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"The government" is tiered. A move towards local (e.g. county or city level) control of things like broadband has so far on average been very successful. Maybe even stuff like social networks should be locally run. I'd love to see some city or county level fediverse instances pop up to tie in with locally run broadband. Maybe some craigslist-like personals ad boards and other services would be good, too.

In that case, if it sucks, you can stand a chance at politically influencing the state of things, or move somewhere where it doesn't suck. Over-consolidation is bad. Things that don't strictly require nation-sized central authorities to do should not be controlled by nation-sized central authorities.

Throwing up our hands and accepting the status quo because government is corrupt is not something anyone should be advocating for. The government is still the battleground whether it's corrupt or not. Corrupt officials need to be named and shamed. People who claim not to see a problem or who think it's not worth addressing need to be moved out of the way or convinced otherwise.

> "The government" is tiered. A move towards local (e.g. county or city level) control of things like broadband has so far on average been very successful. Maybe even stuff like social networks should be locally run. I'd love to see some city or county level fediverse instances pop up to tie in with locally run broadband. Maybe some craigslist-like personals ad boards and other services would be good, too.

This is the concept of Subsidiarity [9537] - "the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level". In practice this would mean things like the last mile broadband should be handled by the town or neighborhood, the links to the main city in the area by the county, the links to the biggest cities by the state, and the international links by the federal government (roughly).

Same can be applied to many things, and it does add inefficiency to the world, but not much, and prevents giant centralization and the issues that come with it. It also becomes much easier to fix things as the issue is most likely at a lower level. If everyone in the town wants faster Internet, they can just do it without having to negotiate with a massive company or government.

[9537]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

There actually is a way to give devolve power away from both the government and private companies. Details here: https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/towards-platform-de...

Essentially get a representative sample of the population, pay them and train them up (through neutral 3rd parties), and have the make the ultimate calls.

This isn't a crazy new idea; it's been done around the world for many complex and controversial issues. Here's a video from the Economist on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UcFQ-eDhTk and here's examples of uses of this approach around the world https://www.oecd.org/gov/innovative-citizen-participation-an...

Great, just have the neutral 3rd parties do the decisions.

If you have those, you have everything! But "getting those" is the whole problem.

Just chiming in to say that I concur with your reply here; this article seems to be missing the fundamental point which is, "when/where do experts capable of avid citizenship come from?"

It's worth noting that this can be reduced to, "how can you make the public more well informed and capable of mediating and governing itself?"

Last week they were demanding that dating sites be 'socialized'.

https://jacobin.com/2022/06/tinder-hinge-for-profit-dating-a...

It'll be interesting to see what must be 'socialized' next week.

Knowing Jacobin, the answer is yes.

As in everything.

My 2cents: Last mile is most expensive and isn't conductive for competition. So there is some sense for it to be publicly owned.

That said, giving government power over it must me done in a way that can't be used to discriminate. I.e. if you are Republican in a blue state, state can't just arbitrarily decide to prevent from connecting, or vice versa.

Privatizing means giving control to "the few whose only incentive is to make more money." Which is worse beyond doubt.

Yes but I think what the person you're responding to was pointing out was the high risk of regulatory capture.

We tend to have this false dichotomy of the government vs private companies. When in reality most regulation that's passed is most heavily influenced by lobbyists and special (corporate) interests that don't represent the majority. OP is pointing out that government regulation will only work as long as the public stays engaged. In the long term it would actually lead to even more power concentrated to "the few whose only incentive is to make more money."

It feels really unfair that all anti-gov / taxation arguments are just fatalistic "this will fail" and we're okay with that as if entropy isn't the default state of the universe.

No use building this bridge it'll just rust.

Why eat! you're gonna die anyways.

Why bother with a wealth tax, they'll out smart you anyways.

This has nothing to do with defeatism, OP points out the flaw with idealising regulations willy nilly without having a mechanism to make sure it doesn't get exploited (that mechanism often being the people understanding the issue and thus having a stake in it).

A good example is direct democracy in Switzerland, the key reason to why it works is that people are 2 things, Switzerland big focus on education and the vast information of the for, against, status quo option the citizens are presented with.

Without these things the Swiss would be very vulnerable to demagoguery.

I would make that argument, but I didn't today. There is a real chance in the next decade that the public will be voting on how to respond to Russia with consequences that may doom us all. That may not even be the biggest issue, depending on how these famines and supply issues resolve.

