Please Help Me Understand What’s Wrong with Title II

In a blog entry here yesterday I described FCC Chairman Wheeler’s Title II proposal as “replanting the roots” of communication policy in the digital age. Shortly after I posted it, the Commission released a four-page summary of the proposed “New Rules for Protecting the Open Internet.” Not surprisingly, the document triggered a barrage of public responses from a range of interested parties on both sides of the issue.

After reviewing the FCC’s Fact Sheet and some of these responses, I found myself puzzled about claims regarding risks and problems associated with Title II classification. So I thought I’d invite comments to help clarify what those risks and problems really are.

In yesterday’s post I focused on:

the core values and history related to the Communication Act of 1934;
how today’s technology provides greatly enhanced opportunities to support those values and learn from that history and;
how Title II treatment of Internet access seems like a sensible way to maximize the prospects for realizing these opportunities and the benefits of today’s (and tomorrow’s) information and communication technologies.

Today I want to focus more on questions of near-term strategy, tactics and risks related to the Commission’s proposed Title II action, and invite comments that clarify how and why the proposed Title II classification is problematic. It’s a claim I’ve heard often, but have difficulty understanding.

Here’s how I see it:

The courts have repeatedly struck down FCC rules designed to ensure that broadband access is provided in a non-discriminatory fashion. The primary basis for the court’s action was essentially that the FCC lacked legal authority to impose such rules as long as broadband access is classified as a Title I information service rather than a Title II telecommunication service (the Title I classification was made in 2002, when Michael Powell, current president of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, was FCC chairman).

Given this very clear (and repeated) signal from the courts, it seems quite sensible to me that Chairman Wheeler and his staff would conclude (as many others have) that only Title II reclassification can reliably provide the authority and flexibility to, in their words, “protect the open Internet.”

In addition to laying out a set of “New Rules to Protect an Open Internet” on page 2, the FCC’s Fact Sheet states clearly on page 3 that the Commission intends to exercise “forbearance” in its Title II treatment of broadband access. On that page it lists the major provisions of Title II that the proposed order would apply to ISPs, and those that would be subject to forbearance. The latter include rate regulation and the imposition of new taxes or fees.

To address concerns that its planned approach would discourage investment or otherwise cause serious problems, the document closes with a reference to how the mobile voice industry has fared under Title II classification:

For 21 years the wireless industry has been governed by Title II-based rules that forbear from traditional phone company regulation. The wireless industry has invested over $400 billion under similar rules, proving that modernized Title II regulation can support investment and competition. Fewer provisions will apply to ISPs than were applied to wireless carriers.

When Title II was first applied to mobile, voice was the predominant mobile service. During the period between 1993 and 2009, carriers invested heavily, including more than $270 billion in building out their wireless networks, an increase of nearly 2,000%.

For a more detailed discussion of how forbearance works and has worked, I’d recommend this post by Harold Feld, Senior Vice President at Public Knowledge, or a somewhat condensed version here.

If the FCC and Feld are correct that forbearance can and has worked well, and that the mobile voice sector is a good example of how an industry subject to it has thrived and invested aggressively for decades, then I find myself confused about what the real dangers are of the proposed Title II classification when coupled with a strong commitment to forbearance.

I can certainly understand that ISPs would be opposed. As publicly traded corporations, their shareholders would expect or even demand that they seek maximum freedom to maximize shareholder value in whatever ways they can within the law. That’s to be expected and applauded (at least by their shareholders).

But I hope I’m correct that the purpose of our nation’s communication policy is not to maximize the shareholder value of a handful of large companies who “grew up” as relatively protected and regulated monopolies and would now like to exercise the substantial market power they’ve since accrued, unfettered by either regulation or competition from networks deployed by local communities who feel poorly served by a choice of two, one or sometimes zero high-speed services available in their area (more on this last point in a later post).

All that being said, I could be missing something important here.

One of the Quello Center’s goals for this blog is to stimulate and inform constructive debate on important and timely communication policy issues. So, if you think I am missing something (or if you agree with me), please share your thoughts on the subject.

Primary takeaways

Digital inequality shows larger impacts on youth academic performance as compared to time spent on screens.
Digital skills play a significant role in mediating unstructured online engagement (social media use, playing video games, browsing the web) and youth academic, social, and psychosocial development.
Unstructured online engagement and face-to-face social interaction are complementary and continuously interact to create and enhance youth capital outcomes.

