Information Technology Industry Needs Fewer Rules, ACI Hears
The government needs to deregulate information technology industry areas, panelists said at an American Consumer Institute event Wednesday. ACI Wednesday released a series of essays (http://xrl.us/bmzmmr) titled “The Information Technology Revolution and the Transformation of the Small Business Economy,” written by industry experts about technology’s effect on the small business economy. “When you get government out of the way and provide certainty in the marketplace, small business owners will come in, and that will create jobs,” Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. and a House Communications Subcommittee member, told the event. The FCC regulates one-sixth of the American economy, and it needs to be reigned in, she said, urging lawmakers to pass the FCC reform bill (HR-3309).
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
The information technology industry shows the most promise for the economy, and the U.S. can’t afford for the government to get in the way of that innovation with outdated and complicated regulation, Blackburn said: “Any rule we write that affects technology will be out of date before the ink is dry."
New technologies have changed the way businesses work, said Carolyn Brandon, CTIA vice president of policy. Essays in the report ACI released show the different ways that technology changes the small business economy, she said. The mobility aspect and the one-to-one relationship with technology changes small business owners’ approaches, Brandon said. This means that business owners will create different business models and build their products and services around these new technologies, she said: The essays are “accurate and thought-provoking, and the FCC should read them.” The assertion that the FCC has control of one-sixth of the economy is “frightening” when considering what is at stake if there were corruption, she said.
"Despite all you heard about how we don’t need the government, but we actually do: We just need it to do its job,” said Morgan Reed, executive director of the Association for Competitive Technology. The government should step up to protect its citizens’ intellectual property rights, ensure there is enough spectrum and provide clarity among rules and legislation, he said. Other countries with little intellectual property protection, like China, are stealing Americans’ property, and the government needs to regulate to protect the U.S. from that, Reed said. The government is sitting on an additional 400-500 MHz of spectrum that it should move out for public use, he said. Companies could prefer other countries to the U.S. because of the lack of transparency and consistency in U.S. information technology regulation, he said.
"Technological innovation is prompting a transformation as significant as the industrial revolution,” FreedomWorks Vice President of Research Wayne Brough said in his essay. Lawmakers should avoid overregulation in innovating areas like the Internet, he said at the event. Innovation among small businesses is not always about technology, said Luke Chung, president of software solutions provider FMS. People will change and make better decisions because they want to be better, he said. They will use technology to make those changes, but it’s not the technology that spurs the change, he said.