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Engage with government - or ignore it?Engage with government - or ignore it?Posted Aug 18, 2002 23:07 UTC (Sun) by riptalon (guest, #3327)Parent article: Engage with government - or ignore it?
> Sustained political effort can yield results. This is a very bold statement for which I do not see a lot of supporting evidence. People raise examples such as the NRA in these situations but none of these examples involve massive vested interests by all the people who matter (corporations, mass media etc.). Even if you go to a whole other level and talk about the black civil rights movement there was little in the way of vested interests in the status quo from the establishment. The US economy no longer depended on salvery and what was being protested about was a hang over from that time, who's removal did not hurt anyone in power. Since I cannot imagine a similar level of protest can be generated on this issue as the civil rights movement and the opposition is orders of magnitude stronger, since it is made up of corporate CEO's not southern rednecks, the outlook appears very bleak. While it is possible to influence the government one way or another on issues where the powers that be have little interest, it does not follow that the same tatics will have any effect when you are trying to force them to act against their best interests. All this also assumes that the majority of action will take place in the political arena. However corporations, especially when they work together, have at least as much power as the govenment to affect change. Implementing TPCA/Palladium using the wintel monopoly avoids any possiblity of interference by the public. The CBDTPA may well just be chest beating by the "content" industry in order to hurry Microsoft along. They can always use legislation to force to smaller players (e.g. free software) into line or out of business once it is already the defacto standard. In the end this is a battle between the "content" industry and the tech industry and the question isn't whether pervasive DRM is implemented but only who gets to decide how it is done. Everyone who matters will benefit in various ways from these proposals including the govenment which will get greater control of online information (i.e. censorship, spying) and the big players in the tech industry who will enjoy greater barriers to entry for competitors and greater control of their customers. Of course the public are going to be screwed by this but it would be extremely naive to think this will have any effect on the outcome.That is what politics is all about.
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