Let’s Hear It for Gridlock!

by on October 2, 2006 · 14 comments

Derek notes that Congress has adjourned for the year without passing an NSA spying bill. This is good news. It occurs to me that libertarians have reason to cheer this session of Congress, not because anything particularly good happened, but because many bad ideas were floated, and to my knowledge none of them got to the president’s desk:

  • Back in January, I argued that the best we could hope for on the telecom front was for Congress to leave well enough alone. I got my wish. There were more iterations of the telecom bill than I can recall, but with one exception (franchise reform) all of the ideas were bad. We had game-playing that made the universal service system even more convoluted. We had broadcast flag provisions snuck into the bill under cover of darkness. And of course, we had the big push for network neutrality regulations. Now, those all appear to be dead for the year.

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    Tim Lee / Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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