Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren recently tweeted a startling proposal. She proposed the creation of “…a federal Office of Broadband Access”. The cost required to do so, she estimated, was only about $85 Billion dollars. According to this plan, all broad band connections would be allowed only through the government – “…publicly-owned and operated networks”. This government takeover of communication would magically provide broadband to “every home in America”. As a bonus, “no giant Telcom companies running away with taxpayer dollars”. In other words, only the government should be allowed to run off with taxpayer dollars.
While this proposal appears ridiculous to many of us, the dangers of the idea of government control over the means of public communication were made evident by two news stories that appeared less than 24 hours after Warren’s tweet. Both reports appeared on the same page of the Wall Street Journal on August 8th, 2019.
One report detailed the Moscow citizen protests against Putin’s party rigging the city council elections. The protests were met with the inevitable beatings and arrests – 1,000 people were detained by riot police. Government controlled TV stations ignored the riots and instead reported on a local food festival. It was easy to suppress reports of the demonstrations, says the opposition, because authorities slowed or blocked all internet access around the protests sites.
At the same time, India was able to lockdown reports of unrest in the states of Kashmir and Jammu by creating a near-total communication blackout. In this case, the activities of 10,000 troops suppressing the public went largely unreported. Nearly all mobile phone service, landlines, internet connections and even TV transmissions were halted by the government.
Freedom of communication is one of our most basic needs. Increasingly, internet access provides almost instantaneous access to news, along with the ability to verify accuracy of the reports, for those that choose to do so. By assigning exclusive control over communications to anyone – government or not, is a clear endangerment of freedom.
Fortunately, Warren’s proposal will eventually be technically impossible, as space-based internet access becomes increasingly available for everybody (politicians tend to be blessedly ignorant of technology). But the fact that politicians would even propose such authoritarian measures is disturbing, and must be challenged by those who value our personal freedom. A politician may envy the controls that are exercised by Russia, China, India, and others. We must not allow that envy to destroy our personal freedom.