[governance] FW: [IP] Shock threat to shut Skype

[Michael Gurstein]

Essential services. 

Certain political theories (namely social justice theories) consider some
services as essential (i.e. providing the service outweighs other concerns,
especially commercial ones). A very common example here is health care. In
the case of such essential services, nationalization may ensure their
continuation regardless of commercial, environmental, or other external
pressures. According to proponents of such theories, these concerns are
surpassed by the positive externalities that are deemed likely to result
from ensuring the service's availability to everyone.

Wikipedia: Public ownership

(the question McTim, wasn't will they shut it down but rather should they be
allowed to and if not who/how would this be prevented... 

(As you know commercial considerations quite frequently has led to the
writing off/shutting down of otherwise viable goods/services with
significant commercial potential 

(Canada is currently going through something related to that with the likely
destruction of a significant portion of its technology innovation
infrastructure through the dismemberment and selling off of Nortel...There
are very strong pressures on the Canadian government to intervene to prevent
this in support of the public interest... 

(Arguably, as a very significant infrastructure for interaction and
communication globally particularly I think for civil society and the
non-corporate sector the loss of Skype could cause significant harm to the
global capacity for social and commercial innovation among other things...

MBG

-----Original Message-----
From: McTim [mailto:dogwallah at gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, July 31, 2009 9:15 AM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Michael Gurstein
Subject: Re: [governance] FW: [IP] Shock threat to shut Skype


On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 12:08 PM, Michael Gurstein<gurstein at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Anyone agree with me that Skype, like medical care, is too essential a 
> service to be left to the market...

no

>
> I'm not sure what can be done about this but it seems to me that this 
> (or at least this class of issues) would be a suitable discussion 
> topic for the next Internet Governance Forum...
>
> How does one declare an Internet service as essential to the global 
> interest and introduce some means to ensure its survival?

eBay spent 2.6 B USD on this thing...do you think they will actually shut it
down?
-- 
Cheers,

McTim
"A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route
indicates how we get there."  Jon Postel

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