Broadband caps: Should we fight fire with fire, or fire with water?

March 23, 2011 at 6:21 pm · Filed under business ethics, consumer, corporation, Editorial, government, history, issues, Legislation, litigation, Opinion, patents

Image by John M. Cropper via Flickr

I just read an interesting article on the Stop the Cap! site, entitled An Open Letter to Content Producers: Netflix, Hulu, Valve, Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. Basically, the gist of the article is that those companies should realize that broadband caps are eventually going to hurt them in the pocketbook. Consumers are going to be far less likely to buy devices, such as game consoles and home theater equipment, that depend on a broadband Internet connection if actually using their broadband service is going to cost them an arm and a leg. But how do the huge ISP’s get away with these Internet overcharging schemes? As Stop the Cap notes:

For starters, the broadband providers have very powerful lobbyists — quite a few of which are ex-legislators. Together, they wage their public policy battles on both the state and federal level, often writing the bills a compliant legislator is willing to introduce as their own.

That’s very astute, and it’s exactly the problem.  In the United States, the huge corporations are now buying legislators and writing the laws.  This is not necessarily a new thing (the railroads and oil companies didn’t get as large as they are today without considerable assistance from the government) but this sort of thing used to be viewed as despicable, and when it happened it generally took place in the proverbial “smoke-filled rooms” where no one knew what was happening.  Well, a few decades back, we started passing open meetings laws and various types of “sunshine” legislation, hoping that if this type of activity could no longer take place in secret, it just wouldn’t happen.  Unfortunately, what’s turned out to be true is that neither large corporations nor legislators really have any significant sense of shame anymore.  They’ve figured out that you folks know what’s going on, but you’re not sufficiently motivated to do anything about it.  There will always be a few that “cry in the wilderness” about how the big corporations are taking over, but you just go back to watching TV or gaming or browsing the Internet and forget all about it.

So, Stop the Cap continues:

Consumers — your customers — can’t do much about this beyond writing their members of Congress and complaining.  But because they did not enclose a check or money order made payable to the respective politician’s campaign fund, the result will be a form letter response weeks, if not months later… after the corporate agenda is enacted into law.

We just cannot fight this battle all by ourselves.  Recognizing the realities of today’s politics, we need your help to fight money and power with money and power.

The video game industry earns billions yearly. You have already faced battles in Washington, so you know how this works. You can fight for your interests while protecting ours by ensuring broadband service is cheap, plentiful, and unlimited. The same story applies to other content producers, such as online video, software, and any other company that wants to move to online distribution to power their business. You cannot succeed if customers are too afraid of using your service because of a bandwidth cap.

Now, I understand the sentiment here.  The thinking is, we “little people” are powerless against these large corporations, so why not at least try to convince a few of the big corporations that it’s not in their economic interest to let other big corporations do whatever they want, and that they should use the same tactics (in other words, buying politicians and using their influence) to stop those other big corporations.  So you wind up with a “battle of giants”, each fighting over who gets first dibs at picking the pockets of ordinary people like you and I.

This, unfortunately, is the “fighting fire with fire” approach.  Sometimes that works, and sometimes it backfires and your house gets burned down.

What we really need is a “fighting fire with water” approach.  Not trying to have one group of huge corporations take on another group of huge corporations in our political system, because whoever wins simply becomes the next oppressor of the people.  There is no such things as an altruistic corporation (if you don’t believe it, rent the documentary film “The Corporation” sometime, or if you are patient you can view it on YouTube).  There are just more evil and less evil corporations (I’m not including here the very small corporations of just a handful of basically good people, that only incorporated because they felt they needed the same legal protections as their competitors).  And the bigger a corporation gets, the more evil it becomes.

What we need to do is get corporations OUT of bed with the government.  Now, some of you may have observed, if you didn’t sleep through civics class in high school, that our Constitution has a “Bill of Rights“, and that the first ten amendments were expressly written to give rights to the people that they didn’t necessarily have back in whatever country had formerly been home.  Let’s take note of a couple of specific protections, starting with the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Besides the government, what institution had been the major oppressor of the rights of the people for hundreds of years?  Organized religion, and specifically, organized religion that was closely tied to the government.  The Constitution did not say that you can’t have religion — in fact, it protected it — but it did say that organized religion could not use the force of government to compel you to do anything.

