President's plan on net neutrality is a step backwards, not forward. President Obama's recent call to regulate the Internet like the old telephone system is puzzling. The Internet is widely viewed as one of the greatest innovations of modern times. Its success is typically attributed to the longstanding commitment to keep the Internet unfettered by regulation. Treating the Internet like a telephone would seem to be a step backwards that would impede its future success.

Perhaps the best evidence about the onerous nature of telephone-style regulation is Google Fiber. Google Fiber explored offering its own voice service, but decided against it in part because of the substantial regulatory burden. It is easy to see why. The Code of Federal Regulations reveals that telephone-style regulation includes an array of economic restrictions, regulatory approvals, and accounting and reporting requirements. This would be a radical change for the Internet, which has never been subject to this type of regulation. And as many network neutrality proponents have recognized, telephone-style regulation would not prevent broadband providers from charging content companies for faster, guaranteed access.

Policymakers should also remember the days when all handsets were black. Traditional telephone regulation did little to promote innovation or investment in many parts of the telephone network. The same can be said for services such as touch-tone dialing, voice mail and caller ID.

Under the president's plan, claims that the Federal Communications Commission could lift many of the regulatory burdens that come with legacy regulation through a process called "forbearance" offer little comfort. The success of the Internet has been based on allowing new ideas to move forward without seeking prior approval. The forbearance approach reverses this presumption, making the default answer "no," unless the regulator says, "yes". Administrative notice-and-comment requirements mandate that such processes would take six-to-12 months under the best of circumstances and would often take much longer. Subjecting the speed of technology to the speed of government bureaucracy would be devastating for digital innovation. Such processes also tend to be unduly affected by well-organized special interests.

This approach is further complicated by the fact that the FCC has never developed a coherent framework for analyzing forbearance. At a minimum, the agency will likely have to propose another round of rules setting forth a clear method for weighing forbearance claims. More importantly, in order to forbear, the law requires the agency to conclude that that changes in circumstances have eliminated the need for regulation, usually because the market is now competitive. Such a conclusion would conflict with the primary motivation for mandating network neutrality in the first place.

For a real-world comparison, consider Europe, which has always included the Internet within telephone regulation. Wireless and wireline Internet speeds and deployment have fared far better in the U.S. precisely because of contrasting regulatory models. By the end of 2013, 85% of U.S. households had access to Next Generation Networks (providing 25 megabits per second), compared with only 62% of European households. The gap in rural Next Generation Network coverage is even wider, with the U.S. leading Europe 51% to 18%.

The absence of investment in networks and the failure of innovative services, such as those provided by Google and Facebook, to emerge have led to calls for Europe to reform its policies to be more like ours. Europe's interest in moving away from traditional telephone-style regulation makes the U.S. proposals pushing in the other direction seem incongruous.

A final caution stems from the fact that traditional telephone regulation is controlled entirely by governments. This stands in stark contrast to the White House-supported multistakeholder approach that currently governs the Internet, which includ es representatives of the public interest and end-user communities.

The Internet is on the cusp of a great step forward. It is on the verge of moving past the relatively simple email and web-based applications to applications that are more complex. Preserving the commitment to the restrained regulation would be a far better way to make sure that the Internet remains a vibrant driver of jobs and innovation than would subjecting it to a century-old regulatory regime created for a bygone economic and technological era.

In FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's first public address, he stated that "Regulating the Internet is a nonstarter." Chairman Wheeler should resist contradicting this approach if he wishes to demonstrate his commitment to an open Internet.

Christopher S. Yoo is the John H. Chestnut Professor of Law, Communication and Computer and Information Science and the founding director of the Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition at the University of Pennsylvania.