> Following the 2014 Notice and in the lead up to the Title II Order, Internet service providers stated that the increased regulatory burdens of Title II classification would lead to depressed investment.
To support this notion, they cite two reports that purport to show that capital expenditure by ISPs went down as a result of common carrier regulation.
The first [1] has data only from 2014 on, so has hardly any "before" data; and shows wild enough variability in the "after" data that it seems unreasonable to draw any conclusions from the average value over such a short time frame.
The second [2] is a convoluted enough statistical analysis that I'm not really able to evaluate it -- though it does appear to show that telecom investment in infrastructure appears to have grown at roughly the same rate as it had since the 1980s (save for some wild up and down swings prior to 2010) -- just not as fast as an invented "control group" of imaginary telecoms that never heard they might be classified as common carriers (see figure 3.)
That's shady, right? It sure seems shady.
[1] https://haljsinger.wordpress.com/2017/03/01/2016-broadband-c...
[2] http://www.phoenix-center.org/perspectives/Perspective17-02F...