The Open Internet is History if Congress Gets Its Way

Great ideas flourish in freedom. Such is the case with the history of the Internet, which went from a limited defense-oriented model adopted and adapted by the Pentagon to secure information through diffusion to the commercial engine of the Information Age.

But with great success comes an overwhelming temptation for the state, an institution founded on coercion and theft, to exploit whatever is making a buck and to shut down or otherwise control whatever it deems to be a threat. Open communication and open commerce are the antithesis of the authoritarian state, and the Internet’s shining success is a rebuff to the statists who propagate the lie that anything they don’t control is doomed to failure.