A familiar story: concerns of screen time

Today’s discussions of adolescent well-being have coalesced around a clear narrative: teenagers spend too much time online, and their academic performance, mental health, and social lives are deteriorating as a result. A steady stream of academic papers, books, and op-eds, alongside a growing number of policy proposals––school phone bans, age-gated social media use, restrictive screen-time limits––rest on the same underlying claim, aligning with a contemporary, digitized version of the displacement hypothesis:

Screen time, particularly the unstructured, free-time spent on social media, gaming, watching video content, or browsing the web, is said to displace the productive face-to-face activities that build adolescents into capable adults.

The implied and often practiced solution is restriction. In response, this dissertation tested this claim directly, and placed it within the broader context of adolescence.

Across three years, I followed 653 Michigan adolescents from early through late adolescence: in grades 8 or 9 (survey one, 2019) to grades 11 or 12 (survey two, 2022). Notably, these students, studied over time, were part of a broader pooled sample of 5,825 students across the same eighteen highschools. The study window captured the year before and the year after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdown orders, functioning as an unprecedented stress test for theories of adolescent social, academic, and digital life and, importantly, as a benchmark to compare the effects of pandemic-related change and inequality to those effects from screen time alone.

Across four studies of adolescents, consisting of six cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, findings are not consistent with the displacement narrative, nor the broader concerns about the time youth spend on screens.

Findings are, however, consistent with something the current public and (most) academic discussions have largely overlooked or ignored: the gaps and inequalities that determine whether adolescents can access and use the internet meaningfully in the first place.

What the displacement hypothesis overlooks

Displacement and related research and policy concerning the time young people spend online assumes a “zero-sum” model of adolescent day-to-day time. An hour online is an hour not spent studying, reading, sleeping, or interacting face-to-face (i.e., time spent on more productive or developmentally “better” activity).

Indeed, this makes sense logically. However, as an empirical claim, this model requires time spent online to behave differently from all other ways adolescents allocate time; it must produce uniquely negative outcomes and be inherently harmful across digital contexts, rather than the typical mix of trade-offs corresponding to, and often overlooked among any other social or developmental context.

Yet, online time does not differ from other youth activity. Instead, I find it has a mix of pros, cons, and even some “uniquely digital” benefits which youth utilize for social and academic gains. When I compared unstructured digital media use against traditional face-to-face interaction and activities, both produced similar patterns: some negative associations with academic outcomes, some null, and some positive.

Trade-offs within traditional face-to-face activity (for example, social time with friends and family, or time spent in after-school extracurriculars) are treated as ordinary developmental experiences that must be experienced for the betterment of development. The identical trade-offs involving digital time tend to be overlooked or ignored, and online engagement is perceived as altogether harmful.

A growing body of evidence, including this dissertation, do not support that distinction. Indeed, the developmental context is routinely misread, leaving out the context of the experiences and time spent on digital, as well as face-to-face activities, interactions, existing inequalities, and changes inherent to development. As such, I proposed a novel framework to understand these contexts:

Digital capital exchange

Rather than treating screen time as a unified harm, this dissertation advances an “exchange”-based framework, grounded in James Coleman’s theories of youth capital and digital inequality scholarship, particularly following Eszter Hargittai, Jan van Dijk, and Alexander van Deursen (see this list of all dissertation references for full works).

The core proposition is that adolescents’ online engagement is not an alternative to developmental activity but another, albiet modern domain through which young people accumulate and mobilize online resources––particularly digital skills––that work alongside existing social networks and experiences to be exchanged for human capital (measured as: academic achievement, aspirations, STEM interest) and social capital (peer networks, community participation, extracurricular involvement).

Online time is not the mechanism; instead, it is digital skills that I find to be the most vital component in youth capital exchange and enhancement. Unstructured online engagement contributes to online skills; those skills, accumulated and mobilized alongside existing peer, family, and community networks, translate into the outcomes researchers and parents care about, i.e., academic achievement, aspirations, and face-to-face interaction and social networks.

This digital capital framework treats online and in-person contexts as complementary rather than antagonistic, and it situates adolescents’ digital lives within the structural conditions––connectivity quality, device reliability, autonomy of use––that determine whether exchange can occur at all.

