Net Neutrality And The Continued Growing Power of "BIG"

  
The latest court ruling on Net Neutrality is really not surprising.  It is a continuation of an economic trend favoring big business.

In isolation this latest decision is, I believe, detrimental to economic development in general terms at a time when access to broadband and its associated app-derived services is becoming a human and business right. 

It should be a right to efficiently and effectively access the digital economy that at the end of the day is the DE FACTO ECONOMY and vehicle to the digital revolution for now and the next, well, whatever many years.

But wait. This decision -  when taken together with the other policy and legal decisions in the near past - really proves to be as chilling as a polar vortex.

Let me mention just two:

1    1) Citizens United – Basically this decision opened the flood gates to corporate money to influence practically everything. Perhaps this decision by the courts was unduly influenced by the oceanic sized-pool of money floating in our economy?

2    2) American Invent Act – Again, this act gives immense power to corporate interests with their oceanic-sized pools of capital to file patent claims (average cost for a patent filing is now near $10K). You see, the system was changed from first-to-invent (even drawings in back of napkins were accepted as evidence of invention) to first to file. What this means is that corporations with their army of lawyers will file patents for anything and everything. Just ask and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley that was trying to start a company with an idea for preventing heart attacks. Short story, he could not due to being trapped by a multitude of patents filed by large companies that basically prevented him from creating a new product. In describing his riddle to an audience in a local meet-up in Silicon Valley, he was so perturbed by these findings that he began to cry.

I am not an investigative reporter and I don't have time to write a book on this, but the coming together of all these events, and legal and policy decisions are sure to kill the little guy and their limited sources of capital and influence.


Welcome to the new America. The land of the free to influence and brave to conquer. With lots of money, that is.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The life giving power if Insights…

I love new insights. I am hungry for them. They are a drug for me. If for no other reason than to try to get ahead of the future. Who would not want that? In my world, new insights are the basic ingredients for new ideas. Without them the status quo remains as is: static. With them, there is dynamism. The more insights, the more they can be mushed together to develop aggregated knowledge, theories, philosophies, products, platforms... Why can’t our political system understand this? Here is one source for them to check out www.ted.com. Here is a golden source of fantastic insights from global brilliant agents of change. Come on, go crazy. Whenever you are down, need inspiration, need to clear your mind, go and start your thinking anew…
Read more

An Open Plead for True Leadership

Please, please, to all those with the power to create, affect change and inspire; to all those powers - be them metaphysical or spiritual- please give us real leaders and please give us the capacity to understand what real leadership is. Give us the capacity to think deeply and with great care. Give us the capacity to get past our self imposed celebrity filters and stop the analysis at: “she seems nice.” Give us the analytical mind-sets to be able to connect facts and not fiction. Give us the critical thinking skills and the brain power to go back and see what a disaster immature and arrogant un-leadership has been laid on our door step and that of the World. Give us the strength to not react to emotional triggers. More importantly, however: Give us the strength to look in the mirror and say to ourselves, I am responsible for the mess this country is in due to my own flaccid and indifferent participation. Let’s get active and demand more. Let’s demand an idea revolution and do nothing
Read more

Passion Economy?

So, this is where this thought originated. I was talking to a colleague about how stupidly we have have organized ourselves inside companies. We " comparmentalized " our thinking and have created these static and vertical buckets: "product development", "product management", "public relations", "marketing"etc... What we have not created and need to create are "passion" and "creative" management theories that aggregate these skills/abilities into tiger/virtual teams with members that are passionate about the tasks at hand. In my experience, the first step in selecting a tiger team member is to find those that have the passion. How do you do this? You "shop" it around and those interested will raise their proverbial hands and will want to participate. Moreover, however, Innovation managers need to be very cognizant of the effects management policies will have on people's creative drives; the management et
Read more