[liberationtech] Privacy, Moglen, @ioerror, #rp12

[Pavol Luptak]

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 12:01:41PM +0200, Andre Rebentisch wrote:
> Am 10.05.2012 05:22, schrieb Pavol Luptak:
> >Consider censorship, data retention laws - from the business point
> >of view it does not make sense - on a free market censorship is
> >definitely not a competitive advantage, nobody voluntarily will
> >pay for censored Internet, also data retention is usually too
> >expensive in contrast with fact that most ISPs want to offer as
> >cheap as possible services because it is another competitive
> >advantage.
> 
> Behind EU data retention was largely the content industry. AT&T
> (without genuine business in Europe) lobbied heavily in Brussels.
> Formal pretext was the Madrid bombing. There are also more cynical
> arguments like saving the children.

But this is still not a problem of corporations, but governments as a SPOF
(Single-Point-of-Failure) what means that they are monopolies for law and 
therefore can be easily lobbied and corrupted by private corporations. 
Without the governments (or their monopoly to laws) it would be impossible to 
enforce the data retention law widely in the whole EU
Many people do not realize this fact but without governments, big corporations
would probably have smaller power than now, because now they can lobby easily
governments to approve various laws to protect their business.

Especially critical this is in Slovakia (see one of the biggest scandal here
http://www.economist.com/node/21543398 ) that revealed that our Slovak
government is under a direct control of big financial groups (Penta, J&T), so
we have do not have 'democracy', but a pure corporativism (the situation is
not much different in the US I guess :-) And the power of these private
financial groups is big just because they lobby our government and control 
the laws to support their businesses. Without the government they would loose
the "government-control ability" and would be probably much more weaker on
a free-market.

> In ordoliberal terms the purpose of a strong state is to make a
> genuine market happen, to enforce competition. Dominant companies
> have no genuine interest in competition in a market system because
> it eats their profits away.

Firstly, I think that monopolies are created by the governments (we are not
protected by the governments against dominant companies' monopolies as many
people think). The explanation is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eO8ZU7TeKPw

I can tell you many examples how monopolies/olygopolies are created by 
the EU regulations.

> 
> Think of a small and weak state which entirely depends on the
> banking industry or oil or fisheries. It is a matter of balance and

Every small and weak state can decide to become offshore and gain a big
competitive advantage compared to the other countries :-)

> gravity. If you complain about Paypal's services in Europa you'd
> wonder why Luxembourg has not the balls to enforce basic customer
> service standards. If you pay taxes wonder why IT companies formally
> base their EMEA operations in Ireland.

Luxembourg is a country with strong economical stability (some Luxembourg 
economical laws are from Napoleon's times :) and this stability is a reason 
why many companies prefer this country in spite of the fact they lack some 
service standards.

So in this situation you choose between a company with really stable background
in Luxembourg or company with customer service standards...

Pavol
-- 
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[wilder at trip.sk] [http://trip.sk/wilder/] [talker: ttt.sk 5678]
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