Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Freedom to Connect is Political
Martin Geddes, not always right but never to be taken lightly, perhaps with judgment distorted by the impending birth of * Geddes Jr. II, writes:
Why do you, personally, care about [Freedom of the Network]? Telecom isn’t the only industry with distribution bottlenecks, significant market power, and cross-subsidy between the stages of production. Just look at how baked beans are positioned in supermarket shelves. Manufacturers in the UK pay the supermarkets to buy prime positions. Yet telecom incites such great passion in intelligent people. Baked beans don’t. What’s going on?After a couple of weeks attempting to give economic underpinnings to the phrase, I think he's got a point.
I think I’ve finally worked out why. It’s David Isenberg’s elephant in the corner — what he ambiguously calls Freedom to Connect. Most of these arguments attempt to build a logical economic thesis about why we do or don’t have the correct balance between price discrimination, competition and common carriage. But it increasingly misses the point. We sense there’s a deeper, more troubling, aspect to getting cut off from part of the conversation.
Whilst nebulous and fluffy, it’s all about democracy. The rest is post hoc rationalization . . . my thesis is that we are underestimating the importance of this political (as opposed to economic) side of the debate.
The sense of indignation you feel inside you when you hear about port blocking is because you sense the loss that those customer are enduring. You and I have come to realize that if you don’t have access, you aren’t able to fully participate in society any more in some non-trivial way.
Technorati Tags: F2C, Politics
Comments:
"A major deterrent to war is communications. It is vital that people be able to communicate with each other quickly, effectively, and frequently.
Greater communications capabilities tend to lead to greater exchanges of information, values, cultural activities, and economic opportunities.
Where communications facilities are most extensive, wars are least frequent.
It is precisely the communications links which authoritarian governments try to limit and sever whenever they seek to perpetrate massive acts of oppression."
Freedom of communication has no meaning if it is not affordable.
Saying cheap is not enough.
What is cheap for you can be expensive for an Iraqui.
Affordable infrastructures and IP are the way to freedom.
Patrizia
http://woip.blogspot.com
Greater communications capabilities tend to lead to greater exchanges of information, values, cultural activities, and economic opportunities.
Where communications facilities are most extensive, wars are least frequent.
It is precisely the communications links which authoritarian governments try to limit and sever whenever they seek to perpetrate massive acts of oppression."
Freedom of communication has no meaning if it is not affordable.
Saying cheap is not enough.
What is cheap for you can be expensive for an Iraqui.
Affordable infrastructures and IP are the way to freedom.
Patrizia
http://woip.blogspot.com
The fact is that the political and economic underpinnings are intertwined. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is a phrase that most are familiar with. Wht most don't know is that a hermeneutical analysis of what was meant by our founding fathers by "happiness" had mostly to do about property ownership.
I bring this up because in our society "communicative assets" are not permitted to be as freely leveraged in ways that other property assets are {with "communicative assets" being defined as those assets that one holds **as an inherent right** in our democreatic (by definition) society}
The communicative assets we hold have become more dynamic and volatile as communications technologies have advanced. The easier it is to connect to the network, the more value one's communicative assets have.
The above begs the following question: "How is it that citizens are not freely permitted to organize freely to gather and leverage their communicative assets (their *personal speech property**) any way they wish, including the formation of municipal communications utilities in which they own shares, as taxpayers?"
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I bring this up because in our society "communicative assets" are not permitted to be as freely leveraged in ways that other property assets are {with "communicative assets" being defined as those assets that one holds **as an inherent right** in our democreatic (by definition) society}
The communicative assets we hold have become more dynamic and volatile as communications technologies have advanced. The easier it is to connect to the network, the more value one's communicative assets have.
The above begs the following question: "How is it that citizens are not freely permitted to organize freely to gather and leverage their communicative assets (their *personal speech property**) any way they wish, including the formation of municipal communications utilities in which they own shares, as taxpayers?"
