On the day after Sandy touched down in Manhattan and half the city went dark, people clustered around a closed, dark Starbucks cafe simply because the free wireless there was still working and they could still try to use their cell phones. (C) Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
I was reminded of Susan Crawford's lawfaring on behalf of the collectivists and the redistributionists when Katrin Verclas put her in her list of favourite tech women -- a list I challenged not because I'm against women's rights -- I'm all for promoting more women in tech and working on girls' education -- but because it was so fake because the people in the list actually hadn't done real innovation, but just in a few cases, served men who did (i.e. Wikipedia).
I was tipped off to this article of Susan's, Why Cell Phones Went Dead After Hurricane Sandy by a gay Australian who was trying to convince me that we should all give up freedom of speech and freedom of association in America in order to obtain gay rights, i.e. the Boy Scouts, chik-fil-A etc should all be compelled to drop the articulation of their beliefs in public, and should drop any membership requirements they had for their organizations. That's not what I believe will work, and I patiently explained about Supreme Court rulings, concepts of the rule of law, and even the fact that Maryland just got gay marriage passed on the ballot now -- without any publicized fights with chik-fil-A and the Boy Scouts. How about that!
The route to equality lies through the statehouse and getting legislation passed and demonstrating and campaigning for that legislation for equality before the law -- not hate campaigns that urge the removal of other people's rights to freedom of speech. This man said glibly that we should all give up a little of our rights for the sake of the whole society and claimed that's already how society is run. But that's certainly not true -- we don't have to do that and it doesn't lead to the results he imagines.
Some of that collectivist logic is what backs the whole fake "net neutrality" gambit, which is a bid by veteran die-hard anti-copyleftists to convert their long-time struggle to decriminalize piracy -- which consistently failed both in courts and in the public mind -- to a "rights-based" struggle that would claim that there was a "right" to bandwidth that was akin to freedom of speech. Never mind that this positive right was not a negative right (to speak in legal terms); never mind that they never had any idea of how to pay for all that broadband, which is a scarce resource. "Net neutrality" has tended to fail, even when Obama put his fellow collectivists in the FTC and FCC -- whatever gains have been made have not been made for mobile -- and I can only say: good. Go redistribute yourselves elsewhere, guys.
Fast forward to Verizon, the FCC and Sandy. I'm one of the thousands of people in Manhattan who had no power for 12 days in Flood Zone A -- then got it back, only to lose it again overnight in a transformer fire that forced a new evacuation of the building and no power again. So I truly get this, better than Susan Crawford, who didn't sit like I did in a dark cavernous tower with no light or power, and increasing cold, garbage and presence of rats, hauling buckets of water up the stairs in the dark to try to flush toilets that increasingly wouldn't flush.
Each day, I would trudge uptown 25 blocks to get to the zone where power remained -- and try to find a place not already mobbed by the hipsters to try to charge my phone. It was damn hard. But even when I *did* get my phone charged for a short duration to try to contact my family members, some of whom were spread out in other refuges because it got impossible to live in our building obviously, Verizon wasn't working. That is, it would work sometimes for text messages or for some reason, Twitter. But for what may have been heavier lifting -- email download, voice phone calls -- it just hung and didn't work. Well, as they say, that's life in the big city. I don't view Verizon service as a "right". It's not a utility in the sense that Con Ed -- electricity -- is a utility.
Yet increasingly, people like Crawford are trying to convert cell phone service and Internet provision as utilities like water or electricity or gas, none of which worked during the hurricane blackout.
Are they in fact utilities? Oh, I'm happy to have that debate, but it's a debate that is not automatically solved with socialist solutions. Go back and read about the Tennessee Valley Authority and the break up of Bell Telephone into baby bells and whatever you want to do, but don't tell me that the answer is to make taxpayers pay for the kids to download their Lost episodes, take pictures of themselves hanging out in Starbucks, and gab about how they haven't had a shower. #firstworldproblems
I had to marvel that an entire dorm of healthy, resourced, wealthy kids at NYU preferred to sit in another building to which they were evacuated, sucking up power from a generator to charge all their gadgets and tapping on their laptops and calling home to whine to Mom and Dad that they had no hot water --instead of forming groups and going out to get the water being delivered at least to fire hydrants and help take it up the many flights of stairs in all the high rises in the projects on the East Side, especially to elderly and disabled. Why did they all cluster and whine and watch music videos and College Humor episodes and try to figure out how far they were willing to hike to get their lattes instead of serving as volunteers?
Anyway...Crawford believes the answer is to regulate those hated telecoms that the geeks all loathe and force Verizon to provide more coverage. In other words, so that I can't just text my dispersed fellow refugee relatives and friends or get tweets from my assemblyman with hard news, but so that I can make voice calls and download attached files in work email as well. Why? This is a test of the emergency system. The emergency system does not include your Lost episode and funny cat pictures, you know?
