OPINION:
It’s a miracle of private sector innovation and the magic of the free enterprise system that technologies that were only the playthings of the rich a generation ago are now available and affordable to almost all Americans.
Back in 2000, only half of Americans had internet access. Now it’s 92%. Today, nearly 19 in 20 adults have access to the internet on their smartphone. Does this sound like a market that needs assistance from the government?
If you answered yes, you also probably believe that former Vice President Al Gore invented the internet.
Government’s main role was to stay out of the way. As then-Rep. Chris Cox wrote in the first bipartisan internet access law in the 1990s: “We achieved this rapid deployment by keeping internet regulation free and lawsuit free.” Then-President Bill Clinton also deserves credit for keeping the government’s hands off the internet.
But now the Biden administration, which never saw an industry it didn’t want to regulate and control, has deputized the Federal Communications Commission to police the internet. They are doing so under the guise of “preventing digital discrimination.”
President Biden’s infrastructure bill appropriated $65 billion to help expand access to high-speed internet, even though nearly everyone already has it. Worse yet, he is playing the race card; the new law empowers the Federal Communications Commission to effectively establish internet “equal access.”
The FCC’s lawyers then chose a standard known as “disparate impact,” which means if they can find a minority neighborhood somewhere at any time that lacks the same internet access as a high-income area, they can slap telecommunications companies with a lawsuit. You can almost hear the trial lawyers drooling.
Plaintiffs don’t even have to prove any intent to discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity. These threats of lawsuits will inhibit internet access, not expand it.
If a telecom provider offers a new service but not enough members of a protected group sign up, the FCC could impose a multimillion-dollar fine and require the company to fix the inequities. This is a backdoor way of creating internet access racial quotas.
Here’s the problem. The FCC acknowledged in its 235-page filing released in November it they could find “little or no evidence” of “intentional discrimination by industry participants.” And the commission found no evidence that discrimination “contributes to disparities in access to broadband internet service across the Nation.”
This would be like suing appliance stores for not selling enough Blacks and Hispanics enough TVs.
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr warns that Mr. Biden’s FCC has been given the authority to second-guess every aspect of an internet service provider’s operations, from network maintenance and installation to everyday business operations such as pricing and marketing.
In other words, Mr. Carr believes the Democrats’ strategy is to turn the internet into a regulated utility to oversee “access, content, and pricing.” This will work about as well as airline regulations in the 1970s and health care regulations in the 2000s, which only made these services more expensive and limited access.
Don’t be surprised if some of the telecommunications companies that have played a key role in bringing the internet into our homes and offices decide it’s not worth the threat of lawsuits and pull out of internet services. If that happens, the poor and minorities really will suffer a “disparate impact.”
• Stephen Moore is an economist at The Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. His latest book is “Govzilla: How the Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy.”
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