Addressing some 800 technology executives in Paris on Tuesday at the "eG8" conference that he created, French President Nicolas Sarkozy presented a vision of greater government involvement in and regulation of the Internet. He plans to push this vision onto G8, G20 and United Nations countries, but it’s an innovation-smothering approach that President Obama should avoid at all costs.
Sarkozy described the Internet in grand terms as a new "borderless" form of "civilization.” This borderless civilization apparently threatens the very foundations of democracy. Sarkozy has lamented regulators’ inability to keep pace with innovators, stating recently that the government’s role is to “encourage laws to evolve to take account of the advances of technological innovation.” At the eG8, he is insisting that governments must regulate the Internet to protect intellectual property, children, privacy and security, and to ward off monopolies.
Many in the audience seemed skeptical. One questioner from the United States said the Internet was the "eighth continent" and governments should follow the example set by the Hippocratic oath and "first do no harm.” The question elicited strong applause and forced Sarkozy to defend and repeat his vision of why governments must regulate the Internet.
The audience included top executives from the world’s most innovative companies, including Google, eBay, Wikipedia, Amazon and Microsoft, almost all of them based in the U.S. That the French president, whose nation is home to relatively few Internet companies, was pushing for world regulation of the Internet to preserve government authority, protect intellectual property and prevent monopolies, seems like a nefarious economic challenge to the free market inventiveness which propelled the U.S. to be the unchallenged world leader in Internet innovation.
In a panel discussion later in the day, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and eBay CEO John Donahoe agreed that government’s role is to provide citizens with Internet access, not to regulate content, as Sarkozy seemed to suggest. French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, defending the Sarkozy position, insisted that a lack of regulation would spell “chaos.”
Sarkozy said that the goal of the eG8 is to advise the G8, the world's eight leading economies (except for China), on a common government position on regulation of the Internet. He said the recommendations should go to the G20 and then to the United Nations for approval.
That France should be considered a leader in regulation of technology is especially dubious given its inconsistent record in using unusual laws to overcome countervailing market forces in the name of meeting national objectives. On one hand, France has led the world in deploying nuclear energy and forcing local competition in broadband provisioning. On the other hand, it isolated itself and hindered growth by restricting access to French movies and music, uniquely enacting strange laws protecting "moral rights" of content creators and its "three strikes" law disenfranchising consumers of content.
President Obama will hear the French arguments for regulating the Internet this week and in the future. This request will be bolstered by the powerful Hollywood lobby that works hard to control the unapproved sharing the Internet allows. But he should resist efforts to squelch or filter Internet content to meet narrow old industry and old government objectives. Overreaching government regulation opens the door to justification of controls that would have prevented the “Arab Spring”. It also risks jeopardizing the Internet innovation trend that has largely benefited the U.S. Where would we be if regulation had stymied the creation and flourishing of Facebook, Google, eBay, Craigslist, Twitter or Amazon?
Too much is at stake for America and the world to allow the Internet to be constricted by old government's quest to control content. As Google’s Schmidt has argued, the men and women on the leading edge of technological innovation are smart enough to see the potential problems, and innovation itself will do a much more effective job at addressing potential problems than behind-the-curve government regulators could ever hope to do themselves. President Obama must lead the nation and the world by resisting the well-meaning but short sighted calls to regulate the Internet.
Gary Shapiro is the president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association and the author of the New York Times Best-seller, “The Comeback: How Innovation Will Restore the American Dream.”
