Google rips Senate's online piracy bill: 'This is what is wrong with Washington' | Hacker News Reader

Google rips Senate's online piracy bill: 'This is what is wrong with Washington'

thehill.com

161 pointscwan45 comments

“When Google and other piracy apologists start talking about free speech, it’s completely disingenuous,” Harbinson said. “These guys don’t give a crap about free speech.”

Maybe they don't, but at least they are trying to stop this bill, while the others are pushing for it, clearly not giving a crap about free speech either, as it seems all they care about is the ability to stop piracy - at all cost.

> "while the others are pushing for it, clearly not giving a crap about free speech either"

This, I think, is the problem in American politics. The best the citizenry can hope for, given the amount of corruption that unfettered political donation has brought, is for a corporate champion whose own economic interests just happen to align with our liberty on this issue.

Because the legislators supporting this don't care about piracy any more than Google cares about free speech. They care about protecting their share of political donations by the industries whose economic interests are aligned with pushing crap like SOPA.

the amount of corruption that unfettered political donation has brought

That's one side of the issue, and it's not inaccurate. But I'd ask you to consider the other side as well.

Why do you think that businesses find it worthwhile to dump so much money into political contributions? I submit that the reason is because, as the government has assumed increasing amounts of power, it acquires the ability to confer significant advantages upon those favored by the law. So it's necessary for business to take extreme steps to ensure that they are, in fact, favored thusly.

In these terms, I think that a more constructive strategy for solving the problem isn't to attack political contributions (which is bound to get into thorny First Amendment questions), but to strike at the root by limiting the power that the government has to decide who is going to win and who is going to lose.

If we take away the government's power, then there's nothing for corporations to buy. If we give the government more power (to regulate the corporations' contributions and other matters), then there is an even greater incentive for the corporations to influence the goverenment -- which is exactly what we're trying to get away from.

There is something for them to buy—each other. Arguably this is an even more dangerous situation, because the result then is monopoly, or close. And then, no competition. And then... Well, then the free market falls on its face, and all of a sudden the answer is that one company wins and everyone else—competitors and customers alike—loses.

There is no silver bullet, for this as well as other problems. Just a web of interconnected aids that we can use to at least try to react when the inevitable corruption arises.

Monopolies rise up in the scenario you describe only in a static marketplace. Very few, if any, markets are static. There is constant change. Well healed competitors from other markets will enter a market where they see monopoly pricing power and begin to compete to grab a piece of a high margin business. Disruptive technologies or methods are also in play. In order for a company to successfully buy it's way into a monopoly, it requires that all other competitors (and potential competitors) either acquiesce to being bought or not enter the market after the monopoly has been created.

Certainly there can be barriers to entry, but those barriers will not be permanent.

A pleasant fiction, but a well-operated monopoly will move to crush nascent competition by undercutting them in price or securing their supplies—and thus their ability to produce at all—at prices that cannot be competed with by a smaller entity.

This isn't to say that it wouldn't be possible to defeat a monopoly eventually, just that it's not as straightforward as you make it sound. Indeed, historically, monopolies seem to have required government intervention to be dismantled (Standard Oil, AT&T, etc), though perhaps that's simply defining monopolies as those entities that the government dismantled as such.

Regardless, I think this is one of the two “silver bullet”-style myths that likes to float around the area of government regulation: one, that less regulation is always better, the other, that more regulation is always better. In essence, a refusal to acknowledge that regulation is and should be in a fluid state, adapting to what the market is doing at any given moment—and ideally ahead of the curve, rather than reacting after financial or other disaster has already struck.

You are assuming that competition will only come from smaller entities. My comment was simplistic because each scenario is different and I was speaking in the general case. Standard Oil had lost a lot of market share by the time it was broken up. AT&T existed as monopoly because government had heavily regulated the telecommunications industry.

Then again, there are a lot of instances where the government really should regulate things. For example, the repealed Glass-Steagall Act.

For example, the repealed Glass-Steagall Act.

This is a myth.

The repeal of G-S was not a cause of the financial crisis, and may have actually softened the blow:

"the left has simply offered no explanation as to how the merging of commercial and investment banks caused the current crisis. In fact, the evidence so far shows that Gramm-Leach-Bliley [that's the act that repealed G-S] has helped soften the blow to taxpayers by allowing commercial banks to take over trouble investment firms" (http://blog.heritage.org/2008/09/22/the-glass-steagall-myth/ )

That said, it's certainly true that in a deregulated market there would still be problems. For example, our institutions of private property fail to recognize some kinds of resources, allowing industry to externalize costs by way of pollution. Absent an overhaul of property rights (such that people would be able to have ownership of rivers, air, etc.), regulation is necessary to keep a lid on pollution.

