GOP's Internet Freedom is For Corporations, Not You

There’s more to the Republican National Convention than incessant speechifying and anti-Obama vitriol. It’s also the place where the disparate branches of the GOP coalesce around a united policy platform. That platform is whipped up before the RNC begins; it’s finalized amongst the tepid Mitt love and the calls to repeal Obamacare. This year, it veered to a hard-right. Most of the platform concerns typically GOP-y stuff: reversing the health care law, securing our borders, staying resolutely anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage, and so on and so forth. But there’s a more interesting plank lurking amongst all the predictable boilerplate: a brand new directive provocatively titled “Protecting Internet Freedom.”

After lauding the internet for having “unleashed innovation, enabled growth, and inspired freedom,” the Republican platform promises to “remove regulatory barriers that protect outdated technologies and business plans from innovation and competition, while preventing legacy regulation from interfering with new and disruptive technologies.”

The GOP also makes it clear that it aims to keep the United Nations’ hands off the internet: “We will resist any effort to shift … toward governance by international or other intergovernmental organizations.” Finally, they offer this call to protect your data from both the government and private corporations, claiming that “We will ensure that personal data receives full constitutional protection from government overreach and that individuals retain the right to control the use of their data by third parties.” And then we learn that “the only way to safeguard or improve these systems is through the private sector.”

All this amounts to a vaguely-worded paean to protecting internet companies from government regulation. The entire text feels downright odd, coming so closely on the heels of the Republican-authored, internet-censuring attempt known as SOPA. But, as we’ll see, the GOP is calling for a very narrow version of “internet freedom”—one that focuses on the freedom of online-related commerce above all else. Judging by the libertarian-leaning Declaration of Internet Freedom on which the platform is based, we can get a sense for precisely the kind of restrictions the GOP is hoping to lift. And indeed, the GOP is against some very specific regulations; specifically, those that target corporations.

In the L.A. Times, Jon Healy points out that “the barriers in question are the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (which was actually co-authored by Republicans), the current administration’s approach to antitrust enforcement … and the Net neutrality rules adopted by the Federal Communications Commission.”

As such, it’s important to understand that the GOP isn’t striving to protect your internet freedom, but to that of companies who operate in the online sphere. There is the one line about protecting your data from government overreach—which ostensibly means they’re in favor of preventing the feds from requesting Facebook or Google hand over your data without a warrant, though I can’t imagine the pro-Patriot Act, anti-terror GOP establishment pursuing such a thing—but the rest focuses on commerce. The GOP feels that AT&T should have been able to buy T-Mobile, that net neutrality should be abandoned, that broadband providers should be unfettered by regulation, and that although websites like Facebook shouldn’t be messing with your personal data, there shouldn’t be any government oversight preventing them from doing so. After all, “the only way to safeguard or improve these systems is through the private sector.”

But again, all that anti-regulation talk only extends to commerce: The GOP is now united behind the notion that the internet should be heavily regulated to reflect its social mores. Under the Renewing American Values plank, there’s a directive called Making the Internet Family Friendly. Included in its charter: “Millions of Americans suffer from problem [sic] or pathological gambling that can destroy families. We support the prohibition of gambling over the Internet and call for reversal of the Justice Department's decision distorting the formerly accepted meaning of the Wire Act that could open the door to Internet betting. The Internet must be made safe for children … Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced.”

So, regulations that impact business online must be swiftly repealed, while regulations that impose a particular moral code on the citizenry must be strictly upheld. Gambling and betting is outlawed on the GOP’s free internet, as is anything that violates our ill-defined obscenity statutes. This, of course, showcases the familiar paradox latent in the GOP’s prevailing ideology; government must be dissolved except where its laws enforce Judeo-Christian values.

And it is now the GOP’s official prerogative to extend that platform to the internet. In the GOP’s world, corporations like Time Warner and AT&T should be free to sculpt the online landscape as they see fit to maximize profits, unshackled by government regulation. Yet a raft of federal laws should be imposed and upheld to make sure you don’t do anything sinful online. In other words, it’s cool that Comcast gouge its own subscribers by slowing download speeds, but Uncle Sam won’t tolerate you playing online poker.

Internet freedom indeed.