[Dialogue] Save the Internet
Don Hinkelman
hinkel at sgu.ac.jp
Mon May 1 20:45:51 EDT 2006
For me the issue is not whether big business is bad or not. It is a
sociological structure with particular incentives and controls. The
public domain exists under different incentives and controls. Both
work to achieve purposes and both are assessed by many means
including balance sheets and profit/loss or surplus/deficit
accounting. The question is which structure do we select to manage a
particular function in society.
For roads, we generally choose the public domain for management,
because the costs are quite lower when handled by a single funds-
collecting ("marketing") agency and free access is uncontrolled.
Imagine dividing up roads into competing corporations and buying
"passes" to use this road and that road. A little of that happens
with toll roads, but less than 1% of North American roads are managed
that way.
For services or products that are delivered, we often choose the
private domain to manage those assets. These are big and small
corporations. It makes sense to have different firms who have the
same purpose to build different versions of cars and different
versions of computers.
For the internet, its structure lends itself to the public domain.
It was so cheap to install free universal internet across all of
Philadelphia, that the city almost did it. That is until some
private interests convinced politicians to privatize and now we have
competing non-universal, high-priced internet system[s]. Like
George, this really makes me angry when powerful interests unfairly
hurt weaker interests.
As an aside, my current efforts involve converting private business
into public business. I work in the open source software movement,
particularly in developing elearning and blended learning software.
We (meaning thousands of universities and volunteers) build and share
code that is interoperable. As of 2006, this public domain software
has overtaken the two largest private domain software groups--
Blackboard and WebCT. You can see it at http://moodle.org
Interestingly, "moodle" has a private domain side to it--providing
local installation and server hardware services. The infrastructure
is public and the transportable, non-monopolistic goods are privately
managed.
In the next few years, we will be moving to convert teaching
materials from the private domain to the public domain. Instead of
buying a textbook from a corporate publisher, we teachers will
download pages contributed by other teachers, then assemble textbooks
on our school computers and print them. Recently I printed my first
textbook this way--100% online. Only the final printing service was
private. It cost US$9 each for twenty textbooks.
That's the kind of big business I like to encourage.
Cheers,
Don
> But back to my original post, to inform and hopefully get some of
> us to write our congress people to keep the internet neutral.
> Right now Big Telecoms has prevented advances in the internet
> driving the U.S. from 1st to 16th place in internet access across
> the world. While many Asian and European nations have broader
> wireless reach and much faster rates of transmission (and lower
> costs). We think 5mps on broadband is fast here. Not only are the
> large telecom companies trying to prevent cities from setting up
> broadband connections and wireless applications in markets that
> these companies won't serve, they are also trying to position
> themselves so they can determine the content of the internet and
> the speed at which various content is delivered and would like to
> put a "postage" charge per email. We were able to forestall some of
> these measures in the Texas legislature, which had those bills
> passed would have crippled business and economic development in
> small and medium size cities. So please, if you are so disposed
> contact your congress person.
>
> And if I be wrong, please correct me.
>
> –george holcombe
>
>
> On May 1, 2006, at 5:49 PM, John Epps wrote:
>
>> Hello George and other colleagues who are welcome in on this
>> dialogue.
>>
>> It's a real treat to be able to clarify some thinking with you. So
>> here goes:
>>
>> For some time, I've been working with "big businesses." It has
>> come to gall me when I hear people whom I respect and whose values
>> I share speaking as if "big business" were the demonic force
>> causing all the pain we all experience. I'd be the last to claim
>> that business organizations are blame-free, and, to be sure, some
>> are indeed demonic. They are, however, the clear minority. Most
>> are well-intentioned, honest endeavors to make life more liveable.
>>
>> A clear misunderstanding, which I am opposing in the graduate
>> business course I'm teaching, is that the purpose of business is
>> to make money. That is not true. Despite the opinions of Milton
>> Friedman, that view is a definite minority among business scholars
>> (yes, there are some). The purpose of business is to create value
>> (i.e.,to provide goods or services that people value enough to pay
>> for), and the measure of its success is profit. As Peter Drucker,
>> Charles Handy, and others say, claiming the purpose of business is
>> to make money is like saying the purpose of life is to eat. We
>> must eat to live, but eating is not the purpose of life. It
>> enables us to pursue a more valuable purpose. We find that helping
>> people clarify the real purpose of their business is very
>> motivating, and touches the desire most of us have to make a
>> difference with our work.
>>
>> Business organizations, just like religious organizations, are
>> finite, fallible, and clearly imperfect -- just like the best of
>> us. They're neither more nor less to blame for social ills than
>> anyone else. It's just that waiting for the perfect organization
>> to come along would entail a VERY long wait. We make do with what
>> we have, and, as H. R. Neibuhr suggests, we attempt to be the
>> sensitive and responsive part of that organization, working for
>> its continual transformation.