Kindly contrast the effects of the crash in Canada, where banking remained tightly regulated, with the effects of the crash in countries where banking was effectively deregulated.

Kindly contrast the effects of the crash in Canada

You've completely ignored the argument in the article I referenced, and instead are relying your own assumption that correlation equals causation. If you want to argue from a comparison with Canada, you're going to have to flesh out your argument much more than "Canada is more regulated, and didn't have the same effect we did", since there's a world of other differences in the situation.

The economics experts have studied the situation, and found that the repeal of G-S couldn't have been the cause. Consider [1]

[QUOTE]

Given a history like this people wonder how repealing the law could have been a good thing. But a significant academic literature has investigated these claims and rejected them. Eugene White, for example, found that national banks with security affiliates were much less likely to fail than banks without affiliates. Randall Kroszner (now at the Fed.) and Raghuram Rajan found that (jstor) securities issued by unified banks were (ex-post) of higher quality that those issued by investment banks. A powerful book by George Benston went through the entire Pecora hearings which supposedly revealed the problems with unified banking and found them to be a complete sham. My colleague, Carlos Ramirez later showed that the separation of commercial and investment banking increased the cost of external finance (jstor). Finally, my own work (pdf) unearthed the real reasons for the separation in a titanic battle between the Morgans and Rockefellers.

Thus, the history of banking before Glass-Steagall and now our recent experience after is consistent, generally speaking unified banking is safer and repeal was a good idea.

[/QUOTE]

And it's not just a question of academic theory. The actual empirical evidence bears this out. Let me expand my original quotation from the article [2]:

[QUOTE]

Just look at which organizations have failed:

* Bear Stearns was an investment bank before it was sold to JP Morgan Chase (which includes a commercial bank).

* Fannie Mae were Freddie Mac were government sponsored entities before the government bought them.

* Lehman Brothers was an investment bank before it want bankrupt.

* Merrill Lynch was an investment bank befor it was sold to Bank of America (which is a commercial bank).

* AIG is an insurance company with no commercial banking division.

...

If Glass-Steagall's repeal had meaningfully contributed to this crisis, we should see the failures concentrated among megabanks where speculation put deposits at risk. Instead we see the exact opposite: the failures are among either commercial banks with no significant investment arm (Washington Mutual, Countrywide), or standalone investment banks. It is the diversified financial institutions that are riding to the rescue.

[/QUOTE]

[1] http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/09/gla...

[2] http://blog.heritage.org/2008/09/22/the-glass-steagall-myth/

> ...I think that a more constructive strategy for solving the problem isn't to attack political contributions (which is bound to get into thorny First Amendment questions), but...

If you have reached the point where, at a fundamental constitutional level, you really can't distinguish industrial lobbyists buying laws from the freedom of individual citizens to express themselves, then you've already lost any chance you had of fixing this problem without building a new system of government. You have accepted that artificial entities such as corporations should be treated in a similar way to real people. At that point, you might as well just apportion votes by something like market cap and be done with it.

Personally, as a non-US citizen but part of an international community that is inevitably affected by bad government in the US anyway, I am hoping for a bigger version of what we did to our MPs in the run up to the last election: find a convenient political excuse to remove a substantial proportion of incumbents from the running altogether, and then not give any party outright control of the following Parliament. That should have led to fundamental reform of our voting system, but the campaign in favour of such reform were so incompetent that it was a damp squib in the end. In any case, I think we are being damaged considerably less by the coalition government we have today than we would have been under any one of the major parties alone (which is intentionally a pretty damning indictment of all the major parties). The US is in a much worse state than we are, because the whole deck is stacked so heavily against minor candidates that you're basically locked into a two-party mess until something revolutionary happens, but ruffling enough feathers to remind the public's representatives that lobbyists do not (yet) actually have a vote would be a good start.

If you have reached the point ... then you've already lost any chance you had

You're probably right. But that doesn't mean we should give up: that would be even worse.

Oh, I'm not saying you should give up. On the contrary, I wish you all the luck in the world in restoring sanity to your political and legal systems. I just think you're going to need to bring down the whole house of cards and start over to do it. Then again, given the current economic conditions and the kind of idiocy that results in obviously bought-and-paid-for legislation like what we're discussing here, if ever there was a chance to shake things up it's probably over the next cycle of elections.

The problem is, the government has that power, irreversibly, simply on account of being the government. Once you've got the monopoly on the legitimate use of force, you've got it all.

