Here’s a little secret: Nobody really knows what the economical and social ramifications will be if the Federal Communications Commission heeds President Obama’s call to classify broadband internet as a utility (more exactly, a “telecommunications service”). You might be amazed by this if you have been listening to combatants on both sides declaring with looking conviction that such a move would destroy it or save the web for the last week. Like that saying about academic debates being so vicious as the stakes are really so low, but it is a little — here the confidences are maybe not so weak as the evidence is not really conclusive.

One crucial reason why the evidence tells us so little is that both sides in the argument can assert, with some justification, that they’re simply attempting to let the method of creative destruction to keep working its magic. The President is attempting to defend the principle, usually known as either “network neutrality” (coined by legal scholar Tim Wu in 2003) or “open web” (the FCC’s preferred term for recent years), that broadband providers should not be permitted to decide winners among the internet companies that use their conduits. His competitors want to defend the principle that broadband is a free market (in FCC lingo: an “information service” as against a telecommunications service) in which competitors, not government management, will bring quicker, more affordable internet connections. In both situations the gist of the reasoning is, It Is been going pretty well so far. Why destroy everything?

A little historic history: In the days of dialup internet service in the 1990s, phone companies were controlled as telecommunications services that had to let internet service providers use their copper cables at acceptable speeds, while the ISPs were classified as information services which could do pretty much whatever they needed. Sure, the largest ISP was always attempting to decide winners by cutting deals with content suppliers and search engines, but if you did not enjoy that there were hundreds of AOL opponents to select from.

When phone companies began offering DSL connections that were more rapid, the FCC decided that these also needed to be open to competing ISPs. However , if the cable companies jumped in with their even-faster broadband connections the FCC, with Michael Powell (now the chief lobbyist for the cable business) at the helm, deemed this signs that competitive forces were working their magic and declared in 2002 that cable broadband was an advice service that did not have to let other ISPs piggyback on its conduits. After several years of legal wrangling, this standing was expanded by the Commission to the phone companies’ broadband offerings. Since then the U.S. has relied primarily on rivalry between local-monopoly telcos and local-monopoly cable companies to start investment and protect consumers.

The FCC shortly found, however, that just free broadband suppliers had an irritating proclivity to block internet services that they did not enjoy. The very first confrontation was with Madison River Communications, a North Carolina telephone company that was blocking Vonage voice over-net calls. In 2005 the FCC ordered it to cease. A couple years after it was Comcast blocking BitTorrent and other peer to peer file sharing services for using up an excessive amount of bandwidth. The FCC ruled in 2008 that such conduct “unduly squelches the dynamic advantages of an open and accessible web.” Comcast sued, and an appellate court ruled that since Comcast was designed to be a lightly regulated information service, the FCC did not have legal authority. The FCC issued a modified “open web” rule, Verizon sued, as well as the same appellate court ruled again that the FCC did not have legal authority to do that. (Need more detail on this particular thrilling authorized saga? Here you go.) This is the President has encouraged the Commission to do this and considering reclassifying broadband suppliers as telecommunications services to make its power clearer, and why the FCC is revising its open net rules.

The telephone and cable companies really, really, really do not need this to occur. But it’s of course they who’ve driven the FCC to this stage. Comcast executive vice president David L. Cohen promised the other day that his firm agrees with all four of the open-web principles espoused by President Obama. However, the firm has had a funny manner of demonstrating that — suing the FCC when it attempted to apply those principles before and, when the latest open net rules were thrown out in court early this year, instantly cutting a deal with Netflix that certainly appears to be an immediate breach of Obama’s fourth principle (“No paid prioritization”). The absolute dis ingenuousness of the representative of the cable sector is a remarkable situation to behold