And even if Twitter and messages didn't work, I would understand. Why? Because this is a company that has to pay huge expenses as it functions. It is facing downing of wires and equipment and towers *itself*. It is doing the best it can to function. Do I really need to subject it to the strain of an entire NYU dormitory or a Starbucks full of hipsters who want to chat and share Instagrams of themselves by downed trees? Do I really need to subject it to the strain of 300 page translations I'm working on or accessing of Russian news videos or Facebook with hard news needed for work? No. It's supposed to be, you know, for communications, first of all for those first responders. This isn't about the First Amendment WHATSOEVER; it's about CONSUMPTION, and about a private company providing services need to regulate CONSUMPTION THEMSELVES.
And so no, I don't think Verizon needs to get regulated so that it is FORCED to provide services to everybody regardless of their CONSUMPTION LEVELS to "enforce" the First Amendment. That's absurd. Crawford, at Harvard, surely gets the difference between negative and positive rights. But she wants to put a heavy spin on the notion of "Congress shall make no law" into a regulatory burden to ensure the means to First Amendment rights are supplied forcibly by the state.
Doesn't she get that this leads to the state restricting speech all over then? You don't put states in charge of your rights. You don't, as this witless Australian told me (who should know better, because the law in his country doesn't work this way), that the state doesn't "give you" the rights to freedom of speech and association -- they are inherent, inviolable, endowed by the Creator (and you don't have to believe in God to understand the inherency of rights in a natural law concept -- but of course, natural law is the last thing that Susan Crawford wants to turn to for refuge.) The objective here is to have states not take away rights, not give them; the objective is to have the state *not take away cell phone service* or Internet access as the state does in Turkmenistan. But that's not what Crawford is talking about; she thinks Verizon should be subsumed under the state and do its bidding. And not even via Congressional legislation or a judicial decision, but a bureaucratic executive branch directive at the FCC or FTC.
Cell phones went dead -- to answer the question Susan poses in the headline -- because Verizon had to make legitimate, needed decisions about how much to serve its customers when its system itself was on both assault and overload. And that's okay. Private companies with public missions still get to do that. If people find -- as they found with some of the regional power companies -- that these private entities did not serve the public, and were shoddy or negligent in their work, then they will demonstrate, call their Congress people, get the companies to change -- as indeed people in my complex are going to be doing with Con Ed and their assemblymen regarding the fact that the transformer in one building was 40 years old and should have been replaced years ago by law.
What you can't do is convert cell phone gabbing, picture taking and exchange, Facebooking, etc. into a similar service provision as water and electricity. Yes, water and electricity are used for frivolous purposes, too -- people take more showers than they need to and use their electricity to do all kinds of things merely for entertainment. But hey, water and electricity don't cost anything near as much as broadband to produce and provide and therefore the costs for the customer are nothing compared to cell phones; nor are they as scarce a resource.
And I'm simply not buying the scarifying over this that comes with earnest NGOs piously intoning that we are all going to face abusive loss of our rights because of the failure to regulate telecoms the way the redistributionists wish to:
This particular lawsuit is just one push in a longer effort by Verizon and the other high-speed Internet-access providers to get immunity from oversight. AT&T Inc., just last week, filed a petition with the FCC seeking wholesale deregulation of its wires. According to Harold Feld of the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, this would make the company immune to all laws promoting consumer protection, competition and universal affordable communications. California became the most recent of more than 20 states to eliminate its authority over digital networks.
Er, immunity from oversight? Or refusal to subject its private business to the whims of redistributionists? Scoffing at the law? Or in fact making private decisions that they are entitled to make in a market in a capitalist system? De-regulation because they are abusive and want to hide from justice? No, de-regulation so that they don't face lawless Bolshevism.
If California eliminated state control over digital networks, I have to wonder if it wasn't for the prudent reason that they needed especially in Silicon Valley to promote innovation and freedom in this sector, not a socialist grab.
Susan Crawford and friends have to get in touch with the fact that CONSUMPTION is the issue here in a marketplace. As much as they try to portray Internet usage as a function of educational access especially for the poor and minorities or even Bibles for religious believers -- they'll stop at nothing to jerk a tear -- the reality is that the kids aren't sitting and learning with Khan videos or studying their math homework but watching Youtube, and the poor and the disabled are merely exchanging the same heavy jpegs of their cats as all of us. The Internet is about entertainment and socializing as much as it is about education and emergency communications, and companies that supply it have the right to reduce its flow in the interests of economy. Sorry, but I'm not going to fight for the right for people to play WoW and send instant videos of their girlfriends in a flood zone. And yet that's EXACTLY what people did in this flood zone, or 10 blocks away from it if they were fortunate to still have power.
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