Methods (in brief)

Paper-and-pencil surveys were administered to students in classrooms at two time-points: spring 2019 (N=2,876) and spring 2022 (N=2,949), across the same eighteen predominantly rural Michigan schools, grades 8–12. Official, nationally-ranked standardized reading, writing, and math test scores (PSAT 8/9, PSAT 10, SAT; College Board) were then anonymously linked to students’ survey responses with the help of participating districts.

Cross-sectional path analyses modeled pooled and wave-specific samples (pooled N=5,825); two-wave cross-lagged panel models tested reciprocal, longitudinal relationships on the 653 students who completed both surveys. Multi-group analyses of the cross-lagged panel models compared relationships between girls (N=345) and boys (N=308). All longitudinal models included time-invariant socioeconomic covariates as well as time-varying covariates to reduce omitted-variable bias.

Key findings: an overview

To summarize, to the best of my ability, eight chapters across 376 pages, I present two primary findings:

First: digital inequality predicted larger and more consistent declines in human capital than screen time did.

Unreliable home internet and technology maintenance problems––experiencing and/or dealing with broken or outdated devices and software, restrictive school-issued hardware, issues with connecting to or maintaining internet access––decreased youth GPA and standardized test achievement. And, these effect sizes were substantially larger than any negative direct effect from unstructured digital media use.

Across all four empirical studies, digital inequality emerged as the most substantial predictor of academic and developmental decline.

Second: digital skills mediated the relationship between online time and adolescent academic and social outcomes.

Unstructured digital media use, particularly online gaming and web browsing, predicted higher internet and social media skills for adolescents, which in turn predicted stronger academic achievement and self-efficacy (human capital), and social interaction and extracurricular participation (social capital). The positive indirect effect of screen time through skills offset or exceeded any small negative direct effects across several outcomes (supporting our existing peer-reviewed work: Hales & Hampton, 2025, and which you can read more about here).

These exchange processes were amplified when peer and family networks were modeled alongside digital skills, consistent with the premise that online and offline contexts operate together rather than in competition. The effect was not universal: social media skills amplified rather than offset a negative association with consistency of interest, one of the two subscales of grit. The exchange framework describes a contextual and conditional, domain-specific mechanism, not a blanket defense of time spent online.

Implications

If digital inequality, and not screen time, is the primary predictor of adolescent academic and developmental decline, and still warrants concern regarding access quality and experience even with the broader adoption of digital devices across the United States, the current policy emphasis on restriction is pointed at the wrong target. The evidence supports a different set of priorities.

Stable, reliable home (fast) broadband should be treated as an educational prerequisite rather than a consumer amenity. Unreliable connectivity exerted larger downward pressure on human capital than any measure of screen time, and that pressure intensified during the pandemic-era reliance on digital infrastructure. Technology maintenance, device repair, replacement, technical support, and the flexibility to install software and explore the web autonomously, matters as much as initial access, and school-issued devices that restrict autonomous use appear to hinder skill accumulation rather than support it.

Restrictive parental mediation of internet use was negatively associated with grit and self-efficacy at magnitudes comparable to the positive contributions of face-to-face activity. This challenges the assumption that digital restriction functions protectively. Instructive mediation, teaching adolescents to verify information, navigate platforms critically, and mobilize online resources toward meaningful ends, is the posture the data supports.

Finally, the technical skill-building that occurs through gaming, self-directed exploration, and deep web use is skill-building, not wasted time. Closing the persistent gender gap in these domains likely requires legitimizing technical play for girls, rather than restricting it for everyone.

None of the above is an argument that screen time is benign. It is an argument that screen time is the wrong focus, particularly when studied mostly in isolation. Context matters substantially, whether that is time spent on other activities during adolescence, the period of adolescence itself, digital inequality, resources gained from such online use, and how all such factors interact. The factor that predicts whether a given adolescent can convert online engagement into capital outcomes is structural: access, infrastructure, skills, and the autonomy to use them. These factors are distributed unevenly, and its uneven distribution, not hours logged, is what separates adolescents who thrive from those who fall behind.

The full dissertation is available through Michigan State University’s ProQuest archive, or see the embedded full-text PDF below. I’m happy to share papers, preprints, or the underlying framework with anyone interested and working in this area––don’t hesitate to reach out via my contact form. Thanks for reading.

Tags: FCC net neutrality policy regulation Title II

Please Help Me Understand What’s Wrong with Title II