the game with their fiber offering. AT&T shut them down with regulatory capture.

https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/save-energy-money/help...

I really don't want utilities making value judgements for me.

> "The most famous example of an ISP acting badly was a company called Madison River Communication ... Vonage quickly complained to the FCC, which quickly obtained a consent decree that included a nominal fine and guarantee from Madison River Communications that they would not block such services again."

Basically his defense of the old regulatory framework in this instance is that the FCC took action. I don't have much confidence that Ajit Pai would have the FCC take action if he were faced with this same scenario.

> "Another popularly cited case is Comcast’s attempted throttling of BitTorrent in 2007 ... The FCC ordered Comcast to stop in 2008"

Once again his defense of the old framework is that the FCC will take action should this scenario recur. Chairman Pai doesn't exactly engender confidence in his willingness to take on ISPs.

> "if the furor over net neutrality has demonstrated anything, it is that the media is ready-and-willing to raise a ruckus if ISPs even attempt to do something untoward"

So the author acknowledges that what the ISPs are trying to do with net neutrality is "untoward"? Not sure why he's written this article then... But even so, what good has that furor caused? It has become clear that the ISPs are going to succeed regardless of the ruckus. So this doesn't really support the idea that the media can successfully regulate ISPs.

> "it is an acknowledgment that ISPs can and will self-regulate."

The author may be right that they can and HAVE self-regulated in the past. That does not mean they WILL self regulate in the future.

> "ISPs bear massive fixed costs, which means they are motivated to maximize the number of end users."

Not exactly. They are motivated to maximize profits. Maximizing the number of end users is certainly part of the equation, but monopolies tend to engage in other profit maximizing practices such as price discrimination (which is mentioned shortly after this in the article). However the author seems to assume that ISPs will only engage in price discrimination with regards to companies, and not consumers ("they could price discriminate and charge the Netflix competitor nothing at all!"). I find that unlikely. It is not unreasonable to think that blocking user access to some sites unless the user purchases a certain "package" will be used in service of price discrimination.

> "Ajit Pai is right to RETURN REGULATION [emphasis added] to the same light touch under which the Internet developed and broadband grew for two decades."

In my opinion this is a false equivalency. Though it may nominally be the same regulatory framework, there are differences between the regulatory environment then and now; primarily the FCC's and Chairman Pai's willingness to take on ISPs and support the principles of Net Neutrality.