Posted by PBS Mind | Today's New York Times reveals the decision of Verizon Wireless to block text messages sent by Naral which are requested by its supporters. Those of you who read my previous post about this exact problem may be noticing a pattern beginning to develop. What's that old saying? "Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a trend." Why do I think Time No. 3 isn't far behind?
I would point out first that this is NOT the same thing as television networks turning down certain ads or similar situations. The difference there is choice. If you watch a television show, you're also (technological advancements to the contrary notwithstanding) watching its ads -- you have no say-so in which ads will run with that particular show. In both the instances I'm writing about, however, the audience has been pre-screened and has chosen to see content that is subsequently being suppressed by a third party.
Second, if you get into any conversation with our own "The Crux" about corporations, you will sooner or later learn (and don't bust me for this, Cruxy, because it's not intended to be a direct quote) something to the effect that a corporation is an entity subject to certain protections and restrictions under the law whose sole purpose is to make money. (And if you read elsewhere on the subject, you will find this purpose is supposed to be strictly impersonal, and impersonal to the point that ethical discussions have touched on the phenomena of people working for corporations doing things that are so heinous they'd never for a minute consider doing them in their personal lives.)
Let's bear that in mind for a minute.
Theoretically, unless you actually work for a corporation or own stock in it (which is going to change your relationship with it, naturally), your sole interaction with any corporation should be constructed thus: you seek a good or service from it, and it seeks monetary compensation for same from you. Period. You yank a Coke off the shelf, Coke gets its buck-nine, everybody is happy if a little less healthy from all the sugar.
NARAL makes a deal with Verizon to provide text messages. Verizon stands to make money on the deal. The consumer gets what he/she wants -- to receive the text messages. The corporation makes money, and the consumer gets a service. The corporation has fulfilled its purpose.
Except that somewhere in there, we seem to be seeing corporations making personal decisions for clients, against their expressed wishes and right to decide for themselves. Peer pressure used to be the purview of parents, friends, the church -- now all of a sudden we're supposed to bow to peer pressure from Hotmail and Verizon? When did the fact that a corporation is willing to take my money come to mean it has the right to make, or alter, my choices?
One priceless quote from the NYT story:
A spokesman for Verizon said the decision turned on the subject matter of the messages and not on Naral’s position on abortion. “Our internal policy is in fact neutral on the position,” said the spokesman, Jeffrey Nelson. “It is the topic itself” — abortion — “that has been on our list.”
Wow. I don't even know where to start with that one. One presumes that the subject matter of the messages is directly relevant to Naral's position on abortion, otherwise everyone is wasting their time and money. And if the topic of abortion has been on Verizon's internal hit list, that by definition means their internal policy is NOT "in fact neutral." Jeffrey Nelson gets a 10 on the flawed-internal-logic meter for that one, except for the 6.5 he'll get from the East German judge, who always screws up the curve.
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The core problem is market concentration. Our government keeps insisting that you can't have monopolistic effects until a corporation gets some very high percentage of a market (like 75-80%).
But monopolistic effects occur long before they affect pricing. One example: a company might have only 1% of the national market, but if it is the dominant business in a particular town, there's no free market there.
The main question, though, is not just what market share a company has, but how many real competitors it has. If a company has a 70% market share, but there are 30 companies capable of offering equal services, then there's competition. The problem is that in telecomm, there are only a few companies capable of offering equivalent services.
Posted by: Charles | September 27, 2007 at 01:13 PM