The Internet Hysteria Index

Courtesy of Scott Wallsten and Amy Smorodin at Technology Policy Institute (HT: Tom Hazlett):

The Internet is without doubt the most powerful inspiration for hyperbole in the history of mankind. Some extol the Internet’s greatness, like Howard Dean, who called the Internet “the most important tool for re-democratizing the world since Gutenberg invented the printing press.”^[1] Others fret about the future, like Canada’s Office of Privacy Commissioner, who claimed, “Nothing in society poses as grave a threat to privacy as the Internet Service Provider.”[2]

Sometimes the hyperbole is justified. For example, thanks to Twitter, attendees at this past summer’s TPI Aspen Summit were privy to a steady stream of misinformation even before the DC-area earthquake stopped.[3]

In the same spirit, we present the Internet Hysteria Index (IHI). The IHI, which the DOJ and FCC should take care not to confuse with the HHI, is the most rigorous and flexible tool ever conceived for gauging the Internet’s “worry zeitgeist”. It’s rigorous[4] because it uses numbers and flexible[5] because you can interpret it in so many different ways that it won’t threaten your preconceived ideas no matter what you believe.

The IHI has two components. The first tracks fears of an unrecognizable, but certainly Terminator-esque, future Internet. We count the number of times the exact phrases “the end of the internet as we know it” and “break the internet” appear in Nexis news searches each year since 2000.

Figure 1: The End of the Internet as we Know It!

Figure 1 shows that 2011 produced a bumper crop of “break the internet” stories, mostly related to the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. The spike in 2006 reflects a wave of Net Neutrality stories after AT&T’s then-CEO proclaimed that “what they [content providers] would like to do is use my pipes free, and I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it.”

As our research illustrates, the “End of the Internet” hyperbole shows a healthy, generally upward trend, reflecting the effectiveness of our collective fretting and hand-wringing. Our data do not allow us to identify[6] whether the trend is due to clever Washington PR, lazy hacks retreading old lines, real concerns, or collusion among interest groups simply ensuring they can all stay in business by responding to each other.

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There is more, check out the whole thing here.