Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
I'm well aware that the WH may not take any real action though. Please sign up at http://fixthedmca.org if you care about this issue and want to continue helping the move to fix this issue permanently.
:-/
http://swampland.time.com/2013/01/31/we-the-people/
It argues that the reason for petitions to exist is the possibility to open a dialog to the people who are concerned about certain topics (because the petition website gets your email adress), and that in the time of fractioning news consumption it is a useful way to keep communicating, whatever that means.
edit: Ok, why the heck do they call their page Swampland?
> edit: Ok, why the heck do they call their page Swampland?
Probably because it's about politics, and according to popular myth, DC was built on a swamp.
Whether or not a petition is an effective means of communication I'm not qualified to answer, but it seems like a better option than doing nothing at all.
Specifically, people generally think of petitions as things where, given n signatures, some kind of action is going to be taken (as in 'the right to petition government for redress of grievances'). In that context, it's easy to forget that the most you can 'win' is a response. Hence, 'victory' feels hollow, which can take more energy away from a movement than not having had a petition to rally around in the first place.
Hope that makes sense. I'm not arguing against the system itself, but I think it's overplaying its hand by calling itself a petition system.
If you recognize that people who want change have been writing individually to the White House to get it for generations, redirecting some of that mostly-invisible-to-others mechanism of feedback (which, because of the volume, is pretty much guaranteed to generally produce generic responses and little action) to a mechanism where requests and the responses can be highly visible and serve as vehicle for groups to raise interest and propel a conversation that then extends beyond the WH petition forum, it has some value.
If you look at the response from the WH as the end of the process that the petition starts, sure, its not particularly useful. But that's, I think, misunderstanding the point rather badly.
There seems to be quite a crowd of you saying the same thing every time the subject of a petition comes up. Perhaps you could club together and have a support group.
It's just a gentle way to deliver constructive comments that are sensitive. You bring them down softly. There's no need to be especially cruel in delivering negative opinions, and this is a forum. Negative opinions are warranted; so long as they are at least valid, they need not be particularly liked.
Then don't be.
If you have nothing positive to contribute, don't.
Fixing the DMCA needs to start in the legislative branch (or be ruled unconstitutional by the judicial).
The petition system should geolocate you, suggest who your representative is and make sure that you sign a petition on a national issue that is delivered to your representative together with only the signatures of other constituents in that representatives district. I reckon the system should also prompt you to forward the petition not only to friends and family with the same representative as yourself, but also friends and family who live in districts that haven't received many signatures yet (i.e. it should help fill in the holes).
"The White House announces a new threshold of 500,000 signatures before it will respond to online petitions."
I was initially enthusiastic about these online petitions, but it doesn't seem like any of them have had an effect.
All that ever happened when one reached the 'must get a response' threshold was some staffer would write a couple of quick sentences about how they weren't going to do whatever the thing was, and how you were wrong for wanting it.
Useless exercise all round.
http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/backbe...
As for petitions actually having results, I imagine they are the weakest form of lobbying possible. The executive branch sees them and that is all.
They promised to respond, which is about all they can promise. And this gives them a reasonable metric for how many voters care about an issue, which is a good thing. And they can probably even infer some demographic data from the results, which is another good thing.
Basically this is a tool to better inform policy decisions, and the evidence is that it's "working". If you were expecting more then I think your hopes were a little unfounded.
No, it is actually a safety valve. If the public gets a little too agitated about anything they can go sign a petition to let of some steam. This petition site furthers couch-potato politics; it enables people to 'do their bit' without actually moving their ass. It neutralizes those who are naturally prone to apathy already.
To argue that the practice of policy is cynical and easily corrupted is a truism. To say that the white house deliberately threw up a petition system to actively "neutralize" inconvenient opinions is just ridiculous, sorry. The white house staff are people just like you and I, and they care about many of the same things you do and truly want to do the right thing in the face of many competing interests. Don't turn them into Orwellian villains, it's not helpful.
> The white house staff are people just like you and I
See, that realization is what enables me to believe they would make a petition site just to keep people happy. It is something rather frequently seen in the "real world" from "normal people" (see: suggestion boxes in the breakroom at work), and is exactly the sort of thing I could see myself doing. Hell, I have done it. Have someone that is mad at you? Let them vent for a while until they calm down, then tell them why they are wrong.
