I'm not certain net neutrality will have immediate impacts in the tech community, as Andy Pai is trying to get telecoms to voluntarily commit to not use throttles. The political reasons are unknown to me, but as a start-up founder I am curious to figure out the impact it will have on the economy as this would hurt small businesses, while potentially hurting big tech companies (or helping depending how they use their lobbying power). Tech (XLK) in the past 5 years has outperformed S&P500 (SPY) by 11-12% (https://www.tiingo.com/g/xlk) As to how representative of this is to our economy, I think we are going to have to see "Tech" break apart as "tech" becomes part of our daily lives. For example, at what point will NFLX stop becoming tech, and become a media company as digital distribution becomes the norm? In the same way, telecoms under previous FCC rules is considered a common carrier like Utilities. As net neutrality develops, will we see correlation break apart in XLK as some companies become more affected than others? My opinion is that the beta of the tech industry will be affected by these discussions, but you will see the correlation not be -80-100%, as some companies will be affected more than others (e.g. NFLX). I can only hope the lobby efforts will be united within tech as if the govt is successful in repealing Obamacare and breaking apart net neutrality, it will hurt startup founders like myself, and those involved in the gig economy. The ramifications of such are unknown but thought I would open this up for discussion.
There is absolutely no reason to take back the 2015 ruling. The republicans are going to argue that its big government over regulating, but thats BS. Although there were no major issues pre 2015, this does not mean that we can rely on market forces to prevent throttling and blackouts of other sites and services by ISPs in the future. Nothing will make ATT and TWC happier than being able to charge NFLX a few million every month for use of their networks.
