A Reminder Why the Quello Center Net Neutrality Impact Study is Important

In the past week or so I’ve seen several articles that remind me how important the Quello Center’s empirically-grounded study of net neutrality impacts is for clarifying what these impacts will be—especially since net neutrality is one of those policy topics where arguments are often driven by ideology and/or competing financial interests.

As far as I can tell, this series of articles began with an August 25 piece written by economist Hal Singer and published by Forbes under the following headline: Does The Tumble In Broadband Investment Spell Doom For The FCC’s Open Internet Order? Per his Forbes bio, Singer is a principal at Economists Incorporated, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.

Singer’s piece was followed roughly a week later by two op-ed pieces published on the American Enterprise Institute’s web site. The title of the first AEI piece, authored by Mark Jamison, was Title II’s real-world impact on broadband investment. This was followed a day later by Bronwyn Howell’s commentary Title II is hurting investment. How will – and should – the FCC respond?

What struck me about this series of op-ed pieces published by economists and organizations whose theoretical models and policy preferences appear to favor unregulated market structures was that their claims that “Title II is hurting investment” were all empirically anchored in Singer’s references to declines in ISP capital spending during the first half of 2015. As a member of the Quello Center’s research team studying the impacts of net neutrality, I was intrigued, and eager to dig into the CapEx data and understand its significance.

While my digging has only begun, what I found reminded me how much the communication policy community needs the kind of fact-based, impartial and in-depth empirical analysis the Quello Center has embarked upon, and how risky it is to rely on the kind of ideologically-driven analysis that too often dominates public policy debates, especially on contentious issues like net neutrality.

My point here is not to argue that there are clear signs that Title II will increase ISP investment, but rather that claims by Singer and others that there are already signs that it is hurting investment are not only premature, but also based on an incomplete reading of evidence that can be uncovered by careful and unbiased review of publicly available information.

I hope to have more to say on this topic in future posts, but will make a few points here.

The crux of Singer’s argument is based on his observation that capital spending had declined fairly dramatically for a number of major ISPs during the first half of 2015, dragging down the entire sector’s spending for that period (though its not clear from the article, my sense is that Singer’s reference to “all” wireline ISPs refers to the industry’s larger players and says nothing about investment by smaller companies and the growing ranks of publicly and privately owned FTTH-based competitors). He then briefly reviews and dismisses potential alternative explanations for these declines, concluding that their only other logical cause is ISPs’ response to the FCC’s Open Internet Order (bolding is mine):

AT&T’s capital expenditure (capex) was down 29 percent in the first half of 2015 compared to the first half of 2014. Charter’s capex was down by the same percentage. Cablevision’s and Verizon’s capex were down ten and four percent, respectively. CenturyLink’s capex was down nine percent. (Update: The average decline across all wireline ISPs was 12 percent. Including wireless ISPs Sprint and T-Mobile in the sample reduces the average decline to eight percent.)..

This capital flight is remarkable considering there have been only two occasions in the history of the broadband industry when capex declined relative to the prior year: In 2001, after the dot.com meltdown, and in 2009, after the Great Recession. In every other year save 2015, broadband capex has climbed, as ISPs—like hamsters on a wheel—were forced to upgrade their networks to prevent customers from switching to rivals offering faster connections.

What changed in early 2015 besides the FCC’s Open Internet Order that can explain the ISP capex tumble? GDP grew in both the first and second quarters of 2015. Broadband capital intensity—defined as the ratio of ISP capex to revenues—decreased over the period, ruling out the possibility that falling revenues were to blame. Although cord cutting is on the rise, pay TV revenue is still growing, and the closest substitute to cable TV is broadband video. Absent compelling alternatives, the FCC’s Order is the best explanation for the capex meltdown.

I haven’t had a chance to carefully review the financial statements and related earnings material of all the companies cited by Singer, but did take a quick look at this material for AT&T and Charter since, as he notes, they experienced by far the largest percentage drop in spending. What I found doesn’t strike me as supporting his conclusion that the decline was network neutrality-driven. Instead, in both cases it seems to pretty clearly reflect the end of major investment projects by both companies and related industry trends that seem to have nothing to do with the FCC’s Open Internet order.

My perspective on this is based on statements made by company officials during their second quarter 2015 earnings calls, as well as capex-related data in their financial reporting.

During AT&T’s earnings call, a Wall Street analyst asked the following question: “[T]he $18 billion in CapEx this year implies a nice downtick in the U.S. spending, what’s driving that? Are you finding that you just don’t need to spend it or are you sort of pushing that out to next year?” In his response to the question, John Stephens, the company’s CFO, made no mention of network neutrality or FCC policy decisions. Instead he explained where the company was in terms of key wireless and wireline strategic network investment cycles (bolding is mine):

Well, I think a couple of things. And the simplest thing is to say [is that the] network team did a great job in getting the work done and we’ve got 300, nearly 310 million POPs with LTE right now. And we are putting our spectrum to use as opposed to building towers. And so that aspect of it is just a utilization of spectrum we own and capabilities we have that don’t require as much CapEx. Secondly, the 57 million IP broadband and what is now approximately 900,000 business customer locations passed with fiber. Once again, the network guys have done a great job in getting the Project VIP initiatives completed. And when they are done…the additional spend isn’t necessary, because the project has been concluded not for lack of anything, but for success.

