Our View: Free Internet too tempting for FCC

The Federal Communications Commission, like most government agencies, is constantly seeking to expand its power and scope. Private businesses expand through innovation and offering better goods or services to consumers who can decide whether to purchase their offerings. But government agencies can expand simply by moving into areas of the economy they think they ought to be able to control.

The FCC, the federal government's most active purveyor of censorship, recently decided that since it has jurisdiction over telephone service, it also has jurisdiction over Internet service providers. Since Congress never specifically gave it such power, the move has been challenged in court and a federal appeals court will soon decide whether the agency has overreached.

Meanwhile, however, the FCC is acting as if it already has all the authority it has seized and more. It is developing an ambitious plan to subsidize universal broadband coverage, notably, into rural areas where it would be very expensive — a first stage of what many in government have lusted after for years — government control over the Internet.

The FCC initiative would impose rules enforcing "network neutrality," a friendly sounding term that in practice means government control over how Internet service providers operate. It would divert money from an old program to subsidize rural telephone service into a fund to subsidize rural broadband access.

Why taxpayers in cities should subsidize broadband for those who choose to live in rural areas when they don't subsidize food, clothing or other services is unclear, beyond the utopian vision of "broadband for everyone."

One of the reasons the Internet has been so innovative is that it is mostly free of government regulations that set in stone practices of the past and inhibit flexibility. It would be a mistake to allow the FCC to get its heavy hand on the Internet.