Category Archives: Politics

General Politics

Customers, Companies, and Power – imbalances drive inequities

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I’ve been in the process of buying a house for the past month. It’s been a rocky process. Some of it has been on us, but a lot of it has been on the side of the lender. The first problem came when they basically started the process they day we were supposed to sign. This precipitated a series of events that as lead to the fact that it’s unlikely for us to actually fund the house on the last day we possibly could. Furthermore, they have been rather cavalier about the fact that we can just move closing dates without a problem. Essentially their poor processes have required us on multiple occassions to modify a private contract. We’ve been punished again and again because of their inability to meet their obligations. This strikes me as a serious inequity, especially since it’s not a big deal for them that we essentially lost out on a full month’s of rent from the seller. We have minimal to no recourse to address this loss.  On top of this, they still get paid. In my mind they’ve provided little to no value in this process and have in fact simply added a great deal of waste. They should no be paid and in fact should pay us the loss in rent we should have received from their inability to meet deadlines.

This sort of behavior is rampant in industries and companies that are essentially monopolies. Either their customers are fully locked in to a specific company because it is expensive or difficult to extract personal data or some other technical issue or the customers have no other option. In either case the company is able to act with a great deal of disregard for their customers. The goal of the business then becomes to extract maximum rents from their customers not to provide maximum value to the customer. This can create existential issues for a company that undergoes this transition, because many of the people that made that company great are pressured and have the quality of their employment decline without understanding why. Essentially these folks still try to do the right things and in many cases don’t agree with their corporate leadership. In many cases, such as with a Telecom, it’s likely they are exempt from the full rent seeking behavior of the company.

Thinking about these things have made me really frustrated the past few weeks. My job is to help my company deliver more value to the customer so seeing these actions is increasingly frustrating and counter productive to Lean principles. If companies aren’t adopting principles that improve value for end customers, then what can we do? Well, I think that in each of these cases the root cause comes from two totally different policy actions. First many of the issues we’re having are designed to protect customers so we enacted policies to that end. While the other problem, rent seeking behavior comes from the lack of policies to protect customers.

In each of these cases different government actions have lead to different actions for end customers. In actually these painful delays for our loan may for many other people, truly protect them. However, in our case, they aren’t. In the case of push deregulation on telecom the result has been monopolies and behavior designed to continually take more money from their customers. In each cases, these derive from two different philosophies around the value of government regulation. I think these situations highlight the nuances in this area.

In the end it’s important that we have real conversations about the underly reasons for different policy decisions. We need to understand that there are imbalances of power between customers and companies. In many cases those companies will exploit them to their best advantage. Unfortunately, these imbalances extend to the realms of politics as well. This of course is another area where we have issues and will continue to have issues. It is unclear how to address these imbalances, i’m not confident that we’re going to be able to do this in the next few years. If we cannot address these issues I believe they will continue to get worse as the economy remains flat in it’s growth.

Book Review: The People’s Platform: Taking back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

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I just finished reading “The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age” by Astra Taylor  I really found this book to be interesting. I believe it offered a very different critique on the digital age than Evegny Morozov’s “Click here to Save everything” where he focused on the arrogance of the algorithm and total solutionism of the movement, Taylor focused on the cultural cost of our digital economy. I think combined the philosophizing of Morozov with Taylor’s discussion of the value of culture and the economic forces behind these changes is an extremely powerful argument. Alone they are both excellent, but I think they offer balancing points that compliment each other well.

First of all, I don’t think everyone will like this book. I don’t think a lot of my readers will like large portions of the book. However, even the most libertarian will agree with some portions of it. I think that’s the power of this book. It’s not really fair to one side or the other, although is really obvious she has a bias – which she wears pretty proudly. Knowing this bias is there allows the reader to decide which portion is Occupy Wall street dreaming or which is really a problem (of course one can go too far either direction).

Taylor’s cultural argument is powerful because we are all part of that economy. We all consume cultural artifacts or perhaps, like myself, make them. The fact that these have been commoditzed to a cost of nothing while still valuable is something we deal with daily. The choice between pirating a movie, renting, streaming it on Netflix, or buying it all are choices we decide on a regular basis. I think that even the most hardcore pirate buys a lot of cultural goods.

Many of us, even if we don’t produce cultural goods, know someone that does. You might watch a video game streamer, you might have a friend or two that are in various bands, you might read my blog or another friend’s blog. All of these people want to use these artifacts to either live on or perhaps enhance their career in some fashion.

However, in the digital space most of the companies that share or distribute cultural activities are funded by ads. Twitch makes most of it money from ads, Google makes $50 billion/year on ads, Facebook makes the most money on an ad whenever a friend “Sponsors” that ad with or without our active agreement to “sponsor” the ad.

Taylor argues that we need to help develop a cultural public space that helps create value for other cultural goods that you may not actually consume (which is why I wrote this blog).

Many of the ideas in the book are anti-corporation, but not because they make money. Instead, it’s because they make money in ways that aren’t obviously ads and that control our cultural destiny. She is pro-net neutrality, she supports companies making profits from ads, but she argues for more transparency that an article is actually sponsored.

Her argument isn’t that we should tear down companies, but instead that we pull back some of the power that these companies have simply taken without any real conversation. We need to look at the ethics behind the algorithms they are using and understand their biases. We need to enable true conversations about these topics. Ad driven content leads to self-censorship and lower quality products.

