It's funny how a lot of people (especially those of the anti-capitalist / left'ish wing ilk) cite cyberpunk literature in which corporations achieve a level of power approaching - or exceeding - that of Nation States... and decry that hypothetical scenario as a horrible and undesirable thing.
But in this case, what we see is a situation where we'd like to see Twitter stand up to various world governments... perhaps even the US government. But we all know that, in the end, there's a limit to how much they can contest the will of the government because the governments are the ones with "men with guns".
Maybe companies / corporations with enough power to actually challenge the governments of the world isn't such a bad thing after all. Or, perhaps it would be better to say "maybe corporations with enough power to challenge the governments of the world" is, at least, not a universally bad thing.
As someone of "the anti-capitalist / left'ish wing ilk", the problem with my dear comrades is often that they get a little bit too excited about things like Twitter, which leads them to forget that
a) Twitter's job is to make money; carrying your latest 140-char call to arms 'normally' helps, but if in some circumstance it doesn't, they won't
b) Corporations (and actually, at the end of the day, all capitalist enterprises) are by definition reliant on the state, so you would expect them to compromise when the merde hits the fan.
So, colour me unsurprised. Yes, in theory I would like Twitter to stand up to oppressive state regimes. My political beliefs are as they are, in part, because I know they won't.
Democratic governments are at least notionally beholden to their people. I realize that's something of a bread-and-circuses fantasy, but at the very least they have to act like they're listening and taking action, or they get voted out next election.
Corporations are under no such compulsion. Their sole motive is profit. Put Wal-Mart in charge, and they'll happily kill half the population and feed them to the other half if the accountants say it will cut costs somehow. Yeah, every now and then you get someone with a conscience in charge of a big company, but if you're going to rely on that you might as well just cut out the middleman and go straight to a "benevolent" dictatorship.
Oh, the other thing you missed is that most corpocracy scenarios (including the one that we're actually living in) aren't about corporations standing up to the government, but about them using money and influence to make sure that the government does what's best for the corps instead of what's best for the people. Giving the corps more power doesn't create a balance, it just makes it easier for them to pull the puppet strings.
I'd argue that democratic governments use populism to stay in power in a similar way as corporations use marketing to make profit. In both cases they seek to make masses happy enough to maintain their status quo.
On a related note, if we look at corporations as nations with citizens being their employees, then actually they work in a more similar way to a government - they usually provide healthcare, define certain laws (as in, rules and dependencies within the corporation itself) and seek to make their employees happy (or else employees will go to other company). And additionally people don't get so zealously protective about their corporations as they do about nations, so maybe rather than waging wars they would choose to simply change the corporation they are in.
Well, I certainly don't say we should make a change in this direction though; it's simply a thought I find interesting, how corporations provide to their employees some of the things similarly as the government does (and sometimes provide even though the government should, but doesn't).
> Maybe companies / corporations with enough power to actually challenge the governments of the world isn't such a bad thing after all. Or, perhaps it would be better to say "maybe corporations with enough power to challenge the governments of the world" is, at least, not a universally bad thing.
Please review the history of the various "East India" companies. I think you will find it an enlightening read.
> Please review the history of the various "East India" companies. I think you will find it an enlightening read.
I have, actually. What's interesting to me is that it really points out the inherent paradox, in that corporations (as we know them today anyway) actually owe their existence to the State. With the East India Company it was a Royal Charter.
Note that I'm just playing "Devil's Advocate" here to some extent. I'm not necessarily a fan of super-huge corporations with Nation-State level power. In fact, I'm not necessarily a fan of any entity having "Nation-State level power", including Nation-States! :-)
Wow that was so missing the point. I was kinda more hinting towards how the East India Company financed wars of conquest, meddled in local politics, and then neglected their responsibilities to the population and let them starve (e.g. Bengal famine of 1770).
From my point-of-view, that stuff just kinda goes without saying, when talking about the East India Company. So yeah, we all know that big companies / corporations sometimes do Bad Things. But in the context of a discussion about whether or not a corporation should have Nation-State level power, the interesting point in noting that the East India Company (of at least one iteration) was created by Royal Charter and had (essentially) it's own army, etc., is exactly that paradox of how intertwined corporations and States can be.
Again, I'm not arguing for corporations like that. I'm just interested in the discussion vis-a-vis how power can/should/might be organized and controlled.