I'm not sure why this was downvoted. Even if you somehow passed laws to somehow take away the government's legal authority to interfere in the market, the lobbyists could still buy legislation to restore that power and then use it.

Even if you somehow passed laws to somehow take away the government's legal authority

That's not the only possibility, nor even, I think, the most likely one. It's common (but not common enough) for the courts to say that some legislation or regulation exceeds the authority of the political branches. Indeed, this argument is central to the current battle over the ObamaCare individual mandate.

It's not just piracy, unfortunately. Suppose SOPA passes - there are all these tools available to stop Google/other services from interacting with "rogue" websites.

But what about other things that are as bad as or worse than piracy -- if we use those tools to stop piracy, why not use SOPA-like tools to stop them? (This isn't a slippery-slope argument, it's more of an "equivalent-harms" one.) Similar to how terrorism-inspired tools are used all the time for non-terrorism law enforcement.

Yeah Google obviously isn't trying to protect free speech; they have their own business interest in mind. But really, who cares what their motivation is, as long as someone is fighting the dark side.

This bill has turned into a fight between old Big Business vs. new Big Business. There would be no reason for congressmen to just randomly decide to create a bill like this. It was obviously the result of heavy lobbying from the dying record industry, the overpriced and overpaid film industry, and older tech companies like Microsoft. It's just nice to see newer big companies like Facebook and Google fight on the opposing side, even if it's just because this bill could possibly kill their companies.

I've read the bill myself and it's pretty unsettling. Check section 1.4 for some real-world "1984" thinking.

"But really, who cares what their motivation is, as long as someone is fighting the dark side."

If you must make any agreements with firefoxman, make sure you get it in writing, notarized, with witnesses.

A bit too personal. Sorry.

It seems that the main argument of the supporters of the bill is that piracy is bad for the economy, since it causes job loss.

In reality, at least the way I see it, things could not be further from the truth. Yes, there is a slight loss to the American economy when foreign consumers are not paying for the movies and music (although mostly American companies are to blame here - I cannot buy music anywhere on the internet even if I want to, so TPB is my only source of 24/7 entertainment). However, when it is the American customers that are "stealing", this is not really bad for the economy, as no money is actually lost, it is simply redistributed when the consumers use the money they saved when downloading to buy other stuff - probably coming from the industries that make much less profit than the entertainment industry.

Also, the entertainment industry seems unable or unwilling to face the fact - the consumers aren't buying not because they can download for free, but because the products are crap, not worth the money. Avatar was the most commercially successful movie of all times, in the period of most piracy of all times.

> It seems that the main argument of the supporters of the bill is that piracy is bad for the economy, since it causes job loss.

The average politician sees IP related matters in purely economic terms. So the most effective line of argument is to compare the economic cost of new regulations to their benefit.

I suggest keeping that in mind when writing your representatives on this issue.

> “All players in the Internet chain who profess to care about copyright protections should come forward with meaningful solutions — not simply throw up unfounded charges and suggest they will ignore the will of Congress anyway," said Recording Industry Association of American senior vice president for communications Jonathan Lamy.

1) maybe they don't see a need for additional solutions like you do.

2) the will of congress? You mean your will, care of your lobbyists, care congress, right?

Ok, I'll admit I don't know much about the laws about US donations/lobbying on the political trail, but I'm assuming you can run for a slot for Congress using your own money for whatever is needed right?

Why not get Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergey, Mark Zuckenberg (sorry about spellings) and most all other internet billionaires to threaten to run for congress if Congress keeps doing stupid shit like this? This would probably scare Congressmen more than anything else as I doubt, anyone running against these guys wouldn't have a chance of winning, and thats all they care about.

Because apart form threatening with force (a.k.a. as shooting them), only way I see the people get their power back is if some of these billionaires stand up and make it really hard for some people to be re-ellected again.

I think they have more important business to take care of than squabbling with Congressmen all day.

True. What if they selected a member of their staff to be the actual officeholder?

Exactly. I'm not actually saying they should be in congress, God knows they are way too competent to be there. But if these smart rich people can threaten to do something (run themselves, say they will do all donations to maximum permitted by law to other candidate, support some aide of them, etc) that will cost the election for the current candidate that is supporting SOPA, they may think twice about being shells for some industries.

What I am advocating is actually fighting fire with fire. You have politicians that get elected mostly by the donations made to them by these companies. So, why not get other companies that matter (Google, Mozilla, MS and Apple (not sure they stance on this) FSF, etc) together and start pushing the agenda as well?

Again, I don't know enough about the US system to even think what I'm saying is possible.

