If one ever needed evidence of the ability of the free market to drive innovation more efficiently than the government, look no further than your computer screen. The internet represents one of the last largely untouched free markets we have left. The fantastic growth of instant communication, information, and trade is fueled by entrepreneurs that have reacted swiftly to the freedom of this open market. The mere fact that politicians and bureaucrats have recently begun efforts to sink their regulatory hooks into it demonstrates their incessant desire to control every aspect of our lives.
There have been a growing number of legislative skirmishes with regard to internet regulation recently. The so-called “Internet Kill Switch,” a cyber-security measure that would grant the President dangerous authority to shut down internet traffic during times of emergency was rightly defeated.
In a similar vein, “net neutrality” legislation first emerged a few years ago as an attempt to empower the FCC to regulate internet service providers (ISPs). While not only an egregious overstep of the federal government into areas of free speech, net neutrality would also suppress an area of tremendous economic growth: broadband.
According to a March 7, 2011 memo from the Heritage Foundation, “Investment in broadband today is one of the few bright spots of the economy, with providers expected to invest some $30 billion per year in private capital into their networks annually for the next five years, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.”
While there are valid concerns of ISPs constricting, or outright blocking, access to competing content, accessories, and services, the solution is not government regulation. As more and more of our daily applications and services become web-based, the issue of bandwidth-usage will only be amplified. A free market solution is one that is based upon end-user payment for bandwidth consumption. Just as you would pay the gas company more for greater natural gas consumption in a particular month, payment for greater bandwidth usage is a better approach to keep the internet authentically neutral.
More recently, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate version, PIPA, has sought to grant the government more control to curb online piracy and prevent the hijacking of DNS servers. However, as is usually the case with reactionary federal legislation, the law would do more harm to law-abiding citizens than those operating outside the law—stifling technological innovation by creating uncertainty, imposing technology mandates, and giving the U.S. Attorney General broad internet policing powers that will amount to government censorship.
A more free market alternative to this bill would be the Online Protection and ENforcement Act (OPEN) which targets the criminal action—not legitimate online enterprises, and not our right of free speech.
While no one would argue that there are real and broad threats to our children, national security, and economic interests in a digital age, we must guard against the same all-or-nothing approach to internet freedom that the federal government took with our healthcare. Threats to our economic and First Amendment freedoms come in all forms. And, as your congressman, I will be vigilant in keeping a check against online oversteps by the federal government.