Fasting/roaming half-naked in streets are cheap tools/tricks used by Bania Gandhi to humiliate (not defeat) British regime during India's struggle for Independence.
No thanks. I don't trust corporations like Twitter any more than governments.
All of the dominant American online service already come with their own built-in ideological censorship, usually under the euphemism "family-friendly". (Twitter is actually one of the most tolerant services.)
People can challenge the governments of their own countries quite well, thankyouverymuch. It may take time, but in the end they are a big fat easy target.
Challenging global corporations is a lot more terrifying. So far the only thing that has helped us fight back has been... governments.
> It's funny how a lot of people (especially those of the anti-capitalist / left'ish wing ilk) cite cyberpunk literature in which corporations achieve a level of power approaching - or exceeding - that of Nation States
Reminds me of the ludicrous scenario for Deus Ex Human Revolution. Nation States (at least in developed countries) are concentrating far more power than most multinational companies anyway, so I'd say anything that puts some balance of power is probably a good thing.
Why concentrate power at all? How about we disperse the power, so that the power one has diminishes outside his nation city (size of which is determined approximately by how much one can move in a day). And limit power so that you cannot cumulate it to achieve anything globally drastic unless lots of time passes, or most of people have same need.
Rather than having indirect power that can be stolen, people need direct local power that has consequences with transparent effects.
Big nations, and corporations, we allow them to exist, and some of us, sometimes myself, think they are good for us. It just makes me sad how passive and accepting we are in this regard, and how current culture enables small companies quickly rise to into position to serve yet another brand of Soma.
> Maybe companies / corporations with enough power to actually challenge the governments of the world isn't such a bad thing after all.
Corporations are entities who owe their existence to government and can be terminated at a whim by government. If the government chartering a corporation decides it shouldn't continue to exist, it doesn't exist anymore.
This gets obscured a lot by the fact that the same class of people that derive the most benefit from the existence of corporations also have disproportionate power over government, so that this power is very rarely exercised, but that's not because corporations are powerful enough to resist government or even theoretically could be, its because corporations and governments ultimately are run by the same people.
Has this ever happened? I know governments have taken over/privatized businesses, but when was the last time one was just shut down because it presented a threat? I'd think you'd be well into "too big to fail/jail" territory.
Yes, corporate charters have been revoked for failure to comply with legal requirements. AFAIK, the most recent period of time during which this (sometimes referred to as the "corporate death sentence") was an actively-pursued remedy for violations of the law in the US (though it is one on the books still in, I believe, all states) is the late 19th and early 20th century [1].
I don't question that the state can revoke a charter, I meant if it had done so as a result of a perceived threat (rather than as a result of criminal behavior). I'm aware that since the state also defines criminal behavior the line can be blurry, but I think we can agree that the North River Sugar Refining Company did not pose an existential threat to the state of New York.
The view makes sense. We don't want it to happen because it's unlikely to go well. But if it does happen that corporations acquire power, we express our wish that it goes well, however unlikely that is.
> Maybe companies / corporations with enough power to actually challenge the governments of the world isn't such a bad thing after all.
We should never expect corporations to take on the role of challenging the government. In "democracies", this is the role of the citizen (whose responsibility is to vote). Corporations, on the other hand, are controlled by people with lots of money whose goal it is to make even more money.
Yes, but countries like Russia and Pakistan can hardly be called liberal democracies. If there is no free speech, then it is difficult for citizens of those countries to take action. That is where corporations challenging the government can be helpful.
I don't see why we shouldn't expect corporations to take on the role of challenging the government. It is in Twitter's interest for governments not to crack down on free speech. So when governments do crack down, it is in their interest to stand up to those governments, especially when they don't have any employees or assets in those countries.
One worry would be that the Russian government could threaten Twitter with cyberattacks.
> It is in Twitter's interest for governments not to crack down on free speech
Article shows otherwise, it is not in Twitter's interest to worsen relationships with any government by refusing to comply with requests. Providing some evidence would be helpful.
Which is one of the reasons major communication systems should be distributed and standards based like email, rather than proprietary and run by a single company.
The problem is that in the short term, it is trivial for a well funded private company to offer a better product in the eyes of the end user (eg. GMail when it came out over every other open source mail system).
