OPINION:
These days, people on both sides of the political spectrum seem to want the federal government to regulate internet access, prices and online content. They want the Federal Communications Commission to referee who connects to the internet and what can and can’t be said.
Three recent events, however, highlight why this is a dangerous idea and why an internet free of government regulation and policing is the best policy.
The first was the recent 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that wisely put a hold on the FCC’s illegal power grab to regulate internet access. The Biden-Harris administration has wanted to treat the internet as a regulated utility — a “common carrier” — even though more than 90% of Americans already have access to high-speed internet and costs have been falling.
All of this without any government interference, thank you. Companies such as Google, Apple, AT&T and Verizon have created near-universal access to gain more customers, and an Unleash Prosperity study has found that federal rules have actually impeded internet connections.
A study by University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan has found that the cost of FCC regulations has disproportionately fallen on lower-income households. Internet regulations are a regressive tax.
The second event was the recent finding that the Biden-Harris “infrastructure bill,” which dedicated billions of dollars to increasing access to the internet under the guise of “net neutrality,” has been an embarrassing bureaucratic flop.
Despite some $42 billion authorized to expand high-speed connectivity to rural and inner-city areas, it turns out that three years later almost no households have been connected. Brendan Carr, the senior Republican commissioner at the FCC, found that the agency “has not connected even 1 person with those funds. It now says that no construction projects will even start until 2025 at earliest.”
So much for “high-speed” internet.
Finally, and most chilling of all, was the Aug. 26 letter by Facebook founder and Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitting in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee that the Biden administration had pressured the company to “censor” COVID-19 content relating to health practices and vaccine safety at the height of the pandemic.
In July 2021, President Biden declared that social media platforms such as Facebook “are killing people” for allowing misinformation about coronavirus vaccines to be posted on their platforms. When the Zuckerberg letter was announced, the Biden administration did not even apologize for its gross violation of the First Amendment. It issued a mishmash explanation that it was trying to save lives.
One wonders what the reaction of “progressives” would have been if this blatant and dangerous government violation of freedom of speech and the right to a free press had been ordered by the Trump administration. The incident is especially chilling given that the real misinformation about COVID-19 came from the government itself. Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention successfully advocated lockdowns of the economy and shutdowns of schools, which killed far more Americans than were saved.
These three incidents revealed in a matter of weeks, each provides important lessons on why the internet and access to digital services must remain regulation-free if we want America to continue to dominate the digital-age technology revolution.
A little more than 20 years ago, only half of Americans had access to internet service. Now, almost 19 in 20 households have home access to the internet.
If we have government content police, politics is likely to interfere with Americans’ access to information. Is misinformation spread over the internet? Of course it is. But misinformation is also spread every day in The New York Times, on CNN, on talk radio and even by government agencies such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The alternative to a free press is to rely on the government and politicians for the truth. And that would be a real “danger to democracy.”
• Stephen Moore is a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity. He is also an economic adviser to the Trump campaign. His new book, “The Trump Economic Miracle,” co-written with Arthur Laffer, will be released later this month.
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