[governance] Yes! Hands off the Internet!

Tue Jan 1 12:25:07 EST 2013

These kinds of hrrrmph "the law is the law" arguments are to my mind just silly… Of course, the "law is the law", nobody is arguing that… the problem is that in this area as they say, the "law is (or may be) an ass" and some way of achieving order/justice needs to be found…

Yesterday, I think I "assented" to two or three of these agreements… and of course, I didn't read them… I'm not a lawyer, I don't have the time or the interest and the stakes for me in those instances weren't sufficiently large for me to make much of an investment in working through the fine fine print…

So, what does that mean… that the owner of those contracts can within the rather shall we say, "flexible" limits of those contracts, play fast and loose with my data, my text, my credit card information etc.etc. I guess if they egregiously break law, no, but if they skirt the edge of the law which is what seems to be happening in these kinds of cases again who has the time or resources to call them out.

In fact, blogging seems to be about the best way of handling these things at this point… Conrad I think it was referred to Instagram and the apparent (I guess there is some dispute on this) significant loss of stock market value when various bloggers called them out on some of this kind of egregious behaviour. But blogging seems to be hit and miss and what Nader was calling for was some rather more systematic approach and some way of introducing some form of order/justice into these relationships.

So again enough with the mock outrage… There are enough real things to be outraged about.

M

M

From: Suresh Ramasubramanian [mailto:suresh at hserus.net] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 01, 2013 8:34 AM
To: gurstein at gmail.com; governance at lists.igcaucus.org; pranesh at cis-india.org
Subject: Re: [governance] Yes! Hands off the Internet!

Let me be frank.. It is an established fact that a contract to engage in illegal behavior is an invalid contract, ab initio. 

So, if a website's contract with a user was to contravene some existing law in a country where the user is located, or were it to  contravene US law, it would be automatically rendered invalid. 

Which is, I am sure you will appreciate, the reason why any such contact and all its revisions, would go through extensive due diligence legal review. 

And, especially when a country's privacy, data protection, fair trade etc regulator has received complaints about the website, their lawyers would carry out an equally thorough review with a view to possible enforcement action against the website 

So.. This might be more difficult than simply blogging about how disrespectful of user privacy a website is, but try to find where they violate local laws in their collection and use of your personal data, and complain to the appropriate regulator 

--srs (htc one x)

----- Reply message -----
From: "michael gurstein" <gurstein at gmail.com>
To: <governance at lists.igcaucus.org>, "'Pranesh Prakash'" <pranesh at cis-india.org>
Subject: [governance] Yes! Hands off the Internet!
Date: Tue, Jan 1, 2013 9:49 PM

Pranesh, I think the (high) relevance of the Nader article is in response to the position articulated by (I believe it was) David Conrad and Suresh, with respect to (particularly Facebook) that "ya' pays yer money and ya' takes yer chances" errr... you sign up to the service which includes "assenting" to some indecipherable contract waiver and then (according to them) you are subject to whatever whims or fancies their over-clever and over-priced lawyers and evil twin marketers come up with in their capricious privacy (or whatever) statement of the day... forevermore... 

M

-----Original Message-----
From: governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org [mailto:governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org] On Behalf Of Pranesh Prakash
Sent: Tuesday, January 01, 2013 2:01 AM
To: governance at lists.igcaucus.org; Riaz K Tayob
Subject: Re: [governance] Yes! Hands off the Internet!

Riaz K Tayob [2012-12-29 18:37]:
> See Nader on this issue... here
> <https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2011/05/31/contract-peonage-by-ralph-nader/>.

While Nader is quite relevant to the current discussion, I fail to see how this article of his pertains to this thread.

> Will try to dig out something on why oligopoly is a better approach to 
> understand these kinds of markets than the simple competition vs 
> monopoly argument...

Even assuming oligopoly is the better approach, what is the precise statement of the problem and what is the solution that the "oligopoly approach" provides?

--
Pranesh Prakash
Policy Director
Centre for Internet and Society
T: +91 80 40926283 | W: http://cis-india.org PGP ID: 0x1D5C5F07 | Twitter: @pranesh_prakash

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