That same election will also be deciding how to handle potential corruption in some Board of the Internet.

Are you going to put aside the threat of nuclear war for another day and vote with the #1 issue being whether you feel your internet is too expensive and/or suitably available? Do you want to encourage others to do the same? That would be beyond reckless in my humble opinion. Internet regulation isn't going to make top 5 for me personally for a long while yet.

It isn't reasonable to talk about a public internet putting control into the hands of the Many. The Many don't have that many hands, their hands are already full. They cannot grapple with this issue as well. This will just result in some random committee of people, probably paid off by corporate interests, who will be even fewer than the theoretical few that the article complains of. They will not listen to you either.

And that isn't defeatism, it is pointing out that this solution takes a reasonably good thing and makes it worse by applying woolly thinking to a real situation. The complaint is that power is too centralised, then it is proposing to centralise power further.

> Are you going to put aside the threat of nuclear war for another day and vote with the #1 issue being whether you feel your internet is too expensive and/or suitably available?

You could make this same argument with literally anything though, as if the only priority of the government is nuclear war.

Are you going to put aside the threat of nuclear war and vote on food and drug regulation? Are you going to put aside the threat of nuclear war and vote on voting rights? Are you going to put aside the threat of nuclear war and vote on tax reform? This argument reduces the government to a worst-case scenario committee.

Enumerating the implications is a bit different from a counterargument. I do argue that food & drug regulation has done a lot of damage by centralising power into the hands of the few. You can't really look at the healthcare system after government gets involved and argue that power has been pushed into the hands of the many, it is very centralised and best-case controlled by a small number of technocrats, worst case blatant corruption by big corporations.

The lesson in COVID times was that individuals have basically no control over their health choices when the technocrats make a decision. That was hardly "the many" in action.

I think voting & taxes are ultimately inseparable from government, but yeah - I would prioritise foreign policy above those two issues right now and encourage others to do the same. If a big war breaks out there may not be much left to tax.

culi was not engaging in vague doom-and-gloom, he was referring to the specific phenomenon where highly committed minority interests tend to win out over apathetic majorities. If you want to avoid this outcome, you need to come up with a solution specifically designed to combat this tendency.

I suggest to look up the other definition of the word. Because you may meet people who see privatization as handing control over to members of the public.

The useful distinction being "members of" vs "elected representatives."

I live in an European country. I cannot for the life of me figure out in which way would (a consortium of) private companies come up with something like the GDPR law and the enforcement structures around it. What would be their incentive, as private entities?

Interestingly this is exactly the line of reasoning arch-privatiser Margaret Thatcher gave in her speeches on the subject, she claimed privatisation put nationalised industries in the hands of the public because anyone could buy shares in these industries which were hitherto limited to an out-of-touch government elite, while her ideological opponents (retroactively known as 'Old Labour') made the argument that nationalisation was putting those industries in the hands of the people because they were run by the democratically elected state rather than an out-of-touch corporate elite.

Personally I lean towards Thatcher having done more harm than good, while the British government absolutely did have nationalised industries that were inefficient and needed to be wound down or at least heavily reformed (coal mining and the nationalised car company British Leyland being the prime examples) the way her government just cut down whole communities at the knees was wanton and unreasonable. Rail privatisation in the UK has been a failure too, our system is much more expensive and less reliable than nationalised Continental equivalents to the point it's cheaper to fly from London to Newcastle via Barcelona than it is to take the train, which is fairly likely to be cancelled without reason five minutes before it's due anyway. Even without the economics, the negative environmental effects of this situation are too obvious to mention!

I don't know why so many people insist on absolutism for either position though, the position that natural monopolies and strategic national assets (like nuclear power stations for example) should be nationalised and other industries should be privatised isn't unreasonable.

I don't see any difference between nationalizing failing private business and bailing out failing banks.

The government just injects cash in both cases.

Disagree strongly. Far better to be distributed resources and not in the hands of the group with a monopoly on violence.

I mean the US already tried to create a “Disinformation Bureau”. You imagine if they had the keys to the internet too?

Not just “Disinformation Bureau”, but also “Rumor Control Program”. It’s all in the released documents — though, shockingly, missing from the DHS Secretary testimony to the Congress. She must have just forgotten to mention it, surely nothing sinister going on in there.

