Big Brother targets Internet

By Jonathan Gurwitz

Perhaps you've noticed that the Internet is a real dud. No one much uses it as a medium of communication, and myopic telecommunications companies have failed to find any commercial value in it.

No, you hadn't noticed? That's because this narrative turns reality on its head. But it is precisely the kind of inversion of truth that three members of the Federal Communications Commission have used to justify an order to adopt unspecified rules to regulate the Internet.

You see, the Internet just hasn't done very well without the guiding hand of Big Brother. Pingdom, an Internet monitoring firm, estimates that 1.7 billion worldwide users sent an average of 247 billion e-mails a day in 2009. This month, Google launched its Ngram Viewer, which puts the contents of 5,195,769 books spanning five centuries on the Internet in a searchable database. On Cyber Monday, Nov. 29, Americans racked up more than $1 billion in online sales.

The Internet began in the 1960s as a government project with an important yet limited purpose. It wasn't until the 1980s, however, when the Internet began to be commercialized, that it also started to have an impact beyond a limited community.

Since then, private capital and investment have created a robust Internet that has changed the way the world communicates, destroyed barriers to the sharing of information, expanded the frontiers of knowledge, created new modes of entertainment and commerce, and generated trillions of dollars in wealth.

So what's wrong with the Internet? According to FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, "It may be dying because entrenched interests are positioning themselves to control the Internet's choke points." That was Copps' prediction in 2003, one year before Facebook was launched.

If the last decade is an indication of what Internet necrosis and choke points look like, then by all means, let's have more of them.

The Internet isn't broken. So why are three Democrats on the FCC trying to fix it? They're pursuing a vague progressive objective with the deceptive name of net neutrality.

Net neutrality is anything but neutral. It takes the operation of the Internet away from the heterogeneous and diversified interests of the private sector that have created it and concentrates it in the hands of an unelected and unaccountable board of political appointees atop a federal bureaucracy.

The dire problems net neutrality activists cry wolf about either don't exist or have already been resolved without the heavy hand of government influence. A federal court has ruled the FCC lacks the legal authority to regulate Internet service providers. So why try to do so?

Over the last two decades, millions of individuals have contributed to a remarkable expansion of freedom, creativity, and commerce on the Internet that has benefited billions of people. For three FCC commissioners, that's a problem.