The German Marshall Fund of the United States had a worried piece about net neutrality up shortly before Thanksgiving. Ignoring the author’s opening paragraph, wherein she laid out the Left’s nonsense about how getting government out of the business of regulating the Internet as though it were an early- mid-20th century telephone utility, the main point is concern that the US won’t look like Europe if net neutrality isn’t enforced.
While the decision will not significantly impact European policies or consumers directly, it will exacerbate the gap between Washington, DC, and Brussels on law, values, and interests when it comes to the role technology plays in our society.
Of course, it’s differences that create competition, and it’s competition that stimulates innovation—even among nations. Were we to imitate Europe—or Europe us—there could be no invention, no creativity. It’s not just economic or technology competition, after all, that stimulates invention. Policy differences—like net neutrality there, non-centrally controlled Internet here—also stimulate invention. Policy differences give empirical evidence of what works and what does not, and in what environments economic and technology thises or thats work better or less well.
It never ceases to amaze me how so many so desperately seek to avoid the cacophony of difference, try to anxiously to snuggle into the false comfort of group think.