Prometheus 6

Doc Searls pulls together a lot of good thoughts in this editorial. Titled "How to get past the intellectual and political logjams that threaten Linux and the Net," it has what I think are salient observations for the general case. Some excerpts:

At the same time that media concentration restrictions are being removed, such that three companies will own everything, so too are neutrality restrictions for the network being eliminated, so that those same three companies--who also will control broadband access--are totally free to architect broadband however they wish. "The Internet that is to be the savior is a dying breed. The end-to-end architecture that gave us its power will, in effect, be inverted. And so the games networks play to benefit their own will bleed to this space too."

And then Dr. Pangloss says, "but what about spectrum. Won't unlicensed spectrum guarantee our freedom?" And it is true: Here at least there was some hope from this FCC. But the latest from DC is that a tiny chunk of new unlicensed spectrum will be released. And then after that, no more. Spectrum too will be sold--to the same companies, no doubt.

So then, Dr. Pangloss: "When the content layer, the logical layer, and the physical layer are all effectively owned by a handful of companies, free of any requirements of neutrality or openness, what will you ask then?"

--"But Where's the Internet?" by Lawrence Lessig, MediaCon.

Two oddly allied mentalities provide intellectual air cover for these threats to the marketplace. One is the extreme comfort certain industries feel inside their regulatory environments. The other is the high regard political conservatives hold for successful enterprises. Combine the two, and you get conservatives eagerly rewarding companies whose primary achievements consist of successful long-term adaptation to highly regulated environments.

That's what's happened with broadcasting and telecom.

Liberals often are flummoxed by the way conservatives seem to love big business (including, of course, big media). Yet the reason is simple: they love winners, literally. They like to reward strength and achievement. They hate rewarding weakness for the same reason a parent hates rewarding kids' poor grades. This, more than anything else, is what makes conservatives so radically different from liberals. It's why favorite liberal buzzwords like "fairness" and "opportunity" are fingernails on the chalkboards of conservative minds. To conservatives, those words are code-talk for punishing the strong and rewarding the weak.

As George Lakoff explained in Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't (University of Chicago, 1995), conservatives consider strength a "moral value". Strong is good. Weak is bad.

In street basketball there's a rule called "make it, take it". If you score a basket, you get to keep the ball. Three-on-three basketball works the same way. So do volleyball and other sports with rules that favor achievement over fairness.

Relaxing media ownership rules is all about "make it, take it". Clear Channel and Viacom have made it. Why not let them take more? It's simply the marketplace at work, right? Again, only in a highly regulated context.

We can't change conservative value systems. But we can change the emphasis on what we conserve and why.