The Declaration for the Future of the Internet Is an Invitation for the EU to Dictate Global Policy

The Biden Administration’s newly launched Declaration for the Future of the Internet is too ambitious. There is no need to focus on what are mostly domestic Internet policy issues, where nations are likely to have differing approaches. This includes data privacy—an issue that is best dealt with the national government level, lest the stronger regulator (the European Union) succeed in imposing its innovation-limiting privacy regime on the rest of the free world. Likewise, the declaration’s signatories should not seek to develop consensus on antitrust policy, as there is a very real risk that the EU’s brand of “precautionary antitrust” will spread to other nations, with negative consequences for US technology companies, jobs, and competitiveness. The same holds true with attempting to come to full agreement on disinformation and misinformation, where various democracies have different laws and traditions that cannot be expected to align, which would open the door for the EU’s export of its flawed and discriminatory Digital Markets Act proposal.

[Ashley Johnson is a senior policy analyst and Robert Atkinson is founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.]