Rights, Users & Curators

I am a firm believer that with rights comes responsibility. Let me give you an example. In America you are not just at Liberty to own a gun. It is your Constitutional Right to do so. It is my belief, however, that tied up with your rights to hold said firearm, are your responsibilities to ensure that ownership and use is managed in a responsible way.

The current centrepiece of legal debates in the western world these days is the internet. It is a great purveyor of community and free information. The problem is that it is also a bureaucratic nightmare.

The internet appears to me as an intricate mess, one that looks likely to collapse under its own weight. I think many who fight for the classic Internet freedoms are missing a key issue. The classic Internet freedoms do not appear to be that profitable.

Sooner or later the companies that are making losses will quit the business. Or go bust. Or be taken over by major corporations that care about their profits and not the free sharing of information. As the independent owners of websites, forums & the other niche personalities are priced out of the internet market, their dark corners will go with them.

It is not an impossible situation to overcome though. But the process must contain compromises to encourage continued investment by companies. It is a market world we live in, so market arguments must be considered. A process something like the following is what I could see in the future of the internet, if it is to survive:

First of all there would set up a primary hub. This hub will contain the highest traffic and most important information access points, for example:

Primary:   News Networks; Facebook; YouTube; Digital Radio; Government, School & College Areas etc.

This area would be fully monitored, fully regulated & fully accountable to the law. A basic, safe package for all internet users, at a cheap basic rate of lets say £10/month, or some affordable equivalent. This area would be covered with advertising, which would have a chance at being a sound investment because of the amount of traffic the centrally monitored hubs would process.

Shopping and other profit making organisations however would exist in one of several secondary hub areas. This would act to separate the basic access needs areas (i.e. education, news, networking etc) from the leisure areas. It would also mean a steady if small return for an investment for advertisers and online shops from the extra fee for secondary access. These secondary forms would look like such:

Shopping:  Amazon; Play; iTunes; Online Stores; Subscribed Online Gaming etc.

Community: Home Pages; Blogs; Wikipedia; Journals; Secondary Networking etc

These secondary areas would cost an additional fee, lets say £5/month in addition to the basic package. This area would be far less monitored, to allow for a continuation of free intellectual and commercial enterprise on the internet. They'd still be subject to certain in practice regulations designed for those areas however, for instance the consumer rights laws of the country they are selling to.

A tertiary set of hubs would include niche markets. These would be the smaller sites with less traffic, or at least less consistently high traffic. These would cost more to gain access to because of their higher running costs. However packages could be created to sell access to these small niche areas that are regularly used by specific users.

This is only a very rough sketch. But I think ISPs and the Telecom giants will find them increasingly necessary steps to make the process more efficient. If we are to continue to enjoy the benefits we must be part of the discussions and be active in coming up with the best compromise solutions.

As I see it, acceptance of your rights is also an acceptance of the responsibilities that come with them. A responsible citizen that accepts their rights there-in becomes a defender of them also. As for the internet, by claiming their right to the freedom of access, a user becomes a curator of the internet, responsible for the maintenance & protection of their rights.

We must give consideration to these issues:

+ Firstly as responsible users we must present solutions ourselves to a serious logistical problem with our collective information sharing network.

+ Secondly that things that I have mentioned above need to be discussed in open forum to find the most appropriate and safe solution to a problem that is only getting worse with each new internet page.

In all I believe that as responsible users of the internet, it is our duty, not that of any government or other body, to ensure the Internet's fragile freedoms. If the internet is to be prevented from being just another finance driven market place, as its curators we must act now to find safeguards for its future.

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References:
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+ Amy Shatz & Shayndi Rice's 'Internet gets new rules of the road'; December 2010;

+ Adam Carolla's 'Adam Carolla on Net Neutrality'; February 2011;

More useful lessons from Canada

The dust has begun to settle after a tense season of elections and political intrigue within the Westminster system on both sides of the Atlantic.

The major outcome of the political silly season has been the squeezing of Liberalism, or rather Liberalism being stretched thin by the polemics of the parties to the left and right.

