The term ?net neutrality? describes various proposals for regulatory intervention in the Internet marketplace.  For example, under one type of proposal embodied in pending legislation, regulators would ban a broadband Internet access provider (such as Comcast or Verizon) from reaching commercial agreements with particular applications and content providers to provide the sophisticated quality-of-service techniques needed to support unusually performance-sensitive applications and content, such as real-time video streaming or multiplayer online videogames.  Such proposals will likely be, one way or the other, a principal focus of telecommunications policy for the next decade.  They have captured the attention of Congress, where several bills on the topic have been introduced; of legal, economic, and technology scholars across the ideological spectrum; and?of principal interest here?two key federal agencies:  the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.

Most discussions of net neutrality focus on the merits of the debate:  on the substantive costs and benefits of government intervention in the broadband market.  This paper focuses instead on the comparatively neglected institutional dimension of the debate:  an inquiry into which federal agencies are best positioned to resolve net neutrality disputes when they arise.  As the paper argues, the net neutrality controversy is best understood as a classic antitrust dispute about ?vertical leveraging,? and the institutions most likely to appreciate the economic complexities of that dispute are the nation?s specialized antitrust agencies:  the Justice Department and the FTC.  Because these agencies regulate the economy at large rather than a single industry, they are less vulnerable than the FCC to capture by industry factions; they are less likely to develop industry-specific bureaucracies with incentives to keep themselves relevant through over-regulation; and, because of their firm grounding in antitrust enforcement, they are more likely to resolve competition-oriented disputes dispassionately and on their economic merits.  The paper thus argues for reviving in this context the competition-policy model that prevailed for much of the final quarter of the last century:  a regime in which antitrust authorities, rather than industry-specific regulators, take the lead in addressing vertical-leveraging claims against providers of telecommunications transmission platforms.