Global Internet Access. By Wassim Benki 0690. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

On March 23, Axios reports, Utah governor Spencer Cox signed two bills “aimed at limiting when and where anyone younger than 18 years old can interact online, and to stop companies from luring minors to certain websites.”

The laws require social media companies to “instate a curfew for minors in the state, barring them from using their accounts from 10:30pm to 6:30am” and “to give a parent or guardian access to their child’s accounts.”

Even ignoring the blatant unconstitutionality of both laws — both vis a vis the First Amendment and the reservation of the power to regulate interstate commerce to Congress, not state legislatures — making it likely they’ll be quashed in court, I have to wonder just how Utah’s Division of Consumer Protection intends to enforce these incredibly dumb ideas.

The bills are titled “Social Media Regulation Amendments,” but if Utah has truth in advertising laws they really should be titled “Amendments to Encourage Minors to Lie About Their Age and Learn to Use Virtual Private Networks to Hide Their Locations,” which pretty much describes the effect they’ll have if there’s any real attempt to enforce them.

Unfortunately, Congress also seems to be tip-toeing through the tulips of “social media regulation” in similar ways, from prospective app bans (if you think a successful TikTok ban would be the last such action, think again) to various measures for suppressing “disinformation” (read: Stuff politicians don’t want you to see).

And it’s not just an American thing. Globally, various regimes (including supposed “democracies” like India) increasingly arrogate to themselves the power to just shut down the Internet any time they find public communication inconvenient.

While there are workarounds for all this nonsense, and while each such episode encourages more people to learn about those workarounds, what the Internet really needs is a country of its very own.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a NEW country. Any existing regime with robust telecommunications capabilities — perhaps a Caribbean or Pacific island nation? — will do, if it’s willing to put enforceable “separation of Internet and state” provisions in its constitution, set a nice low tax rate, and watch the revenues roll in as existing tech giants and ambitious start-ups abandon nosier and costlier jurisdictions (and those jurisdictions’ regulations).

Users would take care of the rest.

Short of shutting down Internet access entirely — and likely finding themselves overthrown — the busybodies couldn’t do much about it.

Get this done, Big Tech.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Internal documents and former company executives reveal how Cigna doctors reject patients’ claims without opening their files,” investigative journalists Patrick Rucker, Maya Miller, and David Armstrong reported at ProPublica on March 25. “A Cigna algorithm flags mismatches between diagnoses and what the company considers acceptable tests and procedures for those ailments. Company doctors then sign off on the denials in batches …”

There are many structural defects in an American HMO/PPO/prepaid care system that masquerades as “insurance.” One of them is a tendency to mask outright fraud. If ProPublica’s reporting is accurate, Cigna’s practices are an example of that defect.

While Cigna implemented its “review system” — which sounds more like an “automatic denial of purchased benefits” system — more than a decade ago, legal thriller writer John Grisham described it in his 1995 novel The Rainmaker.

In the novel (subsequently made into a film starring Matt Damon), an “insurance” company refuses to pay for a leukemia patient’s bone marrow transplant on the pretense that such transplants are “experimental.”

A young lawyer eventually discovers that the company’s policy is to simply reject claims, knowing most patients won’t fight for the benefits they’re entitled to. High legal drama ensues.

If you purchased an item from me, and I failed to hand over the item after receiving payment, you’d know darn well I’d defrauded you. You wouldn’t do business with me again, and might even sue me.

But suppose I’m a $150 billion company with 18 million “customers,” most of whom receive my services in the form of employment benefits with limited (if any) ability to withdraw their patronage from, or stop payment to, me.

That kind of arrangement makes it a lot easier for a business to get up to shenanigans.

While I’m on record as thinking that “single payer healthcare,” for all its problems, might work better than the current Rube Goldberg healthcare apparatus, “single payer” wouldn’t solve this particular structural problem: A captive “customer” base at the mercy of a large, opaque bureaucratic apparatus.

The solution to this problem is finding a way to sever the linkage between employment and health coverage, which originated as a way of getting around World War 2 salary caps with “fringe benefits.”

Direct — and stoppable — payment from actual consumers would force Cigna and other “insurance” companies to cater to those consumers, or lose business to companies that don’t treat defrauding the customer as a viable element of a legitimate business plan.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

In 1960, with assistance from the United Church of Christ, civic leaders launched New College — a private liberal arts institution with an initial student body of 101.

By the 1970s, that enrollment had swelled to more than 500. With nearly $4 million in debt rather than a fat and growing endowment, New College made a deal with the devil: It sold itself off to the Florida’s government-operated university system.

In terms of curriculum and educational approach, “New College of Florida” was allowed to largely operate as it had before … until earlier this year, when governor Ron DeSantis appointed six new members to its board of trustees in an effort to, as his chief of staff put it, turn the school into a “Hillsdale of the South.”

If that goal sounds somewhat perverse, it is.

The distinguishing characteristic of Hillsdale College is not that it’s “conservative.” What sets it apart is that it’s one of a handful of truly private US colleges which decline government financial support — student loans, Pell Grants, GI Bill benefits, etc. — and the strings that come with that support.

If DeSantis wanted New College to become a “Hillsdale of the South,” the correct approach would have been to sell it off (or donate it to) “conservative” private sector operators.

Instead, he did exactly what he (and other “conservatives”) constantly accuse “the left” of doing, and have been doing themselves for decades: He imposed his own political viewpoint on a state-operated school.

Establishment politicians of all stripes constantly bemoan the “politicization” of “public” education, while constantly engaging in their own preferred “politicization.”

“Politicization” is baked into the whole idea of “public” education. It can’t be any other way.

When schools are operated by appointed government bureaucrats who answer to elected government officials, schools will necessarily be expected to serve the goals of those bureaucrats and those officials.

Electing different officials who appoint new bureaucrats doesn’t solve the problem, it just changes the direction the “politicization” runs in.

Nor is “school choice” — allowing parents to spend taxpayer money at private schools or send their students to tax-financed government “charter” schools — a solution to the problem. That money inevitably comes with conditions that turn formerly private schools into de facto government schools. Which is precisely why Hillsdale refuses such funding.

The choices are: Complete separation of school and state, or political indoctrination of your kids by and for whoever won the most recent election.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY