Is Big Business Bad for the Web
A recent part time activity of mine has included some detective work which led me, among other things to a particular IP block. These 255 IP addresses, on which you could probably host hundreds of thousands of websites, show a very short list of users, but most of the info is phony, including the provider, tech support, and abuse contact info. The block is listed as registered to NTT America. The first time I called them, the tech taking my call cheerfully entered the IP numbers I gave him, froze into silence, started stuttering, and ended, after several attempts, with a tentative sounding statement that they do not have that block listed after all. Further lookup shows the block as belonging to a netherworld where blocks created before any registries existed reside.
The contact with NTT started me thinking about the ingrained distrust of big business among denizens of the web. This distrust, regardless of whether it is political in origin, has become an unquestioned tenet of faith in many segments of modern society, sometimes with less basis than we require before accepting a religious tenet.
As I often repeat, neither businesses nor currencies are bad. It is people who do right or wrong.
There are many tech and non-tech small business owners on the web. There are plenty of techs and devs who eat based on their ability to get paid for their skill sets on a consulting basis, and who also believe in a peer to peer social and economic model. Individuals, service providers or consumers, represent the vast majority of the population using the internet. Big business, venture capitalists, and public companies, however, represent the vast majority of both investment and ownership of all the resources here. Understanding these entities, and dealing with them, is unavoidable for anyone interested in new or alternative models of any sort.
NTT America, Inc. is a privately owned subsidiary of a Japanese corporation. Whether they are as big as AT&T is not publicly known, although they are enterprise driven and undoubtedly more profitable that the Texas based creation spawned by baby bell. Many fret about Google as well, but as a consumer driven company (and without looking at politics or behind the scenes), they should, imo, rank pretty low on the list of big companies whose interests conflict with those of the general population. Anyone who wants more information about a home grown public company such as this can also become a shareholder. Tracking hacker activity to a company such as NTT, only to hear them expresses no interest in correcting the fact that they are publicly registered as responsible for the hosting block, concerns me far more than what an American public company might do.
A public company is a powerful vehicle. The attendant legal structures offer opportunity for various lucrative occupations, such as stock market promotion, which contribute little to society in general. Regardless of this, the vast majority of large companies remain law abiding and respectable. We don’t worry about GM or P&G taking control of our activities or limiting our freedoms. What makes technology different in this respect is its potential for invasiveness. We are right to be vigilant, but vigilance by itself will make little difference to how the next stage of growth is constituted. The only thing that can make a difference is understanding and involvement.
Peer to peer interactions as a class of business aren’t currently more than a speck on the entire landscape. Those who care about liberty and autonomy would do well to adopt a larger focus. In the same way that media and a few other big businesses are struggling to develop micro-management of electronic relationships and communication with customers, the independent operators should be developing macro visions based, not on the ‘wisdom of crowds’, but on the power of many. A group of many with modest to reasonable means can elect world leaders and influence economies just as a few individuals wielding vast resources can.
The current corporate business models are, in practice, the most likely to influence events and lives. The only thing that can change this is alternative models of a competitive size. Consider building, joining, contributing to, or at least endorsing one. The more of us who have a personal stake in electronically based businesses, the more we know and trust one another in the marketplace and personally, the less we’ll need to worry about potential threats posed by others.
