ISP investment before, during and after Title II's restoration and repeal

Free Press compiled a fact sheet on internet service provider (ISP) investments before, during and after the restoration and then repeal of broadband internet's classification as a telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act during the tenure of former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. Here are the highlights:

• Investment went down significantly every year after 2017 -- the last year when the Obama-era Net Neutrality rules and Title II classification were still in place.
• On an inflation-adjusted basis, investment in every year of Chairman Pai’s tenure was below what it was in 2015, when Title II was restored and the FCC adopted its Open Internet Order.
• Aggregate investment declined every subsequent year of Pai’s tenure, after he took the helm in 2017 and then took till the very end of that year to vote against Title II.
• The largest single annual decline in US broadband industry capital expenditures -- a drop of 11.4 percent -- came in the last year of Pai’s chairmanship in 2020, long after his Title II reversal.
• At AT&T and Comcast in particular, because these companies had finished several upgrade cycles in the year’s before Title II’s adoption and while Title II was in place, investment fell off a cliff during the same period when Pai was pretending the opposite.
• AT&T invested a whopping 35.2 percent less in 2020 than it had in 2016, while Comcast invested 19.5 percent less in 2020 than it had in 2016. These massive declines occurred despite Chairman Pai claiming without qualification that Title II dampened investment.