WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Senator John Thune (R-SD), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, delivered the following prepared remarks at today’s State of the Net Conference in Washington, D.C.:

Thank you, Roger. As the co-chairman of the Congressional Internet Caucus, I’m proud to be here at the 10^th annual State of the Net Conference. A decade in Internet time is an eternity, and yet State of the Net has stayed relevant and thought-provoking. This is no small feat, and Tim Lordan, who organizes this event and leads the NetCaucus, deserves a lot of credit for the conference’s successful run. 

While ten years is a long time in the life of the Internet, I’d like to take everyone even further back in time – to 1996. 1996 was the year I was first elected to Congress. It was a year in which the Macarena dominated the music charts – don’t worry, I’ve promised my staff I won’t dance – and it was also the year that our nation’s communications laws were last updated in a major way.

Back then, you had to pay for the Internet by the hour, and going online meant tying up your home’s telephone line. And once you connected to the Internet on your dial-up modem, there weren’t a lot of things to do or places to visit. There were only 100,000 websites in 1996, and AOL was the biggest by far. Contrast that to today, where there are 860 million websites. Google and Wikipedia had not been created yet. “Blogging” and text messages didn’t exist either.

In the mobile world, the biggest technological innovation in 1996 was the introduction of the world’s first “flip phone,” the Motorola StarTAC, which initially sold for $1000. At that point, more people were still carrying one-way pagers than went online. 

Despite how much the world, consumers, and the Internet have changed, there are many people who repeatedly try to constrain emerging business models and technologies with last century’s regulatory structures. Disruptive startups like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb don’t fit neatly into the regulatory boxes of yesterday, but that hasn’t dissuaded intransigent would-be regulators from trying. The sharing economy is real and growing, and while I understand the need to ensure safety and transparency in the marketplace, I wish more government officials shared my optimism about how successful the Internet is at facilitating individual economic empowerment. 

Here in D.C., there is a policy discussion about how to handle the transition from analog telephone systems to digital, all-I.P. networks. The old copper-based networks that were once monopolies remain heavily regulated while the Internet is largely unregulated and competitive. Many folks, nonetheless, want to apply archaic telephone regulations to the digital ecosystem, and that is the crux of the policy debate. I honestly do not understand how anyone believes that laws designed for Ma Bell in the 1930’s are appropriate for the Internet today. While there are fundamental goals that need to be preserved – such as universal service and public safety – as policymakers, we need to be open-minded about how to achieve those goals in the future without being bound by the strictures of the past.

The Internet ecosystem is a world of entrepreneurship, ingenuity, and innovation. “Status quo” is a four-letter word in this community and “disruption” the highest virtue. And that’s why it amazes me when so-called “advocates” for the Internet want to constrain today’s marketplace with policy thinking from the last century. 

There are exceptions, of course, but far too often when you hear someone say, “we need regulations to protect the Internet,” what they are actually saying is that they don’t really trust Internet entrepreneurs and technologists to create economic growth and increase public welfare. 

The private sector created things like the iPhone, crowdfunding, WiFi, SnapChat, and LOLcats.  O.K. – not every innovation is equal – but the government, for its part, has come up with things like an “Internet kill switch,” the ITU, net neutrality, SOPA/PIPA, and the NSA. 

I’m not suggesting that government is always wrong, and few of these issues are black-and-white, but I think the scales should be weighted on the side of the entrepreneurs and job creators. Do you really need government to step in and help you, or do you need us to just get out of your way? 

I can probably guess how most of you would answer that question, and I believe there are three things Congress should be doing to get out of your way and to foster innovation. 

First, Congress needs to strip away obsolete laws and regulations that are simply no longer needed. 

For instance, before Superstorm Sandy, Verizon was still providing a handful of customers in lower Manhattan with telegraph services for some reason. Sandy, however, wiped out miles of Verizon’s copper network. The affected telegraph customers are reportedly fine with moving to more modern, fiber-based services, yet Verizon is still required by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to ask for the agency’s permission to discontinue its telegraph offering, a service that is literally obsolete. 

Another FCC regulation requires telephone companies to label, track, and report the exact location, down to the specific room and shelf, of every single piece of equipment in their central offices—even a $10 circuit board. And if the $10 board lasts two decades, the company has to keep a record of it and all of its movements for those 20 years, along with records on every other piece of equipment throughout their network. Thankfully, Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room wasn’t burdened by such government micromanagement.

Unnecessary laws like these at the FCC and throughout the U.S. Code have piled up over decades. While they seem trivial, their accumulated burdens represent a significant economic drag that diverts limited resources to lawyers and regulators and away from providing new products and services to consumers. 

Second, Congress needs to modernize those laws that we do not get rid of, so our statutes better reflect the 21st Century. As you can imagine, there are several statutory regimes that are in need of modernization. 

