Telecom carriers have been cutting jobs for years, independent of what's been going on with net neutrality regulations, Turner added. He noted that Verizon officials said Thursday they planned additional job cuts beyond an earlier announcement that they planned to cut 13,000 jobs this year.

The assertion that net neutrality will lead to job cuts "is plainly unsupported by the facts, and actually contradicts what unfortunately has become the ISP industry's default behavior, as was demonstrated by Verizon yesterday," Turner said. "In this consolidated industry, as revenues rise, jobs are cut."

To predict the impact of net neutrality regulations, Bazelon looked at bidding in the C block in the 2008 auction of the 700MHz wireless spectrum at the FCC. The FCC placed net neutrality rules on that block of spectrum, and it sold at a discount compared to other blocks, he said.

Bazelon also looked at the effects of broadband network sharing in Europe and on the sharing of rail lines in the U.K.

But the study fails to measure the number of other jobs that will be created through net neutrality rules, Turner said.