Issue link: https://cp.revolio.com/i/964464
6 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL www.datacenterjournal.com pages—if not hundreds of thousands of pages—of laws, regulations and so on at just the U.S. federal level is hard enough. Add to it the machina- tions of unaccountable politicians and bureaucrats around the world, and it's a wonder anyone bothers to start a business. Such overreach may, how- ever, combine with growing concern about globalism to increase national isolation on the Internet. Only time will tell. Meanwhile, companies will face potentially he fines for failure to comply with this new regulatory scheme. Whether consumers will gain anything from the inevitable higher prices remains to be seen. NET NEUTRALITY e arguments for net neutral- ity are ubiquitous and well known. Proponents of FCC-imposed net-neu- trality regulations were most boister- ous just before that federal agency implemented them in 2015 and around the time it repealed them late in 2017. Seldom heard, however, are the arguments against net neutrality, as well as how such regulations hurt (or help) data center operators. Apart from the theoretical objec- tion to regulation on the grounds that it's less efficient than common-law justice (the former focusing on merely administrative violations whereas the latter focuses on actual harm to some party), obvious counterexamples demonstrate how regulations can ruin entire industries. For a moment, think of which industry has the most out-of-control costs and the lousi- est results. You probably thought of either education or health care. What do they have in common? Decades and decades of ever tighter govern- ment control through regulations, licensing and other red tape. e question is then why we should expect that net-neutrality regulations will benefit the Internet. First and foremost, the Internet grew into the economy-changing technol- ogy it is largely in the absence of regulations: "What is responsible for the phenomenal development of the Internet? It certainly wasn't heavy- handed government regulation. Quite to the contrary: At the dawn of the commercial Internet, President Clinton and a Republican Congress agreed that it would be the policy of the United States 'to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet… unfettered by Federal or State regula- tion.' is bipartisan policy worked." So said FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai.