Who do you trust more: Corporations or Government?
This post takes the long road. If you don’t want to take the long road, skip the train of thought and get to the point.
In one of my moments of Random Thoughtitude, I was thinking about what my ideal country would look like. My first thought was infrastructure. I want a government that adequately funds and maintains a viable, nation-wide mass transit system and mandates bike lanes on every road. I want an educational system that actually teaches kids.
My next thought was: and what if our telecommunications infrastructure was owned and maintained by the government? What if our cable wires, our radio, our phone lines, and — the thing that sparked my original thought — our Internet were seen as massive public works projects on the order of sewers and roads?
Corporations would then compete in other ways. They might, for example, offer special content and charge for access to it. Or they might sell the hardware to connect to this otherwise national infrastructure.
Telecommunications, and the Internet in particular, has become this sort of basic, critical business commodity that is key to economic growth. But the corporations that run them are either too concerned with profits or really don’t have enough capital to upgrade their networks.
And we wouldn’t have this ‘Net Neutrality issue of corporations wanting to charge more or limit the flow of certain forms of data because boo-frickin-hoo, they don’t want to invest in their systems. Corporations are, after all, legally-bound to pursue profit. Their decisions must be made — for the bottom line, not the common good. Our government, on the other hand, would really have to treat all data the same and invest in our systems because we were all paying for it with our tax dollars.
Makes perfect sense, right?
Or does it? I thought some more and remembered that China controls its Internet infrastructure. And they have a few issues with censorship. Ditto Iran.
Our own government also has issues with freedom and privacy. Maybe handing them the keys to the Internet car would not be such a good idea after all.
I realized then that this is a pretty big conundrum. I wholeheartedly believe that corporations are evil, heartless, parasites who are incapable of doing The Right Thing unless it will make money. But I also believe the U.S. government is more concerned with maintaining power, control, and protecting their own personal safety and wealth than with building a just, free, and fair society.
So the question becomes: Who do you trust more? Corporations or Government?
And as importantly, what entities do you trust or would you trust? What does your ideal nation look like?
It largely depends on who the company and government are, but I trust neither unless they have a proven track record of communicating with (not talking at) the public, and a record of changing their actions based on that communication.
I don’t really trust either of them. However with corporations at least it’s obvious what their motivation is (profit). With politicians you can never really tell why they’re doing what they’re doing, which one of their many campaign contributors asked them for a particular favor, or if they’re actually acting on behalf of their constituency. And even if they are acting on behalf of their constituency the interests of the Mississippi 3rd might not coincide with my interests (just look at Ted Stevens and all the things he’s done for Alaska…).
I agree with the other comments: I trust neither.
In America, however, I trust the government over a corporation in most cases, including maintaining the Internet. Here we have some degree of democracy in our government, nothing even approaching authentic democracies like Venezuela and Bolivia but still something substantially more democratic than China. On the other hand, if you look at a corporation, you are talking about a tyrannical entity, by definition, which is controlled strictly by those who own it. When Comcast chooses to change their privacy policy for Internet service, they need only the permission of their shareholders, provided they are within the law. The government might try to do the same thing, but there are potential avenues where citizens can hold the government accountable.
My ideal nation is a democratic one, where people actually get to make the decisions that affect their lives. This doesn’t really resemble the U.S., which is more of a plutocracy, or the rule of the powerful.
I don’t trust either but, I trust the government less simply because - in most cases - corporations are kept "honest" by other corporations. Technically, the voters keep government honest, but people are much more vigilant about how they use their pocketbooks than their votes.
I wonder if it would make a difference if that control were decentralized. After all, most roads, sewers, etc. are not controlled or maintained or built by the federal government, but by local governments. And that’s a lot closer and at least theoretically more accessible than the feds.
For example: the guy that plans all the roads in the city where I live was at a meeting last night that I organized, and that a couple dozen of my neighbors attended. He got to hear all about specific safety issues, and it’ll be pretty straightforward to find out what happened afterwards.
OTOH, localization of control & maintenance can lead to some pretty serious problems of inequality, as school district funding demonstrates.
I’m slightly more trustful of (a democratic) government then of any corporation in these matters. Tyler expresses the point probably better than I would.