The Entitlement State Hits The Internet
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Egalitarianism at that virtual commune: the internet
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The defeat last week of proposed intellectual property bills in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives was the natural culmination of an ever-growing entitlement mentality and consequent society that serves such mindset.
Nowadays, everyone feels entitled to what they get, and perhaps even more: the leaders of teachers’ and government workers’ unions claim they are entitled to rich pensions and medical plans that they pay little if anything to; government aid recipients, when the media has a slow news day and sticks a microphone in front of them, will winnow about welfare programs (unemployment, food stamp) that ultimately expire after a prolonged period of time or have reasonable restrictions (do you really need such?) on them; corporations will claim they need tax breaks and grants to compete with foreign competitors (R&D credit, Solar Energy loan guarantees) and banks will plead for bailouts due to a housing meltdown that they did little to avoid, if not aid.
The first sign of such entitlement mentality to hit the internet was when Google and other search engines and similar information warehouses came four-square against internet service providers effectively charging for the amount their networks are used. The net-neutrality proponents claimed that everyone is “entitled” to the internet at the same price regardless of how much or little one used it, as if the network is this “horn of plenty” that was created by out-of-world resources and there was no earthly cost to create it here. It’s the equivalent of going to the gas station and having your tank filled but claiming that you should pay as little as the person who only buys a gallon of gas. Yet the amorphous nature of the internet, despite the very real costs of building its infrastructure, has allowed outfits like Google to annex the internet hardware, without the cost, to serve its business model. Now that’s effective cost of goods management!
Such argument, however wrong, is a natural springboard to the claim that anything in the vaporous cyberspace really doesn’t belong to anyone in particular but to that vast commune known as the world wide web. This explains the full-throated opposition to the proposed intellectual property bills that died in congress last week.
While such a battle won appeals to those with a strong egalitarian streak, it begs the question as to why anyone would decide to create anything if it can be taken on the internet without reward to its creator?
So to use a play on the famous line from the movie Field of Dreams, “if you build it, they will come,” our new state of entitlement can best be summed up as “If you create it, others will come and feel entitled to it and take it.”
-I.M.Windee
