Op-Ed

Today, 30 years on from my original proposal for an information management system, half the world is online. It’s a moment to celebrate how far we’ve come, but also an opportunity to reflect on how far we have yet to go.To tackle any problem, we must clearly outline and understand it. I broadly see three sources of dysfunction affecting today’s web:

People in China use WeChat for everything from sending messages to family to reading news and opinion to ordering food to paying at vending machines to paying for a taxi. For Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, WeChat is both his greatest challenge and the model for the future of his company. WeChat is what Facebook has yet to become.

Right now, Congress is considering a new federal privacy law, but nearly all of the proposals on the table have ignored the crucial issue of forced-arbitration clauses in consumer contracts. Companies use these clauses to prevent customers from suing them, often leaving no practical options for consumers whose rights have been violated.  Arbitration clauses are especially harmful when it comes to the Internet, because almost everything we do online involves a contract.

When it comes to hurting businesses, schools and families in rural Oregon, the Federal Communications Commission decision to pull the plug in 2018 on network neutrality really hurts. As the first senator who introduced net neutrality legislation in the Senate more than a decade ago, I am proud to stand on the front lines of 2019’s national fight for a solution that puts real enforceable net neutrality rules back on the books. Everybody understands consumers must pay a fee to get access to the internet.

America’s big tech companies have achieved their level of dominance in part based on two strategies: 1) Using Mergers to Limit Competition Using and 2) Proprietary Marketplaces to Limit Competition.

The Trump re-election campaign’s wireless open access proposal was a poorly vetted scheme possibly intended to score political points. It was squelched almost immediately after it became public, as shocked White House staff members complained that it contradicted the administration’s support for competing wireless networks. The twist? Open access wireless is actually a terrific idea.

Ultimately, the ping-pong match of network neutrality will not be resolved by political struggles over control of the Federal Communications Commission. A lasting solution can only come from bipartisan legislation, which will involve compromise. Identifying the points of compromise, places where each side is willing to give ground, is impossible if the two sides see each other as enemies worthy of contempt rather than basically good people who can reasonably disagree, even about important issues.

China is planning to deploy fiber-optic connections to 80 percent of the homes in the country. What’s new about China's massive deployment of fiber, both in its own territory and in its global market along its planned Belt and Road, is that China is likely to permit only 5G equipment made by Huawei and a handful of other Chinese companies to connect to that fiber. China, not America, will be the place where new online services are born. Although the US came up with the idea of the internet, we don't have a sandbox to play in, a giant market in which to test new high-capacity services.

A healthy public sphere needs a healthy public media. We’ve built the equivalent for television and radio. Now it’s time to do it for the Internet. The simplest way to proceed is to tax major technology companies to pay for better content.  A billion-dollar federal funding infusion to upgrade public media would be a start — perhaps paid for by a “journalism tax” on the largest tech platforms, as has been proposed in Britain.

The US needs a positive alternative to the Chinese 5G model, and it needs to put it forward right now, before or during Barcelona. If we don’t, this year’s Mobile World Congress risks turning into a victory lap for Huawei and Beijing. The solution is not, as some have put it, to “become like China to beat China.” China is playing to its own strengths—state-directed investment and financing, lack of checks and balances internally, and a unified decision-making structure—to support its goal of wireless domination.