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Now it’s the geeks’ turn to play politics

© Alan Kotok

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Ever since the IT industry began exercising its political clout, the industry's business managers, known as Suits, have set the political agenda (see our story, "Campaign finance -- the IT industry learns to play the game," 19 February 2002, http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/1081... rather than the Geeks -- the architects, engineers, and code-writers who actually create the technology. Now the Geeks want to be heard, and are getting organized.

Jeff Gerhardt, host of The Linux Show, a weekly interactive experience for developers, presented over Web-based audio and IRC chat, wants to take on what he sees as the erosion of intellectual freedom and growing monopolization of the IT industry. Jeff is more than a disgruntled geek; he is also the chief technical guru and a major shareholder in an ISP, Pinnacle Communications.

Hey, we built the Net!

Gerhardt and fellow Linux Show host Kevin Hill have written a proposal for an American Open Technology Consortium and a companion political action committee to capture and promote the original vision of the Internet as conceived by the geeks that built it, "of open access that would empower everyone, not just techies; that would enable dynamic new markets and industries, more fluid and competitive markets, and that would indeed promote human freedom."

Gerhardt and Hill see their fellow geeks as the people carrying this vision forward, through initiatives such as open-source software and community wireless networking. This vision, to Gerhardt and Hill, built today's highly productive $600 billion IT industry, as well as transformed the entertainment industry, but it is under attack from monopolists and corporate interests that want to, "lock down the Internet and replace it with a 'content delivery system' designed for little more than delivering digital-rights-managed media streams to passive couch potatoes who were probably already happy with their cable TV service."

Geek/user solidarity

Gerhardt and Hill recite a litany of threats to this world, in terms of recently enacted and proposed legislation that concentrate power in the hands of the media corporations, such as The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act, Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, and a Copyright Arbitration and Royalty Panel. They also cite the Tauzin-Dingell bill designed to tip broadband technology in favor of the regional Bell telephone companies (see our story "Key players square off over broadband access legislation," 23 May 2001, http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/1081... that Gerhardt and Hill see as a threat to the existence of some 10,000 ISPs.