In Canada the Conservatives were victorious at the 2011 Canadian Federal Elections. In spite of Mr Harper's victory, the Canadian Liberals, NDP and Bloc Québécois showed that coalitions of parties representing the full left spectrum can get together over the issues in common and achieve things without losing their separate identities.

In spite of this the Liberals suffered at the ballot box, with the party's support being pulled apart and drawn off by the groups to left and right. The NDP on the other hand found itself in the role of official opposition. It is a role the New Statesman suggests could foster strong international cooperation beneficial to both the NDP and the British Labour Party (Fox, 2011).

As Labour have something to gain from Mr Jack Layton's party, they also have something to learn. Liberals too may have lessons to learn from their sister-party on the other side of the Atlantic.

Mr Layton's New Democrats and the formerly Mr Ignatieff-led Liberals spent their time in office up to the federal election fostering a spirit of cooperation. On numerous occasions they presented a 'United Left' to oppose Mr Harper's policies and to eventually pass a no-confidence motion after finding him in contempt of parliament (BBC, March 2011). The diversity and fragmented nature of the left has often been its weakness but the Canadian parties showed how it can also be its strength.

John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty (Mill, 1859) about truth and its divided nature:

'Conflicting doctrines, instead of being one true and the other false, share the truth between them, and the nonconforming opinion is needed to supply the remainder of the truth.'

The divided left parties appeal between them to a wider core support than one single united left could on its own. Being divided allows these parties to put at their core something specific to them and key to their followers. This allowed the Liberal Party and the NDP to maintain their separate identities while cooperating for a common cause.

And such politics are central to coalition governments. For the Liberal Democrats their two truths are broken promises & compromise. The popular opinion of broken promises is not untrue but lacks the definition of the heretical opinion: that compromise demands tough choices.

But how can these two truths be reconciled? That is the question the Liberal Democrats face and the seemingly diametric division of the opposed ideas links to Liberalism's greater problem, that of overcoming the polemic discourse of politics. Lord Mandelson suggested that the Yes to AV Campaign, supported by Lib Dems, had picked the wrong fights and fought them badly, saying that:

'The groundwork was not done... and I think [the public] didn't see why AV... was really the solution to many of the problems they feel are in our political system.'
                (Mandelson, 2011)

Could it be that Liberals need to be more cynical in fighting their corner? The party has already begun to attempt a reforging of its separate identity and to make clearer what its fighting for (BBC, May 2011; Brogan, 2011).

Labour can certainly be considered guilty of some cynicism in their approach. At these most recent elections they adopted a tack of treating voters much like Mr Denis Healey once treated the party members that subsequently broke away to form the SDP (Crewe & King, 1995). They smeared their opponents and turned to their supporters with a 'You've got nowhere else to go'.

Those tactics split Labour then and in Scotland, where they were faced by a seemingly credible left alternative, Labour were ditched. The SNP, as the Lib Dems before them, picked up support by being (as Lib Dem Deputy Leader Mr Simon Hughes put it) a radical left alternative to Labour. The Lib Dems were the alternative until the coalition made that no longer appear to be true, driving voters away. Mr Clegg failed to understand his followers and Labour underestimated theirs.

Both have had a hard lesson in these elections. But have they learned anything? The Lib Dems where certainly punished harshly enough to not forget the past year in a long time, but Labour where strangely fortunate in their timing to have only been punished in Scotland. When presented with a credible alternative the Labour vote fragments as voters from across the left flock to the it. First the Lib Dems and now the SNP. Mr Clegg didn't understand his following, but the SNP's Mr Salmond appears to be wiser to the matter. While he continues to play the credible alternative those votes will be hard for Labour to recover.

To do so Labour must change. Its problems lie at the same core as those of Liberalism. Its own determination to drive home its polarising message breaks the support of fellow left parties through fear that it might monopolise those numbers itself. However this breeds resentment amongst its growing following creating numbers willing to jump ship at the first sight of something better. It also robs Labour of political allies when the chips are down.

So if Labour can gain a real ally in NDP leader Mr Jack Layton, so too can they learn something from him. The left is a diverse house and Cooperation is its strength. And with it comes more room for the constructive debate that Liberalism thrives upon.

