As Republicans ride triumphantly into the 119th Congress, they confront a choice on technology policy: free markets and free speech, or heavy-handed, censorial technocracy. On most issues, the GOP ranks stand united against the sorts of overspending and central planning that characterized the Biden era. The party broadly agrees that energy production must be deregulated, tax cuts delivered, and employers and workers left free to contract as they choose, to mention just a few areas.
But within tech policy, a sizeable and growing faction of Republicans seek to tighten Washington’s control over Americans’ digital lives and the online platforms on which those lives are lived.
Should the technocratically disposed members of the GOP conference prevail — and enact legislation with the aid of like-minded Democrats — America may well forfeit its global dominance in technology and innovation, which it has fostered thus far through light-touch regulation and the promotion of permissionless innovation. American excellence was neither predestined nor the product of random chance — and it is by no means assured to persist. Heavy-handed regulation can squash it.
America need not depend on abstract theories to vindicate its light-touch tech policy. The successes are manifest. American companies account for 20 of the world’s 25 highest-value companies, including the five largest, and six of the world’s seven trillion-dollar companies. Of these, all are tech companies: Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta (in order of market cap).
Moreover, American workers are unmatched in terms of productivity, thanks largely to technology and innovation. “This year the average American worker will generate about $171,000 in economic output, compared with (on purchasing-parity terms) $120,000 in the euro area, $118,000 in Britain and $96,000 in Japan,” the Economist reports. China, America’s foremost economic and geopolitical rival, languishes far behind.
The alternative to America’s successes can be found not only in economists’ models or white papers but across the Atlantic, in Europe. Favoring regulation over dynamism, the continent has imposed one innovation-throttling regulatory regime after another. These include, among others, the General Data Protection Regulation, the unpopular slayer of innovation and mobile applications; the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a nonsensical and protectionist behemoth; and the AI Act, a profoundly timid law that treats free innovation as a danger that must be slow-walked and micromanaged.
The EU’s aversion to creative destruction and anything but state-micromanaged innovation has, quite predictably, vitiated its tech sector, which boasts few companies of note. Companies simply cannot hope to satisfy the demands of this labyrinthine mess of red tape and regulation. The best they can manage is to placate enforcers whenever subjected to investigation or scrutiny.
Nonetheless, some technocratically-minded Republicans have advocated — and even co-sponsored — the DMA’s American cousin, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. Likewise, many have cheered the attempts of Biden-appointed officials seeking to bring European-style competition policy to the U.S. tech sector. Others have attempted to saddle AI with devastatingly constrictive regulatory fetters, reminiscent of the EU’s “Mother, may I?” posture towards the industry.
The GOP’s technocratic insurgency also wishes to ape the EU’s censorial regulation of online speech. Consider the case of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a constitutionally dubious blunderbuss of a bill that would add a statutory imprimatur to regulators’ attempts to have disfavored content removed from digital platforms (and would also, for the record, fail in its titular objective).
As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Jessica Melugin noted, many of KOSA’s provisions — coincidentally or otherwise — mirror the recommendations of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CDCH). This British–American nonprofit has an abysmal record on speech issues, having helped craft European policies such as the Digital Services Act (DSA), a law containing explicit, baldfaced censorship mechanisms, which regulators have deployed against online platforms that host officially disfavored speech. Nonetheless, some Republicans clamor for Congress to bring CDCH-style policies stateside.
Taking a broader view, the DSA illuminates the divergence between the European and traditional American attitudes towards free speech. The former prefers regulators to patrol and sanitize discourse, while the latter loathes such paternalism. Republicans seeking to Europeanize U.S. speech regulation — via KOSA, the repeal of Section 230, common-carriage requirements for social media, etc. — should reacquaint themselves with the text and spirit of the First Amendment.
Republicans entering the 119th Congress should remember that central planning cannot but fail — on either economics or speech issues. Knowledge problems and the other incompetencies that invariably dog regulators exist as much in the digital world as in the physical one. The temptation towards big government always tugs hard on the human heart; but to ensure America remains free and prosperous, the GOP must resist. Europe provides not a handbook for online regulation but a warning.
READ MORE from David B. McGarry:
The Supreme Court Defends Free Speech
New York’s Attempted Hit on the NRA Violated the First Amendment
David B. McGarry is a policy analyst at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.
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