As Republicans ride triumphantly into the 119th Congress, they confront a choice on technology policy: free markets and free speech, or heavy-handed, censorial technocracy. On most issues, the GOP ranks stand united against the sorts of overspending and central planning that characterized the Biden era. The party broadly agrees that energy production must be deregulated, tax cuts delivered, and employers and workers left free to contract as they choose, to mention just a few areas.

But within tech policy, a sizeable and growing faction of Republicans seek to tighten Washington’s control over Americans’ digital lives and the online platforms on which those lives are lived.
Should the technocratically disposed members of the GOP conference prevail — and enact legislation with the aid of like-minded Democrats — America may well forfeit its global dominance in technology and innovation, which it has fostered thus far through light-touch regulation and the promotion of permissionless innovation. American excellence was neither predestined nor the product of random chance — and it is by no means assured to persist. Heavy-handed regulation can squash it.
America need not depend on abstract theories to vindicate its light-touch tech policy. The successes are manifest. American companies account for 20 of the world’s 25 highest-value companies, including the five largest, and six of the world’s seven trillion-dollar companies. Of these, all are tech companies: Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta (in order of market cap).
Moreover, American workers are unmatched in terms of productivity, thanks largely to technology and innovation. “This year the average American worker will generate about $171,000 in economic output, compared with (on purchasing-parity terms) $120,000 in the euro area, $118,000 in Britain and $96,000 in Japan,” the Economist reports. China, America’s foremost economic and geopolitical rival, languishes far behind.
The alternative to America’...