EDITORIAL: Washington wants to ruin Internet, too

The Internet might be the last truly free part of the U.S. economy, and the lack of government interference has led to transformative innovation, ferocious competition, waves of job creation and favorable costs for consumers.

So it goes without saying that Washington is more determined than ever to stick its heavy hands in the works and screw it up for everyone.

Because making health care and energy more expensive and less efficient wasn’t enough, now the Obama administration is leading the charge to throw the wet blanket of federal regulation on the Internet. The goals are familiar: higher taxes and more control.

President Barack Obama wants the Federal Communications Commission to reclassify the Internet as a utility under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, even though Internet service providers are not monopolies. The president is a big supporter of so-called “net neutrality,” which would prevent providers from delivering some Web content faster than other sites. Such agreements ensure consumers have immediate access to popular sites such as Google, Facebook and Netflix. If Internet service providers are barred from entering “fast-lane” pacts and forced to treat all Web content equally, consumers inevitably will see slower load times for certain content. Americans would get a slower Internet.

And they’d pay significantly more for it, too. Last week, a Wall Street Journal editorial noted that reclassifying the Internet as telephone service would allow Washington to apply federal “universal service” fees of up to 16.1 percent. And the Progressive Policy Institute reports that states and local governments have their own telephone taxes and fees that could be applied to Internet service. The institute and the Brookings Institution estimate that FCC oversight of the Internet would impose $17 billion in annual user fees.

At some point in the near future, it could get worse. A moratorium on Internet access taxes expires Thursday but is expected to be extended into next year as part of a short-term spending bill that should pass Congress this week. And a late-year push to apply sales taxes to all Internet purchases died this week. States and local governments and large retailers want to make every Internet retailer, no matter how small, comply with the requirements of nearly 10,000 taxing authorities nationwide — regardless of whether the companies have a physical presence in any of them.

Regulation comes at a cost. If the FCC becomes the Internet’s traffic cop, expect less investment and a slowdown in the growth of broadband access. And as Internet access becomes less affordable, fewer people will be willing to pay for it.

The Obama administration and the regulatory branch should take note: It’s not a coincidence that the Internet has thrived outside of their control. Leave it alone already.