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So... What happened with net neutrality? It's been 5 years since the FCC voted to repeal it in 2017. Net neutrality supporters promised a dystopia where small businesses and individuals are throttled by ISPs, and consumers have to pay for each website separately.
As far as I can tell... That didn't happen? Nothing happened? Did it even matter? I must be missing something, why would anyone bother trying to repeal or keep net neutrality if it doesn't make a difference? Biden apparently made an executive order in July 2021 asking the FCC to restore net neutrality, but they haven't done it. The Wikipedia article doesn't have much on what happened after 2017 other than legal developments (on the national level, there were two failed congressional laws and a failed lawsuit by Mozilla to restore net neutrality).
I think it's an example of the simplistic political thinking most people have, where they assume a regulation to prevent X will actually prevent X, and repealing such a regulation will cause more of X to happen. Most people think rent controls reduce rent and repealing rent controls will cause rent to rise, despite mountains of empirical data suggesting the opposite is true. It's just much easier to assume that laws do what they say they do, rather than thinking about all the complex ways that stated intentions can fail to manifest in the real world.
Wait, why do rent controls fail to control rent?
I was under the impression that they did keep rent from rising (by pushing externalities onto...landlords or something?). The ensuing supply shock seems like a different problem so long as controls stay in place.
There are three main reasons, as I understand it, why many economists think rent controls drive up rent:
When renting to a new tenant, the landlord has to set the rent based on the expected market price over the next, say, 10+ years the tenant may occupy the property, instead of setting the price for the coming year knowing it can be raised later. This raises rents.
A rent controlled apartment is effectively an asset that gets more valuable the longer the tenant holds onto it. This reduces apartment turnover, which reduces supply, which increases price.
Rent control makes building new housing a less attractive business model, so fewer apartments get built, thereby reducing supply and increasing price.
A fourth point (e.g. relevant for the Swedish rent control system) is that if the maximum rent is based on templates like how much rent may be set based on furnishings and access to services and so on, then that creates a strong incentive for landlords to provide the cheapest possible amenity that still meets the legal definition of the thing.
This means that shortly after rent control is enacted, landlords goodheart the regulation to the max by erecting the smallest possible "park" in some unvisited corner of the plot, or modify the building so that there is technically an "ocean view" if you stand on some exact spot and use binoculars.
In the end rents don't decline, and the costs of the modifications is susequently partially borne by the tenants, either in increased rents or worse quality of the amenities they actually do care about.
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