Forgive me a personal anecdote, but it is applicable to the current point of discussion. In 1979, I was introduced to the Internet, though at the time it was called the ARPANET and linked only a few universities and a few U.S. Department of Defense sites. I remember when I first received my secret clearance and began accessing information via an old green-screen with it’s cumbersome Unix-based operating system thinking: “This is amazing. This is going to change the world.”
I don’t claim to be a prophet, but even then, the implications were obvious and enormous. Now, three decades later, that is one promise that has been fulfilled. Once the ARPANET was released to the general public in the 1990s and placed in private, non-intrusive operational hands, a very large genie was out of the bottle.
What the Internet did is give everyone an equal opportunity to express their opinions and provide their information without editors, politicians or others able to control content to suit their biases. And anyone who doesn’t believe editors in the commercial media and politicians don’t have biases hasn’t been inside both those cabals, as I have. (I have to confess to once having been an editor and a politician.)
Yes, the Internet is messy. Crass elements of our crass society have filled their niches with pornography, Hollywood nonsense (much of which is pornographic, in addition to being mindless and highly politically biased), and many other things that most of us would wish to avoid. The genius of the Internet is that we can steer clear of it if we want.
The real genius of the internet is that everything is out there, including vast arrays of useful, beautiful, informative and multi-biased information, as well as possibly even some information that may not be biased in one way or another. The genius of the Internet is that it presents all points of view about all history, all religion, all science, all knowledge. You can see the world as it is, not as editors and politicians would have you see it. You have to do a little work yourself to get all the relevant viewpoints, but that capability is at your fingertips.
This is very threatening to editors (and the business interests behind them), as well as, ultimately, to politicians of every stripe. They never know when after their biased pronouncements, the general public isn’t going on-line to read, or listen to, the contrarian viewpoints--all of them. That is a very, very good thing for democracy. Most politicians and editors aren’t very comfortable with democracy—giving people all the options and letting them make up their own minds. Most editors and politicians think they know best. I’ve got a news flash for them, they don’t. I didn’t when I was each of those, and still don’t. I’m just one voice in the wilderness and I like it that way.
When someone hacks an institution very near to the center of the Global Warming scare and posts the findings on the Internet, all of a sudden editors and politicians are forced to scramble to explain why their exposed biases aren’t really biases and they really weren’t “cooking” science for political purposes, when it becomes very clear that they were and have been doing so for 20 years.
There are bills in Congress now to give the federal government control over the Internet in so-called “emergencies”. Those are by far the most dangerous bills currently in a currently very dangerous (because it is controlled by only one party) Congress. Only in Communist China and a few other pleasant places in the world, such as radical Islamist states, is Internet content controlled. Of course, those are places where having the “wrong” bias can get you tortured, killed or incarcerated for life. Those are not models we should emulate; we don’t want similar things happening here and elsewhere around the world.
If you have never opposed any bill in Congress before, now is the time to do everything possible to stop these bills. A free, un-edited Internet is the last bastion of true democracy. Keep it free.
You don’t need politicians and editors telling you what to think, despite their preference for doing so. Yes, the people can be unruly, obstinate, crass and biased. But I would rather trust them—as a whole—than others who would tell us what to think. Yes, we need institutions and governments, but they always will tend to become ever more oppressive over time—it’s the nature of human beings. Democracy (even in Republic form) is a precious rarity in history. Our federal government hardly resembles the simple republic originally written into the Constitution.
It's harder for governments to become oppressive when everyone has a say in every matter. Keep the Internet free! It and information technology in general are the greatest boons to mankind in many generations.
Would electricity industry regulation be one of these actions perhaps, I wonder. I wonder too if it would also include any actions by governments to manipulate energy prices to force changes in public energy consumption, like for example forced Time-Of-Use billing on utilities. Or actions that change the rules of commerce like banning the sale of some products to foster a widespread culture change towards more energy conservation and energy efficiency.
If these actions are included then heaven help us because these dangers are widespread in governments all over the world way beyond the United States Congress.
A compromise, resisted by uber-planner types, is letting many jurisdictions try many things, and having each watch the others and learn. Results are so-so even when this is done, because few participants in one regulatory scheme are prepared to throw it over even in favor of a demonstrably better one. Occasionally their elected masters will force such a change, but you can probably number on your fingers the times you can think of that happening. Each pleads unique circumstances, and special needs.
Fortunately, the laws of economics eventually come to bear, and lower cost and more efficient approaches demonstrate their superiority financially (and socially). E.g., California and Texas' tax regimes.