This sort of tactic isn't unique bizarre super-villian behavior. It is standard bullshit.
If the intent were completely pure, merely to educate, they wouldn't have people perform a meaningless action before they got their cookie. You don't get that far in politics by being clueless about how to gauge public interest in a topic without resorting to an online tally of interest. That is simply inconceivable.
An internet petition is just a number and a paragraph that people clicked a thumbs up on. Nobody would ever care unless those people actually started voting differently, and by differently, that means something other than just going across the isle and shaking hands with their neighbor politician in the other camp.
It is the same reason you don't argue with businesses with petition letters, you argue with them with their bottom line. If you are in a state of demanding something, the other party has a power and influence you don't, and you need some pull in the relationship or else you will be walked all over.
Heh. And here you are, in said forums! Somewhat perfecting the voice of righteous judgement! Bravo, but no. I see what you came to represent here, but if you think trumpeting loudly some bad-ass anti-establishment intellectual philosophy while standing on the tiny issue of "the right to cell-phone-unlocking-regardless-of-lender-contract" as a basis for your purist reasoning, then you sir/ma'am, live in a first world overrun with problems of the same degree! There is wisdom in "choosing your battles," and this, my dear zanny, is not the one. Trust me.
edit: alternatively, I'm finding some non-existent sarcasm.
The fact of the matter is their aren't any looming issues facing the US that are likely to result in widespread riots today. But let's assume we are back in the 1950s during the Civil Rights Movement, I can't imagine a non-reply to a "We the People" petition doing anything to quell the Civil Rights Movement. Frankly, I suspect it would just further fan the flames.
The only way I could see this working as a "safety value" is if people confuse signing an online petition with actually voting. Something I find unlikely. Now if the government uses the site inform their opinions of the populace and shape their actions this could influence policy but only if it has been shown that if you oppose a petition than you will get voted out next election. The elderly are great at doing this which is why no one touches Social Security and Medicare. A lot of people think the Internet is a representative sample of the general population, and if something is massively popular online than the fact the the government isn't doing is means that they are usurping the will of the people.
I don't see online petitions as very helpful in any way.
100,000 out of 300,000,000 people. What effect do you imagine it should have?
If you really want to give these petitions some weight, they should raise the threshold to 150,000,000. And there should be some way of letting people without computers sign it too. Maybe we could have places where people come to sign the petition. But that sounds like a big undertaking. Maybe we could gather several petitions and let people sign the ones they like, every say 4 years.. maybe with a smaller event in-between. And the results should be counted, and then the government forced to do what is decided.
Hmmm... If only there was something like that. That would be awesome.
We have elections. Demanding that a petition from 100,000 people override the results of an election is ridiculous. The administration is responding to the petitions with their position -- I think that's about all they have the right to expect.
Really? I'm honestly surprised to find anyone who is genuinely surprised to discover State malfeasance these days.
Did you really, honestly, hand-on-heart believe that these petitions would change anything?
I think it was P. J. O'Rourke who opined that if voting could change anything, it'd be outlawed.
Furthermore, these petitions aren't going to be seen by lawmakers, as someone in the below comment says. Strictly speaking, the President is part of the executive branch, not the legislative branch, so in any event, no "lawmaker" will be seeing these petitions at all.
I have this fear that people will think signing these petitions is "enough" (or "anything" really) and won't do more to push their particular issue. This literally does nothing but solicit a response from the White House, and 99% of the time (likely 100% but I don't know that for sure), the response could have been written by anyone familiar with the White House's already-public stance on the issue.
So put a cap on how much you can donate, and ban corporations from donating. Only individuals should be able to donate. I don't care that they think they need $100 million to get elected, and with this they'd only get $10 million. The point is their competitors will only get by with that much, too, but in a much fairer system, where the voices of many more people have to be listened to, instead of just the voices of a few.
If an organization wants to petition its members to donate to a campaign or political action committee, go for it. But it cannot coerce, it cannot apply punitive measures to members that do not donate, and it cannot be a religious institution that receives tax-exempt status.
Tax-exempt religious organizations such as churches can (but often don't) have their tax-exempt status revoked for urging their congregation to vote for specific political candidates already.
The first, is typically called 'bundling'. An organization, say PETA, organizes a donation drive and encourages its members to make their personal contributions to campaigns PETA has researched and through such bundling the donations have a clear statement of why they were made and what policies are important to those donors.
