at capacity — even without much in the way of legal authority to enforce their will.
“The FCC should rise to this moment and use all of our existing authority to act without hesitation,” Jessica Rosenworcel, the agency’s senior Democrat, said. “We can help the newly unemployed. We can connect students so no child is left offline. We can create pathways for telehealth. One thing is for certain: Internet traffic is up a ton since Covid-19 started forcing cities, states and entire nations into lockdown.
But the nightmare of widespread internet outages shutting down an already devastated economy has not come to pass. Since the late 1990s, key differences have emerged in the American and European approaches to internet oversight. The U.S. favored so-called infrastructure-based competition, pitting similar communications providers against one another and requiring new market players to build their own networks. Europe instead focused on service-based competition, in which new internet providers are allowed to use the same data pipelines that more-established competitors have already created.