February 25, 2005

Corporate vs Community

Karl at phillyfuture.org asks (or cites)...

    Would you rather have community or corporate control?

    That's what Free Press asks in a recent piece.

    I think WiFi as a public utility makes sense and if you foster decent competition between public and corporate as in the UPS/FedEx model, great innovation will occur.


Federal law dictates that you if want to ship a letter via UPS or FedEx (or any third party), they must charge you twice the USPS or three dollars. Which ever is greater.
Doesn't exactly meet my standard of competition.

Not exactly the same thing, but it would be if....
The city of Philadelphia let you use Comcast or Verizon if they had to charge you $2/Gb vs $0.50/Gb or free.

Competition and innovation online occur not in delivery, but on content.
Installing wide scale wi-fi, while not trivial, isn't exactly building a Pyramid, a Gothic Cathedral or an Apollo project. There isn't any innovating in installation. Many pockets lined, many dollars changing hands. Call my cynical, but I don't think any new technology will come out of it.

The question is, do I want community or corporate control? With community control, it immediately becomes a political question. And you can get nonsense like this. Corporate control means open the taps, I can sort it out, and if I don't like it, I have options and I can take my business elsewhere.

But around here, I'm preachin' to the choir.

Posted by AlexC at February 25, 2005 3:00 PM

The ThreeSources Choirboys, Live at Leeds!
The secret to me of community control is the size of the community. WE had a comment thread on Berkeley Square Blog once about a handful on neighbors who would pitch ion to get their rural road plowed.

Once the so called community becomes too large for a single individual to wield influence, then it becomes a commons problem.

The pejorative connotation of "Corporate" never ceases to amaze. A Corporation is no more than a legal framework to shared risk, responsibility and reward; you would think most folks would like that!

Posted by: jk at February 25, 2005 4:03 PM

The corporate villain is always the CEO and his cronies. Whenever they earn more than Ralph Nader's "10 times the minimum wage" ceiling, the "community" advocates scream foul. This violates even their sense of "some are more equal than others."

Posted by: johngalt at February 26, 2005 5:09 PM | What do you think? [2]