Regulation and technology.

AuthorFalzone, Anthony
PositionThirty-First Annual Federalist Society National Student Symposium: Bureaucracy Unbound: Can Limited Government and the Administrative State Co-Exist?

This Article consists of some general observations and a few examples that illustrate them. First, technology can benefit tremendously from government involvement. Regulation may be part of that involvement, but thinking just in terms of regulation obscures some important points. When people talk about regulating technology, they usually assume technology is a private good, and the question becomes whether--and how--the government should regulate private property. This obscures the truth that technology is frequently a product of public and private collaboration.

The Internet is a good example. It began as a creature of government-funded research. (1) That rudimentary network laid the groundwork for all sorts of innovation that nobody could possibly have foreseen in the 1960s and 1970s when the government was funding research that eventually resulted in the development of the Internet. (2) The wealth the Internet created and the innovation it helped foster were completely unforeseeable. The payoff horizon was far too long and uncertain to stimulate sufficient private investment, so had it not been for the government's investment, there may have been no Internet, or at least not the Internet we know.

Now that the Internet has become so important to our everyday lives, there are problems that need to be addressed. One is network neutrality. (3) Should the government allow the people who own the infrastructure to adopt practices that are going to favor or disfavor certain uses of data, applications, content, or certain users, and if so, to what extent?

The answers to this question will determine both whether the Internet will remain an open platform where people can innovate without permission and whether the kind of radical disruption that has marked Internet technology will continue. (4) Allowing incumbents to make the rules will stifle the innovation that exists because of an open architecture that lets everybody in and allows for newcomers, whether or not the newcomers have permission from the incumbents. (5) Is there a good market solution here? No. That is why the government has a role to play. It needs to protect the public good by keeping the structure open and preserving the ability of new participants to use the network in new and unforeseen ways.

Internet privacy is another question and it has a different answer. Should the government regulate the information websites collect and how they use it? Here, there is much more potential...

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