The second, is an organization donating its money politically, effectively increasing the net donation impact of its members. (as they can donate to the organization and still donate individually)
The argument against the second situation still allows for the first. But conflating the first and second is begging the primary question of whether organizations themselves, in their limited-rights-having-but-clear-non-person status, ought to have their own right to political speech.
Because we can deny organizations the right to contribute directly without denying them the right to bundle. And such a situation would actually massively multiply the power of organization itself: as engaging an increasing number of voters becomes more important than being able to convince a small number of wealthy backers to contribute increasing sums of money.
The only real hedge against this is a return to a constitutional government that doesn't have the power to grant special favors. That opportunity has long since passed.
Why should people living in Florida have any say whatsoever into the affairs of people living five thousand miles away in Alaska? Why vice-versa? How does that make any more sense than people in London having a say in the lives of people three thousand miles away in Boston?
Nevertheless, people in Florida are able to exert control over people in Alaska, and vice versa. That seems incredibly absurd to me, what do they share beyond a common language and currency? Even the distance between Portugal and Finland is only half of that, and the EU is rather different than the US Federal Government.
If we all needed to band together to increase our military might in order to keep razing hoards of Canadians at bay, then I may see the need for it, and clearly the importance of common travel and trade agreements cannot be overstated, but right now our system enables politicians elected in flyover country to tell people living in Portland what they may or may not do in the privacy of their own home. The opposite is equally unfair. Where is the value in that?
These are different communities, different regions, different societies being forced to play politics with each other. If we need to start sacrificing the quality of the democracy (reducing representation per individual) in order to keep a system so absurd running smoothly, then it should be downsized.
Chop it all in half, or more, until the size of it resembles a more reasonably sized country. Two to four federal governments instead of one would make more sense. Representation per individual could increase back to previous levels without resulting in deadlock.
Lest I come off the wrong way, my problem is not that the Federal government is strong, but rather that the Federal government covers a regions and people too diverse. I'm not a "state's rights" nut, just a Cascadia nut.
Don't get me wrong, there are several things I think the government needs to do including managing the economy, maintaining military/ law enforcement just to name a few.
But then you have a congressional hearing about steroid use in baseball. We have government tell us what we can and can't do with our own property (cell phone unlocking, etc). And I think, is that what we pay these guys for? They can't even balance a budget because their scope is way too broad.
I agree that government needs to be downsized, just maybe in a different way.
I've actually thought for some time this is an area the tech community could make a positive impact addressing the inefficiency of a small focused interest prevailing against a much larger, but unfocused public interest.
Thinking more like if 100M people contributed $1 to fund politicians that protect the public interest.
I've written some of the code -- but since that time I've learned a lot more so I will probably scrap what I have to rebuild.
Nowadays you don't want a PAC. You'd probably want to set up multiple organizations including perhaps a 501(c)(4) and definitely a Super PAC expenditure-only committee, which is far more useful than a traditional PAC because it can conduct unlimited independent spending in favor of your preferred candidate (or against your non-preferred candidate).
Traditional PACs, by contrast, can only give $5,000 to a candidate -- they're more useful if you're a company trying to lobby a congresscritter. Their scheduler is going to check to make sure you've given before deciding whether to set up the meeting with the boss, etc. Not as useful if you're an advocacy group trying to influence elections.
well how about phone unlocking? I struggle to see the case for having locked phones.
My first cut would be an appeal like 'the phone companies are trying to steal money out of your pocket. It's un-American. You should be free to do what you want with you phone.'
If you want to truly OWN your device, you can pay fair market value for it, and get service from whoever you want.
Paying $200 instead of $600 is covered by the two year contract you sign with a carrier to get a subsidized phone, during which you pay them back the cost of that subsidization. If you leave early, an early-termination fee ensures that the subsidization is paid for.
At the end of your two year contract, you've paid back the full cost of the phone, and you should be able to treat it as Yours in every sense of the word -- even if that means unlocking it and taking it to another service provider.
I'm not sure I see the issue here - if you want the unlocked phone, then buy it and pay for a SIM only type contract, or do such things not exist in the US?
Do you have a source on that? I can't find anything about such an exemption; I'm fairly certain it doesn't exist.
