Katie Benner, Columnist

Regulate the Web as If Life Depended on It

The Web is as woven into our daily lives as electricity, water and the telephone, which is why Internet service providers should be regulated like utilities.

November 11, 2014 at 4:57 PM UTC

By Katie Benner

Katie Benner is a Bloomberg View columnist who writes about technology, innovation, and the cult and culture of Silicon Valley. She lives in San Francisco. Benner previously wrote a tech and finance column for the Information. She has worked at Fortune, TheStreet.com and CNN Money, and was a freelance writer based in China covering culture, business and politics. She has a bachelor's degree in English from Bowdoin College.

As essential as electricity and indoor plumbing.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

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Most Americans can’t imagine life without the Internet. They go online to work, to communicate and to get news about the world. If the technorati in Silicon Valley have their way, health care, education and transportation (hello Uber!) will depend on a reliable, fast connection to the Internet too, through wearable devices, tablets and mobile phones.

Even without the current debate about net neutrality -- that wonky fight over Internet broadband speeds -- it seems inevitable that at some point in the future we’ll decide that Internet access is as essential to civilized life as running water, electricity and phone calls. Messaging and self-driving car apps and health records will reside on your phone, along with the videos of panda cubs wrestling with zoo keepers. And you won’t be able to live without any of it.