An Empirical Investigation of the Impacts of Net Neutrality

Consumers, competition, investment, capacity, and innovation. Behind all the noise surrounding net neutrality (NN), the debate boils down to these issues, each surrounded almost exclusively by theoretics (Haas, 2007). The present report attempts to address this gap by injecting data and empirical evidence into the discussion with the goal of moving beyond the noise. Part of a pair of papers from Internet Association, this report helps to address the hypothesized effects of NN on the economy. The conclusion is a clear lack of negative harms from approximately seven years of either de jure or de facto NN rules in the United States and strong evidence supporting the continuation of this policy. Most fundamentally, using a variety of techniques and direct industry data, the paper finds no evidence of economic harm as a result of NN – neither as a result of the FCC's Open Internet Order of 2010 nor the agency's 2015 NN rules