Making parents an offer they can’t refuse!

nick cowen, 9 January 2008

Via Samizdata, we learn that the government is getting into the broadband Internet business, intending to create a million new compulsory ‘customers’ for the big Internet Service Providers by ‘requiring parents to provide their children with high-speed internet access’. The government claims it has been putting ‘pressure’ on companies to lower their broadband costs. How much pressure is really required to make a deal with corporations that involves giving them millions of customers who are not allowed to say no? I imagine a rather limp handshake would be sufficient.

The thinking (if one can call it that) behind this move is that the growing achievement gap in schools between the rich and poor is down to technological differences between households, rather than the more glaring problem: a top-down state run education system that fails to adapt to what families need. In these circumstances, it is the more advantaged families that can supplement their children’s education through independent means while the less advantaged have to make do with what they are given.
Of course, few would deny that the internet can be a tremendous tool for learning, when used correctly. But one wonders how this policy ‘joins-up’ with the government’s other line of scare mongering the dangers of the internet and video games. On the one hand, the internet is so fraught with danger that only an expensive, celebrity-fronted, government review can establish how children can use it safely. On the other, it is so useful that it must be compulsory for all families! Considering that picking the correct ways to filter what is available and ensuring that children cannot give out personal information to strangers, is hard enough even for net-savvy families, is this really the right moment in time to force the less technologically attuned to get involved too? Perhaps some of those without access have made a choice that the risks are not worth the benefits at this point in time, and that their children are better off continuing to learn with books.
It is also possible that there is a greater point of principle behind these proposals. Communication technology has expanded rapidly over the last few decades, driven by market forces and technological innovation with very little support from government. With the internet already available in some form to anyone with a regular income, within the next decade, it is likely that the market can produce genuine universal coverage without any government subsidy, and without any help from taxpayers. From a classical liberal point of view, this is an ideal economic outcome but also a social good: the fact that government isn’t involved in internet provision means that it is a relative bastion of free speech. This means that, for example, no matter what kind of citizenship curriculum is being taught in state schools, independent information about policy issues (such as our EU factsheets) are available freely to everyone who comes looking for it.
For a political establishment, however, this is not an ideal situation at all: a vast pool of uncontrolled information and opinion that is very difficult to spin to and will never stay on-message! In order to establish greater political control over this highly anarchic (but efficient) system, it is necessary for government to get involved now, while there is still a perceived need for greater provision, while there are still a handful of people left out. But it would be much better for everyone in the long term if the government stays out of the communications market; not just better economically, but socially too.