Later on in the call, another analyst asked Stephens “[a]s you look out over the technology roadmap, like 5G coming down the pipeline, do you anticipate that we will see another period of elevated investment?”

While Stephens pointed to a potential future of moderated capital spending, he made no reference to network neutrality or FCC policy, focusing instead on the investment implications of the company’s (and the industry’s) evolution to software-defined networks.

I would tell you that’s kind of a longer term perspective. What we are seeing is our move to get this fiber deep into the network and getting LTE out deep into the wireless network and the solutions that we are finding in a software-defined network opportunity, we see a real opportunity to actually strive to bring investments, if you will, lower or more efficient from historical levels. Right now, I will tell you that this year’s investment is going to be in that $18 billion range, which is about 15%. We are certainly – we are not going to give any guidance with regard to next year or the year after. And we will give an update on this year’s guidance, if and when in our analyst conference if we get that opportunity. With that being said, I think there is a real opportunity with some of the activities are going on in software-defined networks on a longer term basis to actually bring that in capital intensity to a more modest level.

Charter’s large drop in capital spending appears to be driven by a similar “investment cycle” dynamic. During its 2Q15 earnings call, CFO Christopher Winfrey noted that Charter’s year-over-year decline in total CapEx “was driven by the completion of All-Digital during the fourth quarter of last year,” referring to the company’s migration of its channel lineup and other content to an all-digital format.

A review of the company’s earnings call and financial statements suggests that a large portion of the “All-Digital” capital spending was focused on deploying digital set-top boxes to Charter customers, resulting in a precipitous decline in the “customer premise equipment” (CPE) category of CapEx. According to Charter’s financial statements, first-half CPE-related CapEx fell by more than half, or $341 million, from $626 million to $285 million. Excluding this sharp falloff in CPE spending driven by the end of Charter’s All-Digital conversion, the remainder of the company’s capital spending was actually up 3% during the first half of 2015. And this included a 7% increase in spending on “line extensions,” which Charter defines as “network costs associated with entering new service areas.” It seems to me that, if Charter was concerned that the Commission’s Open Internet order would weaken its business model, it would be cutting rather than increasing its investment in expanding the geographic scope of its network.

To understand the significance of Charter’s spending decline, I think it’s important to note that its 29% decline in first half total CapEx was driven by a 54% decline in CPE spending, and that the company’s non-CPE investment—including line extensions—actually increased during that period. I found it odd that, even as he ignored this key dynamic for Charter, Singer seemed to dismiss the significance of Comcast’s CapEx increase during the same period by noting that it was “attributed to customer premises equipment to support [Comcast’s] X1 entertainment operating system and other cloud-based initiatives.”

I also couldn’t help notice that, in his oddly brief reference to the nation’s largest ISP, Singer ignored the fact that every category of Comcast’s capital spending increased by double-digits during the first half of 2015, including its investment in growth-focused network infrastructure, which expanded 24% from 2014 levels. Comcast’s total cable CapEx was up 18% for the first half of the year, while at Time Warner Cable, the nation’s second largest cable operator, it increased 16%.

While these increases may have nothing to do with FCC policy, they seem very difficult to reconcile with Singer’s strongly-assserted argument, especially when coupled with the above discussion of company-specific reasons for large CapEx declines for AT&T and Charter. As that discussion suggests, the reality behind aggregated industry numbers (especially when viewed through a short-term window of time) is often more complex and situation-specific than our economic models and ideologies would like it to be. This may make our research harder and messier to do at times, but certainly not less valuable. It also speaks to the value of longitudinal data collection and analysis, to better understand both short-term trends and those that only become clear over a longer term. That longitudinal component is central to the approach being taken by the Quello Center’s study of net neutrality impacts.

One last general point before closing out this post. I didn’t see any reference in Singer’s piece or the AEI-published follow-ups to spending by non-incumbent competitive providers, including municipally and privately owned fiber networks that are offering attractive combinations of speed and price in a growing number of markets around the country. While this category of spending may be far more difficult to measure than investments by large publicly-owned ISPs, it may be quite significant in relation to public policy, given its potential impact on available speeds, prices and competitive dynamics.

Expect to see more on this important topic and the Quello Center’s investigation of it in later posts, and please feel free to contribute to the discussion via comments on this and/or future posts.

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 policy research Quello Center regulation

A Reminder Why the Quello Center Net Neutrality Impact Study is Important