The Internet is serious business, and our nation’s political parties have finally caught on.
For the past year, Democrats and Republicans have thrown various Internet-related bills at the wall in an effort to see what sticks. But none of the bills have ever made it through Congress thanks to Congressional rivalries, the political clout of companies like Google and Wikipedia and the grassroots efforts of your average Joe.
Those efforts have finally made their mark.
Both Democrats and Republicans have included “Internet freedom” and other technological issues in their respective party’s platform this year.
Yet while there are many similarities between the two platforms, there are also substantial differences.
The Republican platform praised the Internet for unleashing innovation and inspiring freedom “more rapidly and extensively than any other technological advance in human history,” but it also stoutly criticized the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and its regulation of the Internet, specifically net neutrality rules.
Net neutrality is simply a principle stating that all data flowing through the Internet should be treated equally. FCC rules designed by the principle (and supported by Democrats) are meant to ensure that telecommunications and cable companies cannot throttle or discriminate against certain types of traffic, such as movie-streaming or access to a certain website.
Net neutrality is good for keeping the Internet free and open, and while I would prefer companies did business without regulation, it is important to maintain this principle if it finds itself threatened by business.
But when it comes to privacy rights, Republicans seem more in tune with the concerns of privacy advocates than Democrats.
Republicans claim in their platform that private, personal information will receive “full constitutional protection from government overreach” and that people should “retain the right to control the use of their data by third parties.”
Such a claim is sweet music to the ears of a civil libertarian.
It seems to state that not only will Republicans protect against violations of privacy, but they will also work to ensure regular users are given autonomy over how the information they share with private companies is used.
This would hopefully mean that people can keep their information from being shared or monitored and they can delete their data from a company’s servers whenever they please.
Whether Republicans will actually move forward with that claim remains to be seen.
The Democrats, on the other hand, offered only general protection against censorship and undue privacy violations.
“Undue” is the important word, as it is vague enough to give privacy advocates some concern.
Democrats made headway earlier this year by releasing a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights and advocating for a “Do Not Track” regulation, which would give individuals the option to opt out of the types of tracking that advertisers perform on web browsers.
But, their support for the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, which would have allowed private companies to monitor their users’ communications, is enough to warrant concern over their vague words of reassurance.
The two parties did find vigorous agreement in one aspect of today’s digital society: the enforcement and protection of intellectual property.
Both parties’ platforms expressed a strong sentiment toward intellectual property and a commitment to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a regional trade agreement being forged in secret that includes an intellectual property chapter.
Remember, both SOPA and PIPA were drafted with intellectual property in mind, yet their provisions were harmful enough to illicit a huge, grassroots protest.
Despite these problems, it is a good sign that both parties are addressing the Internet and today’s technology.
It’s a reminder of the power that ordinary citizens have in shaping the politics in this country.
However, it’s still up to us to keep the debate moving along and shape future policies for the betterment of all.
The fight is not over yet.