The only solution to that problem that I can think of is to better educate the end user, and to make them see that even though company X's shiny product seems better right now, in the long term there is everything to lose by using their communication systems. That's a hard fight though.
I think a more realistic solution is to educate developers to prioritize making open shiny.
After all, Gmail may have its problems, especially recently with Google+, but it interoperates with every other email service (and until recently, Jabber client) and is relatively easy to move off of; for most of its 10 years of existence, I'd say it had a positive role in keeping people using email. It's far, far better than something like Twitter where the platform owner has absolute control and can censor tweets or arbitrarily crack down on third party clients.
Similarly, while App.net didn't exactly replace Twitter, I think I think its emphasis on encouraging people to write independent clients for it was very healthy for it (and while some of those clients were proprietary, proprietary native clients for open platforms are far less bad than proprietary platforms). Why didn't tent.io try to launch with spiffy clients?
To be honest, I don't think it's as much that open can't be shiny as that creating a social platform without an existing userbase to leverage is nearly impossible - most closed platforms fail too. And I think most developers know that shiny is necessary - it's just that there isn't enough motivation and enthusiasm. But it's unreasonable to expect anyone to use your platform if you're not going to spend enough engineering effort on it...
Unfortunately, education is itself a massively hard problem. that, and you are trying to teach people to avoid something that greatly improves their lives on moral principles. The only tool I know for doing that is threatening them with eternal torture.
Not poor, just less shiny, and even that mostly at first. That is, if everybody used the stuff regardless of it being less shiny, a lot more development would flow into it, and it might even end up just as shiny. It's a bit of a chicken/egg thing.
Many idealist developers brush off well designed and feature rich artifacts as shiny because they simply just don't get it and never will. So having users use a "less shiny" but more "ideal" artifact isn't going to magically make it better; the developer is still oblivious.
Yeah, but I don't, and I don't see how that follows from what I said either. I was actually more thinking of things like old Opera vs. the current minimalistic trend in browsers - "shiny" to me has nothing to do with features, and in the worst case features even get sacrificed for shinyness. If two things have the same functionality, the more "shiny" one wins, obviously. But that wasn't what I was talking about at all; I have nothing against beauty, but form should follow function, and function should be king.
Unless you can define "the shiny" as anything more than a self-constructed pejorative, your argument lacks substance. What is the shininess? Why is it worthless? Why are users still attracted to it even though its worthless?
Believe it or not, people are actually kind of rational, and pick product A over B for some real reason. Usually B, if feature equivalent or even feature advanced of A, has a hideous UX (command line, really?) and/or visual design (e.g. ugly fake chrome). It might also not be up to date on what is in fashion, but we don't buy unfashionable cars either unless we are going for something retro (part of our culture); consider that "the shiny" at your own peril.
> Last week, Maxim Ksenov, deputy head of Roskomnadzor, took to Russian newspaper Izvestia to complain about an unnamed Twitter account that "published monstrous things" and called for the overthrow of the political regime and the destruction of capitalism. Ksenov threatened to block Twitter entirely unless they "listen to us and periodically remove illegal content."
Wait, so calling for the destruction of Capitalism is illegal now in Russia?
Calls for the overthrow of the political regime are frequently considered extremist in Russia.
Oh, and in my opinion, Communist Party of Russian Federation is about communism as much as Liberal-Democratic Russian Party is about liberalism or democracy. That is, not really.
That reminds me of an argentinean comic's line:
American: "Can you explain argentinean politics to me?"
Pinti: "Noo, no chance. You have it, you endure it, but you can't explain it."
Is it better to censor an open forum than delete it entirely? This is a hard answer for a fan of free speech. I reserve respect for those willing to open a dialogue in an adverse environment. I respect Twitter, at least, for being open for business and allowing people to post. At least some people view it versus none. However, one must consider that when a government is allowed to censor, or “manipulate,” the content that is being seen by its own people, and possibly the world – then we have essentially created a forum for propaganda that may not represent how the people of that society actually view the world. Consider what we know of media in North Korea – are all North Koreans really in full love and support of Kim Jung Un? Think about how such a platform could have been used to support the Nazi agenda in World War II. Personally, I feel that when an autonomous corporation that was designed to allow for the free passage of ideas and experiences comes under the control of an oppressive government or dictatorship, that corporation is lending itself to corruption.
>There can be no doubt that the Russian government is putting tremendous pressure on Twitter as part of its effort to crack down on free expression on the Internet.