I'm decidedly not interested in choosing between control by a handful of bureaucrats vs a handful of profiteers. Neither is an acceptable lesser evil. If Paris Marx or any other leftist intellectual du jour wants a greater public role in Internet governance, they need to first admit that there's a permanent bureaucracy in Washington which is largely immune to elections and unaccountable to the people, then get rid of it.

We already know what the outcome in the US will be if they don't. You can introduce as many rules as you want. They'll still be written by Eric Schmidt, he'll just have a different job title.

A+ comment

> > A privatized internet will always amount to the rule of the many by the few

> Giving control to the government is rather explicitly giving control to the few

There's no clear distinction between the government and corporations.

It's an open secret in politics that government jobs are a revolving door to/from industry.

Corporate executives frequently go in to politics, and when politicians retire they often get cushy, high paying jobs at the very corporations they benefited while in office.

They don't have to be outright bribed while in office (though it's not unknown for that to happen), but they know they'll be handsomely rewarded once they leave.

That's not to mention them or their family members investing in companies they know will benefit from their actions while in office.

So if you're against concentration of power in the hands of government then you should also be against concentration of power in the hands of corporations, and vice-versa.

> Corporate executives frequently go in to politics, and when politicians retire they often get cushy, high paying jobs

This can explained by some benign reasons: both political and management jobs require similar skillsets, like leadership, charisma, speaking publicly and so on. So it makes sense that same people could do both. Furthermore, if a political position involves regulating a certain industry, a person taking it has to have expertise in that industry, which further makes it more approachable for people from the industry.

Not enough people realize this. I was reading Obama's memoir recently and he mentioned this exact concept during the financial crisis, where everyone wanted him to publicly skewer the big banks and talk trash on their CEOs. The problem is, those same big banks are (1) the ones he's trying to convince to re-invest back into the market and stimulate the economy and (2) probably the ones most knowledgable on how to rebuild and fix the financial sector. It's not corruption any more than the NFL hiring Peyton Manning as commissioner would be "corruption"

It becomes corruption when government regulators do things favorable to an industry and then shortly after take cushy positions in said industry. Regulatory capture is a very real thing and, IMO, a much bigger reason for modern problems of governance than "government bad" or "corporations bad".

> (2) probably the ones most knowledgable on how to rebuild and fix the financial sector

They're only knowledgeable about how to "fix" the financial sector back to business as usual, essentially doubling down on the problematic paradigm that will blow up at a later date. That's a large chunk of the corruption - highly biased policies normalized as unquestionable objective advice.

But that's only because the government as it exists now is the puppet of private interests. But don't worry. Once the glorious revolution comes and the reactionaries are all imprisoned or shot, the government that emerges will act strictly in the interests of the people.

Fun history lesson: look up who the Jacobins were and what they did.

Legitimately, one of the best quotes about this is from Terry Pratchett' Night Watch book:

>Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions.” Commander Sam Vimes

This argument is completely harpooned by the fact that the number one threat to the internet in recent memory was the repeal of net neutrality which was pushed for and funded by big ISP corporations. If the pushback for net neutrality is any indicator, a huge number of people would use, if not their vote, then their voice to defend the public internet.

History has shown time and time again that corporations have perverse incentives for public utilities, electricity for example. Privatizing the electrical grid was a complete disaster for Texas. Yet we seem to keep having to relearn this lesson because people think “government bad, corporation good.”

Um, net neutrality lost and so the current internet is on fire and ceased to work.

https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/net-neutrality#post-nav...

ISPs are boiling the frog slowly on net neutrality because they don't want a backlash. But behind the scenes business deals are being made between content providers and ISPs. Thanks to Ajit Pai we also don't get to see any details about those business deals. Your ISP is throttling content and you have no idea.

>The government doesn't have the bandwidth to do what this quote implies they can.

Oh right, they can organize world wars, figure out how to build Manhattan Projects, send people to the moon, invent the internet... But oh no, they don't have the bandwidth?

Where did this ridiculous idea come from, and why is it parroted so often? The internet is a joke compared to what the government can do.

It's part of a long term trend for people to actively work against successful government projects, then use the resulting failure to try to privatize that which should be public.

I am trying to understand why "cheap internet access" isn't a political goal that could be achieved but inflation could be?

The internet is probably the very last thing I would associate with "rule by the few." I don't know what this guy is on about.