It's amusing to see a die-hard libertarian like ESR describe a dystopia where online services are being developed by private entrepreneurs rather than the US Government.
Large corporations always use their influence on governments. This happens for a lot of time around the world. Those corporations influence governments to stipulate laws that protect their own interests rather than interest of proletariat.
The most disturbing aspect is that those large corporations propaganda as they are in fact protecting proletariat's property right. In a country such as U.S. where 1% in populations control 33% of the wealth and 10% in population control 66% of the wealth, the law is not for protecting 90% population's property right, but the 10%.
You doubts this? Look at RIAA, MPAA's effort in U.S. Congress.
P.S. I am a closet libertarian.
I don't think there's anything especially revolutionary in what I just stated.
It may seem natural that it is hard to make copies of physical objects, but just wait 10-40 years (depending on who you ask) until 3D printers become commonplace, and then reevaluate what you consider to be natural.
I'm not a huge fan of corporations like Disney; however, I have a feeling that we are not using the proper ammunition when we attack them based on what our idea of "natural" rights is. As a programmer, I feel that following logical rules should not be encumbered by patents. As an artist, I get pissed when someone tries to imitate me without proper credit, and I feel fully justified in using legal means to stop them. I guess this means that I believe (so far) that abstract algorithms should not be patentable while software implementations (which carry not just algorithms but also a cultural component) as applied to specific problems should be. I know some people try to make them both patentable -- I am against that.
How do you distinguish between the two? If you come up with a revolutionary new cryptography algorithm and implement it in C, you would only be able to patent that implementation. If I came along later and merely re-implemented your innovation in Python, I could free-ride off your innovation without paying you a cent. Is that right or fair? I don't honestly know. What I do know is that its dreadfully hard to separate concept from implementation in a field as abstract as programming.
The more concentrated that wealth and power becomes, and the more unaccountable the possessors of it become, the more open to abuse it becomes, without significant consequence to the abusers.
Most libertarians might be against such an unchecked concentration of wealth and power in the form of governments; some few might also object to it in the form of corporations; but which of them are against its concentration in the hands of private individuals?
Yet private individuals can abuse their wealth and power just as easily as can governments or corporations. As long as that wealth and power is not concentrated in the hands of too few individuals, it could be argued that they'd compete with one another and provide a check on one another's power.
But, to my knowledge, nothing in the libertarian ideology would preclude or oppose any individual or small group of individuals hoarding the overwhelming majority of wealth and power for themselves. In fact, such concentration of wealth and power would likely be a direct result of the implementation of libertarianism.
This is why laissez-faire economic aspects of libertarianism must be opposed.
If you don't think money causes people to do things, or that increasingly large amounts of money cause increasingly large pressures on people to do things, I don't think you're being honest. Worming out along the routes of every transaction being free and mutually beneficial is balderdash; tell that to the starving man in the street when you wave some bread under his nose, that he's free to choose.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3335#comment-310551 June 18th, 2011 at 8:01 pm
esr Says:
>Sounds like you like government after all.
Remember, I attribute the takeoff of the Internet to DARPA deliberately lying to its political masters. This happened precisely because DARPA’s leadership knew it was impossible within the incentives operating on governments for them to tolerate the ‘randoms’ or the results DARPA foresaw.
It's hard to imagine what would happen if things hadn't happened the way they have. I expect we'd have cheaper deployment and it would be wireless somehow.
If the infrastructure is outsourced to taxpayers, there is no incentive to develop a better one.
My 2c.