Bill Gates can make more change for good before breakfast than congress can in an entire session. Locking him up in there with those cretins would be a crime against humanity.

> "This will protect Americans’ intellectual property rights, which in turn boosts our economy and promotes American jobs,” Leahy said in a statement.

Besides lawyers, is there really any evidence behind this?

There is way more money in catering to companies like Google that build markets than there is in helping the RIAA keep grandma and cousin Timmy from illegally downloading music.

I don't think there is any real money in SOPA for anyone involved. It just seems to be a dying industry spitefully flailing about as it takes its last gasps of breath.

"Creating jobs" is just the post-2008 buzzword that is applied to just about every political argument. Just because a company makes more money doesn't mean they'll hire more people. There are clearly enough people employed by record companies because the records are getting produced.

If the company is able to accomplish their goal (create content and make $$$ off of it) with the number of employees they have now, why would they hire more just because they have more money? (Assuming, of course, that they will actually make more money by "stopping piracy")

This makes me wonder what it'd be like if Google ever goes bad: "Kill this legislation or we release the entire search history of you and your family. Then we'll see who the pirates (and worse) really are."

Protect IP and its House counterpart, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), are strongly supported by the entertainment industry, organized labor and business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Well there you go. If you made a list of the top ten groups that give money to Congressmen these guys would definitely be in it. And because they support both parties, guess what? It's biparisan! Something to vote on so you can say that Washington really works. It's just not all gridlock. Hey, look at me! I'm reaching across the aisle to get things done.

If you were some uneducated Congressperson, probably a lawyer/political hack who came up through the ranks, this looks on the outside like just the kind of vote to take home to the voters. I'm your man. I'm stopping internet pirates, protecting the innocent. Think of the children!

I have to laugh, but in reality it's a sad mess we're in. These pressure groups are going to keep at it until something like this passes, whether it's this year or ten years from now. We are well and truly fucked.

I'm glad Google is speaking up on this. I only wish more folks would listen. If you haven't contacted both your House and your Senate guys, now is the time to do it.

"If you made a list of the top ten groups that give money to Congressmen these guys would definitely be in it."

Not sure that's true, esp. in reference to organized labor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying_in_the_United_States#L... http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s

The dollar values may show this, and these numbers show you're right. However, influence wise, unions have massive sway because of the breath / consistency of their voter block - which provides a higher ROI on their lobbying money.

You mean, because they have a bunch of people who vote for politicians? I'm pretty sure that's how things are _supposed_ to work.

No. Because they are the biggest buyers of influence on the hill. It has absolutely nothing to do with having a bunch of people, just a bunch of money.

13 out of the biggest 20 donors are unions. http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?order=A

Sorry, but that's like looking at Hawaii and saying the US is a tropical country. You're ignoring 90% of the money spent by organizations to influence Congress.

Donations are only one small way that money influences the hill. If they were as effective as lobbying, you wouldn't see 10X the money being spent on that.

To me, any concentration of power, whether unions, corporations, etc. is dangerous to democracy. These people each voting their own mind is one thing, but these orgs encourage zombie voters that always vote the same way - while having central leaders to play / pay hard. This is very different from politicians just looking out for their voters.

Concentration of power via voting groups is a fundamental part of the democratic process, be it via representatives creating factions within legislatures or voters banding together to create political groups. (In the end, the Democratic and Republican party are essentially that.) Doing so allows smaller factions that have a single driving issue to have some political impact by focusing their voting behavior on that one axis.

What's the difference between that list and this one? http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?order=A

This list makes it look like unions dominate elections.

The former is a list of the total spent on lobbying, while the latter is political donations (campaign donations, essentially).

Campaign donations are much smaller, and much more regulated, than money spent on lobbying. Maybe the poster meant only donations, but it seems an artificial distinction to me to say that regulated campaign donations are the only way that special interest groups "give" money to congress.

Those comments are downright depressing.

I think this Bill will be good for the world. By the 'world', I mean anywhere that is not the United States of America.

The US has outsourced it's manufacturing, rationalized retail into behemoth monopolies and completely destroyed it's capital markets with rampant corruption and incompetence.

The ONLY area in which the US still is a leader and an innovator is in the internet/web, and now the US government is planning to destroy that as well.

Soon the rest of the world will be providing all kinds of services to US citizens behind the silicon curtain, to allow them to illicitly access information without fear of censorship or imprisonment.

Alternative DNS, proxies, darknets will spring up in the free world, giving the disenfranchised and repressed USians a voice and access to otherwise subversive websites that have forums with comments.

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