Re: From W3C's eCommerce Interest Group of the 1990s to Today's Web Payments Discussion

On 4/7/14 5:11 PM, Joseph Potvin wrote:
> RE: members of [any group] will not, unless forced, take kindly to
> anything that obstructs their interests (as they define them)
>
> There's nothing unique in that way about large companies. The same can
> be said for any organization, including a local farmer's market.

What you say is true, because I didn't clearly state that my 
underlying objection is specific to legally-mandated profit-seeking 
companies; perhaps I believed that part understood. But anyway, your 
answer doesn't seem to address that.

To clarify: I meant that the specific interests -- maybe better termed 
'goals' -- of profit-seeking companies are different from those of 
religious groups, groups of scientists, NGO groups, loose groups of 
anarchists, and so on. Each one will have a goal or set of goals and 
they may differ widely (and/or overlap at times).

And there probably exists a group, 'non-competitive peaceful 
humanists' (but call them what you want) whose goal is something like: 
'where possible to co-exist and support all other human beings without 
doing physical, financial, or psychological violence to them'.

My point is that such a goal (or any other that benefits all of 
humankind) is at best a secondary goal of a profit-seeking 
corporation, and where it conflicts with financial profit it will be 
overridden. The corporation is legally required to do this. (Leaving 
aside the newer format, 'Benefit corporation', which is still a 
trivial proportion of the number of corporations).

This is not news; that's why we have 'regulation'. And so the 
corporations have evolved, in turn, to co-opt the process of making 
the regulations. Here's a quote from "Toxic Capitalism: Corporate 
Crime And The Chemical Industry." (Pearce and Tombs, Toronto, Canadian 
Scholars Press, 1998):

"Central to this text is a recognition of the need to reassess what we 
understand by the term 'regulation'.... At present, corporations and 
their representatives themselves play dominant, often covert, roles in 
the development of regulations to which they are then subjected; they 
then play key roles in negotiating the ways in which, and extent to 
which, such regulations are actually enforced." [page 312].

This was my concern with the W3C in my experience with the HTML5 
development, which Charles McCathie Nevile has confirmed in a later post:

> I also think the often intense politics that led to the HTML WG and which go back
> over a decade account for some of its atypical nature.

Charles speaks positively about this being an anomaly for the W3C, and 
that is comforting. Yet it might only be that HTML5 was the most 
important single change available for corporations to influence since 
the web's inception, and so they did. The fact that the change might 
have proceeded in a way that disenfranchised a large swath of people 
from direct creative and financial participation in the web is not the 
corporation's problem. In fact it was a solution to their problem, 
which is how to make more money. Their solution was to regulate it in 
such a way that only themselves, the experts, could have control.

I suggest this could happen again with web payments -- which may be 
even more of an opportunity than HTML5 was, for many things.

Yet, other things will come down the pipe unexpectedly -- like the web 
did. Bitcoin, and CCN (content centered networking), and other forms 
of distributed processing might upstage any attempts by corporations 
to accrue all money and power to themselves. But IMO a hope that 
running it through the W3C process will avoid that happening is not 
learning from history. Perhaps it's possible, but I expect it will be 
an intense struggle. The banks, Visa, Mastercard, Google, Apple -- all 
will do their best to appropriate all the nuts and bolts work that is 
offered and turn it into something that will benefit themselves. Some 
of the people in the corporations may be happy to see others outside 
their own company benefit as well, but that will be a hobby, a 
sideline -- if it conflicts with their company activity it will be 
co-opted, avoided, or destroyed.

I believe this entire discussion has its foundation on a major 
consciousness change, global, about the Growth Model versus the limits 
to the carrying capacity of the Earth: those two are now in direct 
conflict. The corporations are using Growth Model capitalism. Many 
believe that model is up against the limits of Earth's carrying 
capacity and resources, and that the latter will necessarily win, it's 
just a matter of how long and by what mechanism.

If this is true (and many books have been written about this; 
favorites of mine are "Reinventing Collapse" and "The Five Stages of 
Collapse" by Orlov, who has the advantage of being funny), then there 
really is little point in getting directly involved in such a 
struggle, since eventually the corporations' model will lose anyway. 
No use wearing ourselves out trying to defeat them with a blunt sword.

Might as well spend the time getting to know the people at the 
farmer's market. According to Orlov, those are the people we'll need 
to be on good terms with when it all goes down.

:-)

Steven Rowat









As

Received on Tuesday, 8 April 2014 16:55:52 UTC