Locking the phone doesn't affect the subsidy payback one way or the other.
In an ideal world, you would be able to choose what your taxes were used for. While filing taxes, you could select:
NASA: 10%
GREEN ENERGY RESEARCH: 10%
<CITY> ROAD MAINTENANCE: 10%
and so on..
Just a fantasy. Please don't bash me for imagining having taxes at all 'in an ideal world.'
Probably since overriding a veto is a lot harder than getting one more Senator to vote for the bill, which means the President has more say in what makes it into law than any individual legislator.
He admittedly does have a huge bully pulpit. A defined legislative role. And he does personally lean on representatives. But the US has absolutely nothing equivalent to the organization and party discipline that countries. And "President" is an individually elected position by the country, and has no particular relation to his party other than "(very prominent) member".
A sitting President is always the head of their party.
My understanding of US political parties says that they do not have a rigid structure nor a single head. Indeed if you look through the section on the structure of the Democratic Party on Wikipedia (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_(United_States... - really, go look) you won't find Barack Obama's name anywhere in that section.
The President has a huge bully pulpit. He is in charge of one of the 3 branches of government. The public hears and sees the President.
But the President does not run the party.
The president is a member of the executive branch, not the legislative branch. He signs bills into law in his authority as an executive who will be responsible for carrying out the laws that the legislators write, not as a legislator responsible for creating those laws.
You absolutely cannot say that he is "lawmaker number 1", because he's not even a lawmaker. The fact that most presidents happen to have served as legislators (senators) previously is irrelevant; that was their job then, and this is their job now.
He is not the head of his party. Nor is he the one who dictates how they will (or should) be whipped - the President isn't even supposed to have any say in the process of whipping votes - that falls on Reid, Pelosi, etc. (who actually have the resources to whip legislators, since they can make promises of campaign money, etc.)
We live in an era where the power of the executive has been illegally expanded well beyond what it was originally intended to be - we can thank Bush and Obama for the bulk of that (at least most recently). But that does not actually change the role that the president has (or should have) in legislative matters.
America has never in its history operated according to the ideal. It's just easier to become informed in America in 2013 than it was 150 years ago, so the discrepancies between the ideal and the realpolitik are more obvious.
I guess this boils down to whether you find manipulating the realpolitik to be more or less effective than trying to eliminate it.
Referencing a specific ability the President has which might qualify him as a 'law-maker' is at best a factoid in this conversation, especially because it doesn't even apply to the petition that we are discussing. The President's ability to classify drugs has little to do with banning/allowing phone unlocking (and one would be hard-pressed to apply a general label of 'law-maker' to the President based on a single power, which might better reside with Congress).
Also, where do I show a lack of abstract thinking? Where do I say that I agree with the President having such power? Are you assuming my response of, "Cool, but that's not what we are discussing here" is akin to, "I don't want to discuss this because I agree with it?" That would be a pretty huge leap to conclusions (if that's what you're reading into).
TL;DR - The President does not fit the generic term "law-maker," except for (maybe) very specific instance(s), none (that I know) of which apply to this situation.
I heartily support the freedom to unlock one's own phone and so forth, but I'd bet $5 that the majority of people haven't thought about it that much and think carrier lockin is an acceptable price to pay for 'cheap' phones. Just because everyone you know agrees with you doesn't mean you form a majority; it just means you're part of a clique.
The "portability" laws, also say that the carriers themselves have to unlock your phones if you want to change carrier.
This ensures that a carrier cannot make you locked to them by using phone lock or number lock. It is highly interesting. Maybe facilitated by the fact that all carriers here use GSM (people think that CDMA is shit, and like the fact that GSM chips are harder to clone than CDMA phones).
Do Brazilian carriers offer contract-subsidized phones? Many carriers here will unlock your phone once your contract is complete. See AT&T's unlock details at [1]
But the law says that if the costumer want to end his contract, then he will pay his fines or whatever, but the carrier must unlock the phone.
Also you see "unlocking stores" frequently on metro stations for example, it is perfectly legal, and encouraged by the government, to incentive some free market between carriers (here we have 4 big GSM carriers, some people even own prepaid GSM chips of all of them).
The lock-in is in the contract, not the phone, so locking the phone as well is unnecessary.
Otherwise it's impossible to penetrate the wall between government and people via "your vote, we write response, maybe" - type of approach.
