This piece originally appeared at joshua.trevino.at.

It is an unending source of wonder that partisans of a thing almost always believe that the thing would be made immeasurably better with the involvement of the government. No experience with a state bureaucracy appears to dissuade them; no visit to the DMV imparts any lesson of the inherent tendencies of statist organization; no dismay at the failures of government in one area leads them to rational prediction of government's success in another. The perceived failures of the market, runs the reasoning, will be eliminated if the market itself is eliminated: and of course any meaningful incentive to improve is eliminated along with that market. So we see all manner of counterintuitive projects, from government-run health care to government-run airport security -- and now government-run internet is on the table, in the minds of those who care deeply about its potential and future.

This is the only reasonable reading of the manifesto put forth (both at Personal Democracy Forum and its project-site TechPresident) by Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry. “Who Will Be America's First TechPresident? A Challenge to the Candidates” is an astonishing grab-bag of bad ideas and statist projects that would, if taken as a whole, virtually end the internet-based technology industry in America. Their list of proposals in themselves are worth a rundown, if only to illustrate their nature: they wish to declare the internet a “public good” and hence an entitlement; they want government to take over the task of pushing broadband access to all households; they wish to enforce “net neutrality': they want all public schools fully wired and networked; they want full governmental transparency online; and they want a ”National Tech Corps“ to be established as a sort of National Guard for IT. With the exception of the laudable call for governmental transparency (more on which in a moment), these are all demands for proactive government takeover in a sector that is, for the most part, working quite well, and delivering its services to the overwhelming majority of Americans who want them.

Rasiej and Sifry assert that ”[m]arket players have worked the levers of government to create a scarcity for Internet access,“ and therefore the solution is to make those levers immensely more strong. They're broadly correct in their assessment, but their solution gets things completely backwards: the manipulation of the ”levers of government“ is possible only inasmuch as government has the power to affect the market. The extension of the internet in America today is constrained by one major and one minor factor. The former is the existence of cable-franchise laws that restrict the type of data that may be sent over particular lines; and worse, grant regional monopolies to specific providers. The latter is the slow growth of municipal wi-fi projects that grant taxpayer-subsidized monopolies to individual providers, and hence drive low-overhead competitors out of the market. These are both factors of too much, rather than too little, government power: remove the ”levers“ here, and the provision of internet access across the country would accelerate far more than any government program could provide. The fact is that outside of isolated rural areas, every household in the country is connected to power and telephone grids, and has the option of connection to a coaxial-cable grid. (In those rural areas, satellite television service has proven a booming business, and we can reasonably expect reliable satellite internet to follow in time.) Once providers are free of the regulations that prevent them from sending any data across any lines, it's a good bet that the only American households without broadband access will be the ones that don't want it. Note that I do not say internet access: dial-up is almost universally available already. All this leads to two conclusions: first, that the ”scarcity“ identified by Rasiej and Sifry is not much of a scarcity at all; second, that the solution to problems created by government power is less government power -- not more.

Still, more is what they want, and so we should look to what the effects will be if their wishlist is implemented. First and foremost is the ”[declaration of] the Internet a public good in the same way we think of water, electricity, highways, or public education.“ In this case, like water, electricity, highways, and public education, internet access will inevitably provided by government agencies or government-sanctioned monopolies. (The de facto creation of these agencies is the aim of their proposed ”Internet Innovation and Investment Fund.“) Opting out of this scheme of provision will be concurrently expensive, as the independent providers will be competing with taxpayer subsidies, and you'll pay taxes for it whether you use it or not. This assumes that opting-out is even a possibility; more likely, as with electricity and water, there won't be a choice. Here we have at a stroke the end of the ISP as a wealth-generating sector of our national economy. Surely the whole of our technology industry won't go with it, but much of it will, as innovators and entrepreneurs seek more fertile territory. (And they will, as anyone who has paid attention to the perennial issue of adequate visas for Silicon Valley workers can attest.) The call for ”net neutrality“ is ironic, as it doesn't exist now thanks to the aforementioned franchise laws; and it won't exist when the government controls most Americans' access to the internet under this scheme. The ”National Tech Corps“ is a bizarre and mostly unneeded entity -- who thought IT support was a pressing need after Katrina and 9/11? -- that duplicates the existing function of the Signal Corpsmen in the National Guard. Finally, the problem with American schools is not that they're insufficiently networked, nor that teachers and students don't have PDAs: as Rasiej and Sifry's remarkable assertion that the ”government has an obligation to enable low cost universal access to [the internet]“ shows, there are failures of civic education that cannot be remedied by access to technology.

Underlying all of this is a utopian belief in technology and the internet as not merely transformative, but an inherently improving feature of our public life. Rasiej and Sifry call for government transparency (a good idea with or without the internet) and demand the establishment of a ”connected democracy“ enabled by technological change. These things are probably coming whether we want them or not, and so in that sense technology is transformative. The question is whether it actually betters our discourse and civic life, and here Rasiel and Sifry fall silent, apparently assuming that this is beyond question. The internet has existed as a public resource of sorts since approximately 1995, and the era of political blogging began in earnest in 2002; so we have some experience in just what a ”connected democracy“ looks like. And: it looks like this. What we have now, with the noise and the blogging and the anonymous jeering and the rise of the amateur pundit (including me, no doubt) -- this is ”connected democracy.“ The idea that universal connection and public scrutiny will reproduce the Athenian agora has proven false in nearly every sense: instead, we have the mob, and the things the mob wants. Rasiej and Sifry may think this low age in American public life and politics is a tremendous improvement from prior eras, but they'll be hard pressed to make this case. ”Connected democracy“ does not mean better democracy nor a smarter demos. Mostly it just means more of the same, only louder and more insistent.

There's no sense in complaining about this overmuch, as it is inevitable and more or less here. But we should ask those technologists who promise a bright future on the taxpayer dime to be honest about it. In that sense alone, Rasiej and Sifry have produced a profoundly flawed manifesto. They claim that a candidate-issued endorsement or alternative positions to their wishlist will enable us to ”find out who can actually claim to be the country’s first TechPresident.“ The irony is that the President who truly does care about American technology, and American democracy, will reject it in full.