Is this book perfect? Not by a long shot, but it really made me think about some topics and I think that we need to have more conversations about not just ads, but also about why companies behave the way they do. We need to find a better balance than we currently have.

I rate the book 5/5 for making me really think about topics

Should we celebrate about Google joining net neutrality fight?

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It’s time we be skeptical of high tech companies that support policies that we want. Today, a large number of tech companies came out against the FCC’s plan to allow internet fast lanes. They aren’t as bold as Mozilla in their claims, they don’t push for the most extreme best for the consumer perspective. We, as consumers, have to understand there’s a reason for this. These companies (and there are a lot) wrote the letter without stating what their position actually is, just that they are for a “free and open internet.” This is essentially a dream statement for a lawyer/lobbyist, because “free” and “open” can mean a variety of things based on that company’s perspective.

These companies are willing to push for a free/open internet insofar as it enables them to make money. We have to understand that. Many of these companies are looking to disrupt incumbent market players and are leveraging the internet to enable them to do that.

Normally, I’d be really excited about all these companies coming out in favor of net neutrality. However, because of their tepid support, their lack of recommendations of what to do to address the net neutrality issue, and tardiness to the conversation I’m concerned as to what their actual motives are for this debate. This is a very different discussion than SOPA, where just coming out against the bill was enough. In this case it’s not, we need them to provide clear direction on what the FCC SHOULD do instead. This provides the FCC a path forward and a way to drive the conversation. Without that, essentially there’s no clearly articulated alternative during THIS debate. Yes, they’ve made an argument before, but they aren’t this time.

I also am concerned by this turn of events because of the recent report that Google and the NSA had a very close relationship. In very strict version of net neutrality deep packet inspection wasn’t possible because there was no way to actually do it. The first step to packet discrimination is knowing what’s in the material. Truly end-to-end net neutrality precludes the ability to eavesdrop and snoop on content being passed along the IP backbone. Any sort of relationship between the NSA and arguably the largest internet company in the world necessarily limits the full extent that Net Neutrality can actually be implemented.

Furthermore, we also must remember that a large number of these companies that are now for Net Neutrality were also for CISPA which includes handing over data to the government. Which, based on Google’s relationship with the NSA, they essentially did anyway.

So, it’s a good thing that these companies came out for Net Neutrality because truly only the power of their lobbying can overcome the FCC’s proposal and push Comcast and Verizon into accept the new rules. I don’t think that we citizens could do it on our own.

(if you want to try to fight corruption that’s sort of on display here, check out Mayone.us)

Kickstarter to end Government Corruption

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In my blog yesterday I talked about the value of culture, we know that it intrinsically has value because all participate in it – we just don’t want to pay for that culture. Serious problems. One of the biggest conflicts we have right now is within the internet users relates to content and other cultural icons. A lot of people want it to be easily accessible and other people want it tightly controlled. This of course has been playing out in our courts over the past decade or so.

One of the first people that’s influenced me in regard to culture and sharing and so on, has been Lawrence Lessig. He’s written a few really accessible books about copy right. However, he’s since moved on from fighting copyright extremism to fighting corruption in the US government. I wrote a review about his first book in this arena, he’s written two other since. He’s a big fan of how the internet works and truly believes in platforms like kickstarter (Which could help address some of my concerns from yesterday over keeping a vibrant market place of cultures).

To this end, he’s decided to create a super pac in the spirit of a Kickstarter campaign. He’s calling it MayOne in honor of “May Day” admitting that he’s using it as a call for help. A call to help fix the US government.

I think that this platform offers an interesting opportunity for all of those folks out there that hate our current political system. The initial campaign is to influence 5 congressional seats as well as push for 5 specific acts that will create real reform. Here’s a link to the reform bills they’d want to push form.

I’ve pledged money for this. Why? Because I think that we need to create change in the US government and I believe that Lessig’s plan has the best chance to work. He’s taking the long view and has a real plan for driving change. It’s not going to be an immediate fix it’s going to take several years for real change to happen. This is also a way to influence change with only a few dollars. The goal is to raise $1 million and Lessig will match that million. Their next goal is 5 million, which he will then also match setting up the war chest for 2016. His goal is to help get multiple reform candidates elected to effect change.

I think that this is a way forward and that most of the candidates that MayOne will support will also support things like Net Neutrality, Copyright reform, and similar topics that most of my readers are concerned with.

The EU goes Net Neutral

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If the EU had voted against strong Net Neutrality laws there would have been a serious problem between a few national governments and the supra-government of the EU. A few years ago the Netherlands became the second country in the world to fully support Net Neutral principles. Furthermore, the EU level Telecom and internet lady is Dutch, Neelie Kroes. She’s been very vocal supporting Net Neutral and “Internet Freedom” since I started following her a few years ago.

I’m not really surprised by this law passing. The EU has been under less influence of many companies than the US government. Additionally, net neutrality inherently has more privacy built into the system. It limits the requirements of deep packet inspection – because there’s no shaping based on the content of the packets, just the amount of packets. Ideally, this will mean that there is less capability in the network for deep packet inspection.

This could lead to some difficulties in the differences between US ISPs and EU ISPs. I’m interested in the ramifications of throttling across the different continents. Clearly someone getting content from a company in the EU won’t want it to be throttled in the way that Netflix has been. It could create some legal ambiguity and issues. I’m going to be watching how all of that resolves.