Democratic and Republican Campaigns Agree on Most Fundamentals of U.S. Internet Policy, Experts Say

The Democrats and Republicans agree on most fundamental aspects of Internet policy, industry policy experts said Thursday night at an Internet Society event hosted by Google’s Washington office. That lack of fundamental disagreement has mostly kept Internet issues on the backburner over the course of the parties’ 2012 campaigns for president and Congress, even though Internet issues continue to infiltrate other areas of national policy, they said. The Internet Society had intended to bring in surrogates from the campaigns of President Barack Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, but eventually decided to bring in former members of the Obama and George W. Bush administrations to articulate their parties’ positions, said Georgetown University professor and panel moderator Michael Nelson. None of the panelists were speaking on behalf of the Obama or Romney campaigns, he said.

The parties’ commonality on Internet policy extends to their platforms, said John Kneuer, head of the NTIA in George W. Bush’s second term. “There is a certain degree at the top level of commonality of interest,” he said. “And campaigns are about drawing stark distinctions between the parties, not necessarily singing the areas where they have broad agreement."

The parties’ policy agreement in this area includes opposition to changes to the current international Internet governance structure, Kneuer said. Delegates to the World Conference on International Telecommunications will meet in Dubai starting Dec. 3 to decide on revisions to the treaty-level International Telecommunication Regulations. The U.S. government has been a prominent critic of some revisions to the ITRs proposed by China, Russia, Middle Eastern nations and other ITU member nations that the U.S. fears would adversely change the current multistakeholder Internet governance system. The U.S. House passed a resolution 414-0 in early August that supported U.S. attempts to save “the multistakeholder governance model under which the Internet has thrived” (CD Aug 3 p10). The Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed the resolution by a voice vote Wednesday (CD Sept 20 p16). “The potential of the United Nations or some other intergovernmental organization taking control over what have historically been very base technical Internet government policy issues is in fact something that should frighten all of us,” Kneuer said.

The U.S. may end up encountering trouble convincing the rest of the world to follow its position on the ITRs because of the Obama administration’s domestic Internet regulation policies, Kneuer said. That’s especially true in reference to net neutrality rules, which the Obama administration refers to as “open Internet,” he said. “I always get very, very suspicious when a regulator or a government agency says ‘We're going to preserve the status quo by writing new rules,'” Kneuer said. “I think by definition, you're changing the status quo.” The administration’s cybersecurity policies may also pose a problem, he said. “When we are talking about preventing international regulation, it’s very difficult from an international perspective for people to hear ‘It all has to be private-sector. It all has to be consensus-built. It’s a multistakeholder approach -- except for the United States government, we're going to draft regulations out of the Department of Homeland Security,'” Kneuer said. “The United States is and remains the global center of gravity of all things Internet. If you regulate the Internet in the United States, you are absolutely going to have an extension of that across the globe. That makes the people who are in favor of a more internationalized approach to government very much emboldened."

If conventional wisdom holds true come Election Day, both houses of Congress will end up with a narrower margin between the parties, said Phil Bond, former undersecretary for technology in the Department of Commerce during the Bush administration who went on to head TechAmerica. Since it is not likely that either party will have supermajority control in the Senate, the relationship between the House’s majority leadership and the White House will be critical to “getting anything done” on Internet issues -- a territorial tax, e-commerce sales tax, a more aggressive trade agenda and business visas, he said. “A Romney administration would be better for the fundamentals,” Bond said. “And I'm not sure we can get much passed on some of the technicals."

While the parties agree on the fundamentals of U.S. Internet policy, some things would be different if a Republican had won in 2008, said Eddie Lazarus, former chief of staff to Democratic FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. The U.S. is “leapfrogging” past the rest of the world in development of LTE wireless technology in recent years, he said. “We were behind in 3G when we came into office,” Lazarus said. “We are now ahead in 4G and we have a real opportunity to lead the world in 4G wireless for the foreseeable future.” Both parties agree additional spectrum is needed to maintain that opportunity, he said, though he said the Obama administration’s push to create incentive auctions has opened up new spectrum opportunities. “I'm not saying that a Republican administration would have been against repurposing spectrum, only that the Obama administration did come up with a terrific innovation and got it through Congress despite some Hill recalcitrance on the part of Republicans,” Lazarus said.

The Obama administration has also ensured a more competitive mobile environment by preventing the attempted merger of AT&T and T-Mobile, Lazarus said. A Republican administration would probably have allowed that merger to proceed, which would have “raised consumer prices and also reduced competition,” he said. Lazarus also defended the administration’s net neutrality rules, which he said allow people to “go where they want, not be blocked from going to lawful websites or applications, and that ISPs shouldn’t be charging a gating fee to innovators who want to build the next Facebook,” he said. Those differences should not get in the way of the parties agreeing to commit to “getting broadband to all Americans, and doing it in a way where you drive investment in innovation and you protect consumers,” Lazarus said.