I want you to think about that for a moment.  Here we have what was perhaps the middle ages equivalent of a modern corporation in terms of power and influence over government, and certainly much more powerful in their ability to make life a living hell for ordinary citizens that didn’t kowtow to the church.  And our constitution set boundaries — it said that religion could exist, but it could not use the influence of government to enforce its decrees or promote its ideals (and yes, I do realize that there are certain members of a certain political party that have tried to do everything in their power to negate the effect of this amendment).

And then there’s the Sixth Amendment:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.

The thing about the sixth amendment is that it knocked down the power of that other great oppressor of the people — government itself, or more specifically, government under a king or a dictator.  Whereas a medieval king might have been able to say the word and have you beheaded, now you actually have a right to a trial by a jury of your peers —  not a group of government officials — if you are charged with a criminal act.  And again, we could talk about how much the effect of this amendment has been watered down over the years, but it still stands as a barrier to a vindictive government official being able to do whatever they want to you, just by charging you with a criminal offense.

If you can see where I am going with this, you understand the enormity of the task.  What we need is a constitutional amendment.  Something like this:

Congress shall make no law favoring the rights of corporations or similar entities over the rights of persons; nor convey the status of a person on any entity other than an individual human being.  Any court decision that gives a corporation equal rights with a person is hereby repealed. Corporations and similar entities may not contribute to political causes or candidates, nor hire lobbyists to attempt to influence the voting or behavior of any elected official, nor own patents or copyrights.

Let’s call it the “Restoring Government to the People” amendment and see if we can get it enacted.  How could we do that?  By only voting for candidates that promise to do everything in their power to get this amendment ratified, and then holding their feet to the fire and not voting them in for second term if they don’t follow through.  Eventually, they will get the hint that people want such an amendment.  But also, I think a lot of legislators are getting sick and tired of being strongarmed by corporate interests.  Don’t think for a moment that every legislator would necessarily be against this, because I’m sure that many are sick to death of dealing with corporate lobbyists and with having to basically sell their principles to the highest bidder.  I think that new legislators, that are not yet disillusioned by the process, would be more receptive to such an amendment than some of the “old pharts” that are so used to the “wheeling and dealing” culture of Washington (and the various state capitols) that they don’t know any other way.

Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that the “Stop the Cap!” approach is wrong in the short term.  It’s hard to pass a constitutional amendment, and for better or worse, the founders of our country wanted to make the process difficult.  But it’s certainly possible.  In 1992, the 27th amendment was enacted, and that one limits congressional pay raises.  I hardly think that member of Congress were unanimously in favor of that amendment, but yet it got passed.  So there is room here for both a short-term and a long-term strategy, but it is my opinion that in the long term, we need to fight this fire with water, by “putting out” the ability of corporations to hijack our political process and oppress individuals.

If you’re with me on this, you can start by promoting this article on whatever social media sites you happen to frequent.  I am only one person, a lone blogger if you will, and at my age I cannot make this happen — in fact there’s a pretty good chance I won’t live to see it happen.  But you’ve seen how Internet memes can spread, so pass this along, make a video, do whatever you can to get this idea out there.  Because, once no huge corporation can exert undue political influence on our legislators, maybe they’ll start listening to us again!

Or, you can just go back to surfing the Internet, playing the latest game, or watching the latest propaganda-that-passes-for-news on the TV.  In that case, the big corporations win by default.  It’s up to you!

(And just so there’s no question in anyone’s mind, although I retain copyright on this article, I hereby grant unlimited reproduction rights for any unabridged, unedited copy of this article, which must include this paragraph.  You do not have to ask my permission, and you do not have to pay me.  And, you may translate it into another language as long as you do so to the best of your ability, and release the translation under the terms outlined in this paragraph.)

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