Heck, we don't even have a "collect singatures of a majority of Senators and it goes to the Senate for mandatory voting" rule, so its not surprising that we don't have a "collect signatures of less than 1% of eligible voters and it goes to the Senate for mandatory voting" rule.
I love petitions, but people getting angry over e.g. repeatedly not legalizing marijuana after 0.03% of americans signed something I find confusing and frustrating.
It's almost as if people are easier to ignore if they solely protest through these petitions....
The other route is to just codify the exception into law, but pushing a law through about this takes time.
Perhaps it's not so useless after all.
1. It doesn't matter if there are "more important things to do". If it did, Silicon Valley wouldn't exist, and poverty wouldn't exist.
2. If the Whitehouse invents a petition system to allow people to show what is important to them, people expect the Whitehouse to react and do something about those things.
As has been stated elsewhere, the only real effect this can have is if it gains media traction. Which, given than there are celebrities and murders to report on, is always very unlikely in the US.
If 100,000 people wrote personalized letters to their congressmen and women, it would likely have a much more substantial affect. The problem is that people prefer a "fix my problem" button.
If there were a convenient way to automatically print the letter as well as an envelope that had the mailing information already on it, that would overcome even more friction.
Gives a sense of accomplishment but leads to zero results i.e. the same as arguing on the internet.
My concern is that the WH might once again raise the number of needed signatures for the next petitions! as there are still many reaching the target.
I've always felt petitions were used by lawmakers to help filter noise. If you set a threshold for the amount of support any cause needs before you'll address it (preventing you from having to listen to each person individually) the petition system seems only logical. If the lawmakers now see that 100,000+ people are against their decisions they promised to make a response but have no obligation to change anything.
This is where people's voting power is supposed to matter. If the representatives are always ignoring the issues that are deemed important by petition/protest groups then why should the be expected to get re-election?
Its sort of a shit deal where we're hoping the channels they provide will show some benefit or marshal of change but I haven't seen that happen yet. I'm not American so I'm somewhat distanced from everything but it has always seemed like these petitions were just another campaign tool and never intended to be taken seriously by gov't.
A Kickstarter might be more useful than a petition in getting the attention of the US government.
I mean, the closest thing is recent history, the Occupy movement, was still only a few tens of thousands at most.
https://usa.brianstaskforce.com/
https://brianstaskforce.com/blog/more-than-a-petition
The idea is to combine charitable giving with petitioning so as to establish the weight or importance of your idea to the powers-that-be.
Better than usual, I suppose.
While the President may use his office to champion new laws, he cannot make them himself, or overturn them.
Is it because of the lack of carrier discount? If that's the case, people have already voted with their money on what they value more.
1. We do not vote with money in America. Poor people get as much of a vote as rich people in this country.
2. By making jailbreaking illegal, the government is giving carriers a special legal status that makes it harder for anyone else to compete. If you want a market-based solution to life's problems, you cannot have the government swoop in and give special privilege to certain players.
Which is all that matters. How it should work in theory, matters very little.
> If you want a market-based solution to life's problems
Big "if", for many things, many don't want the depth of their wallet to determine their access to necessary services.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_voting
I'd disagree with the notion as applied here, though, because buying an unlocked phone is rigged to be a bad choice because so few carriers offer cheaper service prices for unsubsidized handsets.
Not entirely sure this applies across ALL carriers, but it does apply to ATT/Sprint/TMO I believe.
We may have voted, but "own my hardware and just pay for service" wasn't on the ballot.
Yes, but when they voted (before jan 26), it was legal to unlock your phone. This law is like changing the terms of the contract mid-term.
Obama doesn't give a shit?
Of course they do. If I buy a new house or car, I don't have to pay the full price up front, but when I have finished paying for it I absolutely do own it.
Subsidized phones are essentially loans. You pay for them over the course of your contract or with early termination fees, and when the contract is over you own them 100%.
I think you need to read up on property law or show me what law I'm ignorant of that says you don't actually own the phone.
You mean like when you sign a mortgage to buy a new home? Only it isn't true. You own your house even if you default which is why you can rip all of the copper and sell it for money before they foreclose on your home.
The contract with the carrier definitely doesn't say they own your phone. It makes no sense for them to say that since they have you for early termination fees.