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?