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References:
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- Canadian 2011 Federal Elections:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13259484
http://www.elections.ca/home.aspx
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13264580
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13271083

+ Benjamin Fox's 'Canada’s realignment of the left'; May 2011;

+ BBC's 'Canadian government falls after no-confidence vote'; March 2011;

+ John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty'; 1859.

+ BBC's Peter Mandelson on AV; May 2011;

+ BBC's 'Clegg fights back with NHS pledge'; May 2011;

+ Benedict Brogan's 'Forget AV – Nick Clegg is winning the big battle'; May 2011;

+ Ivor Crewe & Anthony King's 'SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party';
 Oxford Uni. Press, 1995.

AV Referendum - Why vote yes

Regardless of your feelings towards the Liberal Democrats, it is worth considering them as an example of how unfair our electoral system can be.

In the 2010 UK General Election the Lib Dems received 23% of the popular vote, almost a quarter of all votes cast. However the party received merely 8.8% of the seats in parliament. That's less than a tenth of parliament representing almost 7 million voters.

In UK today we are still using an electoral system designed for a two-party politics which has long since ceased to be representative of the nature of Britain. First-past-the-post now only serves to reinforce the old fashioned views of politics as the struggle between two diametrically-opposed forces.

This is no new problem.

FPTP is unrepresentative and unfair.

It seems that the proponents of continuing with FPTP think that people might be catching on to that. The NO2AV tactics are filled with scaremongering & false dichotomy; they are an insult to the people and pressing to the very limit of what is decent.

It may be that these tactics are used because their own arguments don't make any sense. There are two particular examples:

+ Some people get more than one vote. This is a laughable claim. Rather than one round of voting as we have now, where you can win with the support of  as the largest minority, you have a competition that eliminates candidates  round by round. And everyone votes in every round. Have you ever seen the X-Factor? 

In AV, if no candidate can get a majority of votes, whoever comes last is knocked out of the competition. Here is where the NO2AV idea comes into play. They suggest that a vote for an extreme party counts more because you get a second vote when that candidate is eliminated. What they ignore is that if your first preference candidate has not been eliminated, you vote for them again in the second round or the third round for as long as they are still in the competition. All voters get the same amount of votes regardless of how many rounds of voting it takes to get a candidate who better represents the voters of a constituency.

+ That the BNP will get in. Nonsense. It is FPTP that creates opportunities for smaller (and more extreme parties) to get elected. AV weeds out extreme or divisive candidates for ones who can represent the face of a whole constituency, not just the loudest minority in it. Our democracy is about electing one person to represent fifty thousand; one person to represent fifty thousand in debate and vote; it is not about who 'wins' since winning here means the success of a powerful minority in forcing their view at the exclusion of others.

Now AV is not the perfect solution. But it is the first step in the right direction. It means a move towards greater accountability and a more constitutional politics. Right now we have informal ways of holding members to account. It is to Labour's credit that they chose to kick out a candidate adjudged to be corrupt. However it is often the case that voters must go against their tribal or ideological loyalties to punish a corrupt candidate. AV formalises high expectations of candidates. They must appeal to more than just core votes. Parties must back candidates that can appeal to a broad spectrum, something the known to be corrupt or untruthful can't do.

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References:
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+ Peter Tatchell's 'Democracy: we've never had it so bad'; May 2010;

+ Johann Hari's 'If you get the X Factor you'll get AV'; April 2011;

+ John Cleese on PR, from YouTube;

+ The AV Debate with Andrew Neil; April 2011;

- Supporters of YestoAV:
Tim Farron, President of the Liberal Democrat; Simon Hughes, Lib Dem Deputy Leader; Charles Kennedy, Former Lib Dem Leader; Paddy Ashdown, Former Lib Dem Leader; Ed Miliband, Labour Leader; Eddie Izzard; Tony Robinson; Dan Snow; Stephen Fry; Colin Firth, Helena Bonham Carter, Stephen Fry, Joanna Lumley, John Cleese, Billy Bragg, Eddie Izzard, John O’Farrell, Tony Robinson & Richard Wilson.