The millennials are the first generation that grew up in a world defined by the Internet. What the car was to a teen in the Fifties — a chance to see the world, explore, and connect with friends — the Internet is to the post-industrial age millennial. Today’s Internet is so widespread that many take for granted the fact that they can stream Netflix, hail an Uber, or chat with friends and family across the globe. The Internet and all these benefits emerged through a burst of innovation and entrepreneurship that transformed our daily lives. Yet as the Internet matures, it is becoming the target of special interests and overzealous regulators seeking to control the bounty that the Internet provides.

President Obama recently weighed in on the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) net neutrality proceedings, basically endorsing a government takeover of the internet. Given the president's predilections for executive orders, the decision is not surprising. Imposing sweeping new regulations on the internet would continue the expansion of the administrative state that the president favors. But new regulations come at the price of reduced innovation and lower levels of capital investment, which is unfortunate, because neither the administration nor the FCC have yet to make the case that current internet policies have been problematic.

In response to a recent legal decision in Europe, Google has released a new form for its European users that will allow them to request that links to certain articles about them be removed from the search engine. While European privacy advocates who have been pushing for a "right to be forgotten" may applaud this effort, the impact on the flow of information across the Internet is substantial. As Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School puts it, "The most important harm of this decision is not to the search engine companies, but to the public at large, and its ability to find accurate public information." Rather than an open and public exchange of information, Europe's new law injects an online censor to govern the accessibility of freely available public information.