Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

STEPHEN MOORE: Hey, Washington: Keep Your Hands Off The Internet

President Joe Biden engages with a young boy at a campaign rally for Vice President Kamala Harris in Pittsburgh, Pa., Sept. 2, 2024. (Screen Capture/CSPAN)

Everyone these days — on both sides of the political spectrum — seems to want the feds to regulate internet access, prices and online content. They want the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to be the referee in terms of who gets connected to the internet and what can and can’t be said.

But three recent events highlight why this is a dangerous idea, and why an internet free of government regulation and policing is the best policy.

The first event was the recent 6th 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” — despite falling costs and the fact that well over 90% of Americans already have access to high-speed internet.

All of this without any government interference, thank you. Private companies from Google to Apple to 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 actually disproportionately fallen on lower-income households.

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 of the FCC, found that the agency “has not connected even 1 person with those funds. In fact, 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, there was Meta/Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Aug. 26 letter, which admitted 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 during the pandemic.

In July 2021, President Joe Biden declared that social media platforms like Facebook are “killing people” for allowing misinformation about coronavirus vaccines to be posted on its platform. When the Zuckerberg letter was announced, the Biden administration failed to even apologize for its gross violation of the First Amendment and issued a mishmash explanation that they were 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 of a free press had been ordered by the Trump administration. The incident is especially chilling given that the real dispenser of misinformation about COVID-19 came from the government itself.

It was Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that successfully advocated for lockdowns of the economy and shutdowns of schools, which killed far more Americans than were saved.

In a matter of weeks, these three incidents each provided 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.

Just over 20 years ago, only half of Americans had access to internet services. Now almost 19 out of 20 households have home access to the internet on their smartphones.

If we have government content police, we are likely to have politics interfering with Americans’ access to information. Is there misinformation spread over the internet? Of course, yes. But there is misinformation spread every day in The New York Times, on CNN and talk radio, and even by government agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But 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 senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity. He also serves as an economic advisor to Donald Trump.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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