Winning the IP Future | RedState:
The temptation to overregulate new technologies is strong. It’s also misguided. Today, everyone would agree that it would be absurd for the government to require an automobile to be preceded by a person carrying a red flag to warn people that a car was coming. Or worse, imagine if regulators required motorists to stop, disassemble their vehicle, and conceal the parts in bushes if the car frightened a passing horse. The first actually happened at the dawn of the automobile age—they were called Red Flag Laws—and the second nearly happened, passing the Pennsylvania state legislature unanimously, only to be stopped by the Governor’s veto.
That same regulatory impulse is still with us today. In the midst of a game-changing Internet transformation, regulators are debating how to control progress with monopoly-era telephone rules. They are mulling over how to expand cable television regulations that predate the existence of the Internet and have no place in an all-IP world. This impulse calls to mind the last scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: “You’re still here? It’s over. Go home. Go.”
Whether it is at the federal, state, or local government level, we cannot afford to apply old-world regulations like price controls, corporate subsidies, and common-carrier regulation (otherwise known as Title II regulation) to the Internet. If regulators treat the Internet like a newfangled telephone network, that is the network we will get. We can and must do better.