This summer marks the 15th anniversary of the iPhone’s debut. The smartphone changed how we live, but its innovations also heavily influenced tech policy in Washington for the next decade and a half.
A good example is the push to regulate app stores. The first iPhone came with a handful of pre-installed apps, but the option of downloading third-party apps would not happen until the 2008 launch of Apple’s App Store. Today, various attempts to regulate app stores are among the most discussed bills in the tech policy world.
Apple sold 1.4 million iPhones in the first year. The device revolutionized smartphones with web access, enhanced text capabilities, a built-in camera, mobile shopping, mapping, and social media. But way back in 2007, the public policy debate wasn’t able to anticipate those changes and was focused instead on the tech questions of the day.
In the same year the public first met the iPhone, a bill about sexual content in video games was introduced in Congress following the discovery of a character in Halo 2 capable of “mooning.” There was chatter among lawmakers about regulating various aspects of the virtual reality program Second Life, which is still played by about a million users but is completely gone from today’s policy discussions. The notion of mandating age verification for MySpace was up for debate, too. Legalizing online gambling was only an idea being floated in policy circles — the practice is now legal in six states. That same year, the New York Times reported on the unlikeliness of mobile calling replacing the need for landlines and the merits of regulating Voice Over Internet Protocol phone services.
While many of the tech policy problems of 2007 would be swept away by innovation, some policy areas, such as privacy, are still with us today, even if they’ve taken an unexpected turn.
Back then, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales called for a law to force internet service providers to store customer information for one to two years. Advocates for the mandated data retention pointed to the advantages of successfully prosecuting child pornographers. Some proponents wanted all ISPs, search engines, and social networking sites to store users’ IP addresses. There were even suggestions to track the identities of email correspondents and recipients of instant messages.
That’s a far cry from today’s digital privacy debate that centers on big internet companies collecting and using less user information. While no comprehensive federal privacy law remains, six states have passed consumer data privacy laws.
Back in 2007, lawmakers were getting started fighting about “net neutrality,” a regulatory plan that would go on to be implemented by the Federal Communications Commission in 2015, only to be repealed amid a heated public debate in 2017. Some still call for a reinstatement of the policy from some members of the FCC and Congress, but no regulatory action has taken place since the repeal, and Congress has yet to vote on it.
Conversely, some issues look more like the tip of the iceberg of today’s full-blown policy fights.
In 2007, Google’s policy blog argued why its then-pending purchase of advertising company DoubleClick should be approved by regulators — which it was in December of that year. Concerns about concentrating market power via a leading tech firm’s acquisition of a smaller player are among the top policy debates in the tech sector today. The Federal Trade Commission is litigating a case against Meta, formerly Facebook, for its 2012 acquisition of Instagram and its 2014 purchase of WhatsApp. Democratic and Republican senators have introduced legislation to curtail tech mergers and acquisitions in the current session.
The next 15 years will tell if legislators have gotten better about anticipating the regulatory needs of the fast-changing tech sector. Still, some who have worked in the field for decades remain skeptical.
Adam Thierer, a senior research fellow for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, told the Washington Examiner, “Fifteen years ago, pundits told us Apple didn’t stand a chance against cellular handset giants like Motorola and Nokia and that Microsoft would likely dominate mobile operating systems. Once again, innovation and markets moved faster than anyone could have predicted.”