As the Ranking Member on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, I expect that we will revisit the laws governing subscription television services this year. Many of these laws were written before streaming video, before cloud DVRs, and even before satellite TV became widespread. This is an area of communications law that is certainly ripe for an update. 

The Commerce Committee has also done work on cybersecurity. After fits and starts, I’m pleased that our Committee has advanced bipartisan legislation that resists a top-down regulatory approach. And I’m hopeful that this year may be the one when such legislation—supported by the tech community—is finally enacted.

Two other high-profile issues that I often hear about from the technology and communications sectors are electronic surveillance and immigration. As you all know, there is currently a robust public debate over how to appropriately balance security and privacy in the digital world. Getting this balance right is a critical challenge facing policymakers all around the world, and I expect increased Congressional attention on this important matter in the months ahead. 

On immigration, the Senate passed a problematic bill last year that nonetheless included some worthwhile provisions, particularly on high-skilled immigration. I am a cosponsor of targeted legislation to increase the number of high-skilled workers who can come to work in this country, and I was glad to see the Senate bill include meaningful provisions to ensure that the United States will continue to be a magnet for the best and the brightest talents from around the world. There is a fair amount of consensus around these provisions, and I wish more of my colleagues would welcome such victories where they can be found, rather than insisting on an all-or-nothing approach to legislating.

Third, the government should work to protect the Internet from threats from abroad. This is an area where I do believe the U.S. government can and should play an active role in protecting the Internet. 

Many of you are familiar with overseas efforts to increase governmental control of the Internet, particularly at the International Telecommunications Union, an agency of the United Nations. In 2012, the United States government, supported by a bipartisan consensus in Congress, sent a delegation to Dubai that successfully beat back proposals to have the ITU regulate the Internet. This victory, however, was a narrow one. There is still a great deal of diplomatic work that needs to be done to convince other countries that the light-touch, multi-stakeholder governance model is what is best for them and their citizens, and for the Internet itself. 

Keeping open the avenues for digital trade around the world is another area where the United States government needs to focus its efforts. I’ve introduced the bipartisan Digital Trade Act with my Democratic colleague, Senator Ron Wyden, which would make digital trade a top negotiating priority for American diplomats in future trade deals. Countries like China and Brazil, and even our friends in Europe, are increasingly considering policies to block, frustrate, and disfavor American digital services and goods. 

Just as we have long fought against protectionist barriers that harm American manufacturing and exports, we now need to ensure that digital protectionism does not lead to the balkanization of the Internet. We risk segregating parts of the world from the global network of networks and creating second-class netizens who might not fully benefit from the power of the Internet. And we must avoid letting the legitimate privacy concerns in the debate over electronic surveillance become a stalking horse for opportunistic restrictions on digital trade. 

By working toward these three goals—eliminating unnecessary laws, modernizing the necessary ones, and protecting the Internet from international threats—Congress can help create an environment that allows people to innovate freely. A legal environment where entrepreneurs can concentrate on end users and technology, rather than on bureaucrats and government restrictions. 

Policymakers and the private sector alike, however, need to stay focused on making sure all segments of our population can enjoy the fruits of the digital revolution—old and young, rich and poor, urban and rural. While there is much the government can do, particularly with proper stewardship of the Universal Service program, I challenge the private sector to spend more time thinking about the digital divide. 

Not every technology user is a young person with a good job living in a big city on the coasts. For many folks, the Internet is a foreign language and cutting-edge technology is financially out of reach. The government alone cannot bridge this digital divide. I encourage all the smart people out there in Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, and the Silicon Prairie to really think about the unique digital literacy and adoption challenges facing older Americans, consumers in rural communities, minority populations, and others for whom the promise of the Internet remains unfulfilled.

The private sector is far better than the government at making the Internet relevant to the public. After all, it is the great apps, the gee-whiz devices, the invaluable online services, and even the quirky forms of entertainment that truly drive Internet adoption. As a representative of a state with many rural and tribal communities, I am committed to working on this issue, and I call on you in the private sector to be similarly committed to the cause.

From my position on the Commerce Committee and in Republican leadership, I see every day the rewards and challenges of living through the digital revolution. The world moves so fast that it is hard for even the most technologically-savvy and digitally-connected person to keep up with everything, so it should be no surprise that our laws have fallen woefully behind. Many of the policies affecting our digital life were written in a world that is unrecognizable to today’s digital natives and are just as outdated as the dial-up modem.

I am going to work with my colleagues in the Senate to start a dialogue on modernizing America’s digital policies, because we need 21st Century laws for a 21st Century world. Consumers easily and routinely discard old technologies, like pagers and floppy disks, for newer and better technologies. The government needs to be willing to do the same with America’s antiquated laws.

Thank you.

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