The Internet Is Run by an Unaccountable Private Company (2015)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This bizarre fantasy that privatizing things increases the public's oversight and control and makes the institution more accountable really needs to stop: "Public revokes its own authority over something in effort to increase its authority over it"
It's positively kafkasque in the logic; just astounding people feel this way.
Show me anything that is public. The only thing that comes to mind is roads (even there construction is private) and to lesser extent, municipal services like water and waste (also private contractors but controlled).
The argument given is this process empowers the public and gives them choices.
But it's usually instrumented through monopolies: cartels, m&a, patent protection, natural & geographic monopolies or some mechanism where the choice remains merely theoretical.
For example, the organization discussed here.
So the public gives up control, never gets the choice, and usually weirdly enough still pays for it - the profits just get funneled out of the system.
For instance, in high speed internet, the infrastructure is usually built by tax dollars and those same consumers pay a second time for service on the platform they just paid to build.
This is usually justified by the fact that it's expensive to build the infrastructure conveniently ignoring the source of the funds. The public usually isn't careful enough to deconstruct this rationale.. Really.
It's wacky when you think about it. Fluffy marketing words like "small government" and "free market" which seems to always strangely lead to the most expensive option with the least public control and oversight.
It's a giant hustle, like back when taxpayers built sports stadiums for tax revenue from tax-exempt NFL teams. Without exception all it did was blow huge holes in the city books with the phantom returns never coming. It's a hoodwink operation. Nothing more.
Instead, let the government own some for-profits and cut taxes that way. Like the public bank of North Dakota, municipal internet or the collectors editions from the US mint. If taxpayers build the stadium, taxpayers own the team, simple.
There's no logical reason the public has to be left just with the stinkers that lose money while the winners get privatized away. We'll be paying someone to run the stuff we paid to build, might at well be ourselves
When everyone is divided into a CNN/FOX pissing contest of race, gender, occupation, sexual preference, age, income, region, etc, etc, they are distracted, and it is so easy to give everyone the shaft.
Divide and conquer.
With ICANN's decisions having consequences for internet users all over the world, the right path IMO would have been to move oversight to some international body.
Treating it like just another californian company and removing any oversight was a step in exactly the wrong direction.
The Obama Administration’s decision to give up “control” of ICANN was one of the most brilliant foreign policy decisions they’ll never get credit for. The US government had a never-exercised veto on ICANN decisions from the Internet’s earliest days. Other governments, rightly, asked: “Why should the US get a veto and we don’t.” Perhaps it was justifiable when the US dominated Internet use. But when China and, soon, India surpassed it, it made no sense.
China and Russia pushed for a division of the U.N., the ITU, to take control. It’s hard to argue against. Why should one nation have unilateral veto rights? Why shouldn’t it be a decision of a multi-national organization who can be on the Internet?
Because… ahhhhh! Terrifying to think if the Internet would revert to the lowest common denominator of International policy. While there’s much to criticize about the US’s radically libertarian approach to free speech, an International group consensus on what’s allowed online is far more terrifying.
The FIFA metaphor is apt, but not for the reason the writer intends. I’ve spoken before the ITU. The last time was to talk about anti-email spam issues. When I finished my talk a wisen gentleman stood to speak. You have to imagine a room in Geneva. It’s very large. There are curved tables with placards for each country. This gentleman was from Syria.
“Thank you, Mr. Prince, for your wise words,” he bellowed. “Email spam is one of the top problems that vexes the Syrian people. And your suggestions will help us deal with this most pressing concern.”
This was 2006, if memory serves. Email spam was not one of Syria's top problems. Yet here we were.
After my talk I went out to dinner with a handful of staffers. We went to a nice Geneva restaurant. They talked about how they tried to keep people like the Syrian bureaucrat in his lane and not causing too much trouble, but not offending him too much.
“If I do my time here,” one suggested, “someday I hope I can get a gig with the International Olympic Committee or FIFA. That’s where the real loot is scored.”
For all its faults, I’ll take ICANN over any of that.
0 results.
Lol. Or maybe :(