Lessig on Corruption (at length)

How to Get Our Democracy Back. (via the Nation)

Lawrence Lessig writes a great argument tying the grassroots drive of the Obama campaign to how we might start to fight corruption in Congress. He lists a number of reasons people find for this corruption, but forgets an important one: politicians need money to advertise on television during their campaigns.

It’s for this reason that I have a really difficult time supporting the solution he proposes–publicly financed elections. I don’t think its fair that taxpayers hard-earned dollars go straight into the pockets of media companies, even if it does alleviate some of the influence of big-money donors. Public financing isn’t necessarily a bad idea; there are just other things that would need to be fixed at the same time for it to be a truly effective and just solution.

Alternative Internet Voices Shuttered

Two important alternative voices on the Internet, Wikileaks and P2P.net, have both announced that they need to temporarily shut their doors.  With server costs in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, one can assume that advertising and donations didn’t quite bring in enough to keep things running.

This is an important reminder that speech online is not free–especially if you have something interesting or important to say. I’d argue that, these are perfect arguments for Internet Neutrality. If providers were allowed to shift to a scheme where they can charge sites like this extra for access, one can only imagine how many other ideas might be chilled.

Who knew that, in an age of thinking about how we might fund newspapers, we might also need to think about how alternative voices are funded online as well.