While some ISPs have spent months complaining that Title II net neutrality rules would harm them in numerous and immeasurable ways, they've simultaneously been busy telling investors the rules aren't that big of a deal. Of course there's a number of ISPs, including Sonic, Sprint, Frontier and Cablevision, that have also publicly stated repeatedly they don't think the new rules change all that much.
Wall Street got that message loud and clear, and when the FCC yesterday announced tougher net neutrality rules (and its assault on protectionist state laws, for that matter), ISP valuations and Wall Street as a whole barely batted an eye. This apparently greatly annoyed Wall Street Journal author Miriam Gottfried, who demanded that Wall Street immediately become...more outraged:
quote:
After years of fearing it like the boogeyman, Wall Street may have gotten a bit too comfortable with the government’s latest version of net neutrality...Investors were cheering the chairman’s assurance that the commission wouldn’t invoke the Title II power to regulate prices. But investors, beware: Broadband’s new status opens the door to the possibility of a future that is far less lucrative and more uncertain for the companies that provide it.
Again, while ISPs insist that Title II is going to doom us all, that ignores the fact that Title II has been used to govern the voice component of wireless services for a decade (not to mention
Verizon FioS) without so much of a hiccup. If there's one thing investors can legitimately worry about (assuming money is the only thing in the world that matters to them), it's that these rules will prevent some ISPs from making billions by engaging in anti-competitive behavior.In fact, the lion's share of the scary stories about Title II are really just a useful public distraction from what this is really all about for the ISPs: protecting what they believe is a god-given right to abuse the uncompetitive last mile for additional profit.