The case for free speech is important, but it's dissapointing to see foreign powers with huge resources sponsor whole campaigns and try to influence public opinion, policy and election outcomes in third countries, trying to get friendly lackeys in power.
In tons of countries where there are large external "strategic interests" wanting to rip them off, there are paid (or indirectly sponsored through other means) "activists" and "vocal minority leaders" that are used as propaganda personel for foreign powers.
So it's not enough that speech should be free -- it should also be independent.
> Experts in the country question whether these requests have any legal authority
As much as it sucks that Twitter is forced to do this, the government of neither Russia or Pakistan has a legal system which I would trust to fully respect the rule of law in this matter--either is likely to simply block the service if the requests are not acknowledged.
As principled as Google's stand was in refusing to pull an offensive video, it probably did more to stifle the free flow of information than had they pulled the "offensive" video on request. At least that way people would have an idea of which specific videos the government didn't want them to see, rather than the entire site being blocked out.
No, really, no. Russian users will notice that Twitter is being blocked by the government a lot more than they'll notice that a few tweets have been blocked. Twitter has the position, and responsibility, to play hardball with these governments. A few days of lost revenue from a Russian block is nothing compared to the lost revenue from an entire nation under tyranny.
Only in China do you have a population so brainwashed that they think these things are being done for their benefit. Russians have an active dissent. Feed it; It will bear fruit.
I am Chinese. In practice blocking Twitter and Youtube protects Chinese companies like SinaWeibo and Youku from competing with their American rivals. The point is that China is a market big enough to play the game on its own courtyard.
I'm from China and I just don't know how to refute your last line. Google has been blocked for about half a month now, but average people would not feel a thing about it.
Yandex is the 4th largest search engine in the world and #1 in Russia. I'm pretty sure they have a large local social network as well but the name has slipped my mind.
But that's not on account of brainwashing, that's could be on account of having no need for it. I've lived in China for 5 years and have survived without Google fine. Could also be that most young/modern Chinese have an apathetic split-mind: don't give a shit about Google and don't give a shit about who is blocking them from it or why. They aren't uninformed, they just don't care.
>Only in China do you have a population so brainwashed that they think these things are being done for their benefit. Russians have an active dissent. Feed it; It will bear fruit.
Well, and only in America they believe such naive things.
For one, Russian people voted predominantly for Putin. The "dissent" you mention is mostly the US promoting some of his political rivals, feeding them (you nailed that one) and over-playing them for western audiences, so as to make a big fuss out of nothing to try to influence Russian policy for its own purposes. That's 90% of the "active dissent".
And China is a world player. They want (and deserve) their own Google or Twitter, not to be tied to externally controlled services. (Of course people whose own country is doing the controlling will disagree). Those kind of actions enable local players to sweep the market (why send control of internet search and ads to Mountain View?).
In Pakistan (from where I am from) the laws we have in place do not actually state who, if anyone, within the country can block anything on the internet. So despite
1. court orders to the effect that the government must seek ways of blocking only only offending content on youtube and not whole website
2. a resolution in the national assembly that youtube should be unblocked
nothing has happened towards unblocking. Activists have gone around and convinced everyone possible that youtube should be blocked. Everyone has claimed they are open to youtube being unblocked. Yet it remains blocked.
>As principled as Google's stand was in refusing to pull an offensive video, it probably did more to stifle the free flow of information than had they pulled the "offensive" video on request.
It definitely feels like a lose-lose situation for liberty when governments can pressure websites to censor at the risk of a total block.
Google is currently working on a crowdsourced proxy called uProxy in order to push back against censorship. If uProxy succeeds, it will no longer be necessary to meet censors half way.
The same money-grabbing Ferengi as the rest of the U.S. No surprise there. Any of us would sell the Constitution to the lowest bidder, just to get rid of it. Never let anyone's “rights” stand in the way of profit!
But in this case, what we see is a situation where we'd like to see Twitter stand up to various world governments... perhaps even the US government. But we all know that, in the end, there's a limit to how much they can contest the will of the government because the governments are the ones with "men with guns".
Maybe companies / corporations with enough power to actually challenge the governments of the world isn't such a bad thing after all. Or, perhaps it would be better to say "maybe corporations with enough power to challenge the governments of the world" is, at least, not a universally bad thing.