We Don't Need Government to Regulate the Internet
Monday marked the 29th anniversary of the World Wide Web — one of the underlying architectural designs that helped give rise to the modern internet. Thanks to the many benefits this technology has ushered into the modern world, the anniversary should be cause for celebration. However, the problems of fake news, a reinvigorated activist antitrust agenda, and looming threats of regulatory action have increasingly overshadowed the internet’s many boons. To combat these threats, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, argued in favor of a new, revitalized vision for the internet.
In an open letter, he identifies a host of problems confronting the internet, concluding that many have been made possible by the concentration of power among a handful of technology firms. “This concentration of power,” he argues, “creates a new set of gatekeepers, allowing a handful of platforms to control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared.” Those gatekeepers, in turn, “are able to lock in their position by creating barriers for competitors.”
Is he right? Is the internet now a landlocked island of unassailable, antitrust-proof giants?
Consider the concerns over industry concentration. Churn in the technology sector is significantly higher than almost any other sector. In 1996, Yahoo! was the internet’s major up-and-coming search giant. Google, which wouldn’t be formally founded for another two years, was still just a blip in the minds of Sergey Brin and Larry Page . By 2017, Google had become a household name and a global juggernaut with over $100 billion in annual revenue. Meanwhile, Yahoo!, long a company on the decline, was bought by Verizon for less than $4.5 billion.
If these companies were indeed as invulnerable as many suggest, why do they spend more money on R&D than any other sector of the American economy? Amazon alone spent $16 billion in 2017 — more than any other U.S. firm. Investing in R&D is a bet that a company only makes if it faces intense competition and has to out-innovate its rivals. By contrast, domestic utility companies, the quintessential example of non-competitive monopolies, consistently rank at the bottom of R&D spending.
As a result of these alleged monopolies, Berners-Lee sees an internet that “was once a rich selection of blogs and websites” now “compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms.” Once again, the evidence seems to refute this.
In August 1991, there was just one website on the World Wide Web — the World Wide Web Project. By 1996 that number had jumped to 260,000. As of this writing, that number had skyrocketed to over 1.5 billion, some 200 million of which remain active and updated (you can see a live counter here). Even by more qualitative standards, Berners-Lee’s claim seems specious. After all, none of those quarter million websites in 1996 offered the entertainment value provided by YouTube or Netflix. At the same time, the only things you could buy on Amazon were books, CDs, videos, and select computer parts.
Berners-Lee is right to lament the concern over the proliferation of fake news and the failure of many tech companies to provide actionable solutions. Unfortunately, his solution is simply to promote a “legal or regulatory framework that accounts for social objectives.” But we already have such a framework. In 1997 the Clinton administration embraced the Framework for Global Electronic Commerce, which helped guide the maturing internet by clearing the waters of potentially burdensome government regulations and pronouncing that “the private sector should lead.” In fact, the Framework has been so successful that the Department of Commerce recently reaffirmed its commitment to those principles.
Like Berners-Lee, we all want the internet “to reflect our hopes and fulfil our dreams, rather than magnify our fears and deepen our divisions.” In promoting this vision for the internet of tomorrow, he quotes the late internet pioneer John Perry Barlow, asking us to imagine, and then build, this better future. Yet Barlow, in his 1996 manifesto “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” recognized the folly of state action in achieving desirable social objectives in cyberspace. Writing to the governments of the world he proclaimed a new social contract for the citizens of cyberspace, free and “naturally independent” of those “weary giants of flesh and steel.”
Indeed, Barlow could have been writing to Berners-Lee when he said:
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means.
Rather than celebrating the World Wide Web with calls for more government action, we should embrace Barlow’s message and work through private collaborative channels to address these problems.
The future of the internet should be decided by users and consumers — not by government.
Ryan Hagemann is the director of technology policy at the Niskanen Center.
