>I think the strongest argument against net neutrality is that the US has gone through long periods without it and none of the doomsday scenarios have occurred.
Incorrect, the Internet in the United States has been under de-facto net neutrality rules through a patchwork of agreements, policy statements, and regulations.
The current debate is just about formalizing the legal method & the scope of any rules to maintain a "Open Internet". (That is the term that the FCC uses for the various net neutrality issues.)
> As far as I can tell, there was no regulation before the 2005 open internet regulations.
Before around 2005 there was competition. Regardless of who your phone company was you could get internet access from AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, Earthlink or any number of local hole in the wall ISPs with a couple of T1s and a bank of modems. Those companies had every intention of leasing DSL and cable lines in the same way they traditionally leased phone lines.
The FCC decided that broadband ISPs didn't have to lease their lines to competitors, which essentially killed all of the competitors.
We can have a competitive market with little regulation. We can have a monopoly with strong regulation. What we absolutely cannot allow is a monopoly with little regulation.
They all generally obeyed them because those ISPs didn't want to tangle with the FCC and their Open Internet order. (Who does?) Also at various times before the 2005 regulations, certain parts of the internet infrastructure were under regulations that had the side effect of having a neutral internet.
The reason why the formalizing the rules is now an issue is because a federal court has thrown out the legal method the FCC had been using to wave at ISPs to be neutral.
So now there is no ruling, and the ISPs wouldn't have spent all that time & money on lawyers to preserve what they just took down.
So right now, the FCC is going to release new rules on the Open Internet. The question is, will it be under a new interpretation of the old method that was thrown out of court (Section 702), or by calling ISPs common carriers and then forbearing most of the sections in Title II (as the court alluded is possible).
Incorrect, the Internet in the United States has been under de-facto net neutrality rules through a patchwork of agreements, policy statements, and regulations.
The current debate is just about formalizing the legal method & the scope of any rules to maintain a "Open Internet". (That is the term that the FCC uses for the various net neutrality issues.)