>>
>> The comment about the institution of slavery is absolutely
>> correct: it was evil. But calling it an institution is pretty
>> abstract, sort of like calling Christianity an institution. It is,
>> in some way of talking, but that doesn't provide anything concrete
>> enough to get a handle on. Anyway, I was talking about
>> organizations, not institutions in that sense. There is a difference.
>>
>> I totally share your views on the Religious Right and their
>> perversions of morality. I'm not suggesting that morality is
>> simply an individual matter. In fact, business ethics (not quite a
>> contradiction in terms) is an important topic coming more to the
>> forefront after Enron, etc.
>>
>> So I hope we can put some energy into making good use of "big
>> business" as an ally rather than as an enemy. A useful metaphor
>> comes from the Chinese, "Lure the tiger out of the mountains" as a
>> stratagem. It's built on the insight that when you go tiger
>> hunting, you don't do it in the turf of the tiger. That's the way
>> to get eaten. You "lure the tiger out of the mountains" so that
>> you have a fair chance. In an abstract sense, that means for
>> strategy, if you don't have the advantage, your only agenda is to
>> get the advantage. Anything else is a prescription for failure.
>>
>> We translate that to mean getting the opponent to become an ally.
>> A silly example is the department staff that wanted to buy an
>> expensive piece of equipment, but were opposed by the finance
>> officer. They had the demonstrator model installed in the office
>> of the opponent, who experienced the benefit and quickly became an
>> advocate. What do you suppose it would take for "big business" to
>> perceive the value of continuing the free Internet? Maybe it would
>> not be the telecom companies that would be the ally, but they
>> could certainly be "outvoted" by other industries that routinely
>> use the Internet for normal everyday operations.
>>
>> These are just some ruminations, and I'd welcome response.
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> John Epps
>>
>> At 08:34 AM 4/29/2006 -0500, you wrote:
>>> Perhaps you are right, however I have noticed that small people,
>>> of which I am one, can act very immorally in mobs, something they
>>> would not do on their own, and that in 1884 a Federal District
>>> judge in the U.S. made corporations individuals in law. Also,
>>> there appears to me to be evil conveyed in and through
>>> institutions, e.g. the institution of slavery, which speaking
>>> ethically, goes far beyond what a small person can contribute and
>>> the practices, images, understandings can be perpetuated far
>>> beyond that small person for generations. The right wing
>>> religious in the U.S. have tried to put the whole of morality on
>>> individual responsibility, which is aptly applied in specific
>>> instances, but they readily ignore these principles as a group
>>> when it comes to issues of poverty and the distribution of wealth
>>> and taxes.
>>>
>>> Having attempted to work through the political process at the
>>> state level, it occurs to me that all the people I meet are good
>>> and decent folks as people, but when vote time comes their
>>> decisions are made on the basis of corporate interests, which
>>> they even admit sometimes in private not the best thing to do.
>>>
>>> –george
>>>
>>>
>>> On Apr 29, 2006, at 4:55 PM, John Epps wrote:
>>>
>>>> George:
>>>>
>>>> The villains aren't large companies, but small people.
>>>>
>>>> At 07:17 AM 4/28/2006 -0500, you wrote:
>>>>> The following article highlights an upcoming threat to our
>>>>> communication abilities and the first in a series of moves by
>>>>> the large companies to use congress to control the flow of
>>>>> information and make much more money off the internet. We've
>>>>> had extensive battles in the Texas legislature to prevent the
>>>>> major telecom and cable companies from inserting laws on the
>>>>> books forbidding cities from putting up wireless networks,
>>>>> which have become necessary for small towns to retain their
>>>>> assembly plants and warehouses, since the majors won't serve them.
>>>>> –george holcombe
>>>>>
>>>>> Dialogue mailing list
>>>>> Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
>>>>> http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/dialogue_wedgeblade.net
>>>>
>>>> LENS International (M) Sdn Bhd
>>>> 5th Fl, Tower 1 Wisma MCIS
>>>> Jalan Barat
>>>> 46200 Petaling Jaya, Selangor
>>>> Malaysia
>>>> on the web at <www.lensinternational.com>
>>>> email: <jlepps at pc.jaring.my>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Dialogue mailing list
>>>> Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
>>>> http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/dialogue_wedgeblade.net
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Dialogue mailing list
>>> Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
>>> http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/dialogue_wedgeblade.net
>> LENS International (M) Sdn Bhd
>> 5th Fl, Tower 1 Wisma MCIS
>> Jalan Barat
>> 46200 Petaling Jaya, Selangor
>> Malaysia
>> on the web at <www.lensinternational.com>
>> email: <jlepps at pc.jaring.my>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Dialogue mailing list
>> Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
>> http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/dialogue_wedgeblade.net
>
> _______________________________________________
> Dialogue mailing list
> Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
> http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/dialogue_wedgeblade.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20060502/a76c9711/attachment-0001.htm
More information about the Dialogue
mailing list