Llewellyn King: Big tech media monopolize ads, ravage journalism and act as global censors
At a Google advertising seminar in London in 2010
— Photo by Derzsi Elekes Andor
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
The Department of Justice has filed suit against Google for its predatory advertising practices. Bully!
Not that I think Google is inherently evil, venal or greedier than any other corporation. Indeed, it is a source of much good through its awesome search engine.
But when it comes to advertising, Google, and the others with high-tech media platforms, most notably Facebook, have done inestimable damage. They have hoovered up most of the available advertising dollars, bankrupting much of the world’s traditional media and, thereby, limiting the coverage of the news — especially local news.
They have ripped the heart out of the economics of journalism.
Like other Internet companies, they treasure their own intellectual property while sucking up the journalistic property of the impoverished providers without a thought of paying.
While I doubt thatr the DOJ suit will do much to redress the advertising imbalance (Axios argues that the part of Google the DOJ wants divested only accounts for 12 percent of the company’s revenue), it will keep the issue of what to do about big tech media churning.
The issue of advertising is an old conundrum, written extra-large by the Internet.
Advertisers have always favored a kind of first-past-the-post strategy. In practice this has meant in the world of newspapers that a small edge in circulation means a massive gulf in advertising volume.
Broadcasting, through the ratings system, has been able to charge for the audience it gets, plus a premium for perceived audience quality — 60 Minutes compared to, say, Maury, which was canceled last year.
But mostly, it is always about raw numbers of readers, listeners and viewers. In a rough calculation, first past the post has meant 20 percent more of the audience turns into 50 percent more of the available advertising dollars.
I would cite The New York Times's leverage over the old New York Herald Tribune, The Baltimore Sun’s edge over the old News-American, and The Washington Post’s advantage over the old Evening Star. The weaker papers all in time folded even when they had healthy circulations, just not healthy enough.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.,with their massive reach are killing off the traditional print media and wreaking havoc in broadcasting. This calls out for redress but it won’t come from the narrow focus of the DOJ suit.
The even larger issue with Google and its compatriots is freedom of speech.
The Internet tech publishers, for that is what they are, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and others, reserve the right to throw you off their sites if you indulge in speech that, by contemporary standards, incites hate, violence or at least social disturbance.
Conservatives believe that they are victimized, and I agree. Anyone whose speech is restricted by another individual or an institution is a victim of prejudice, albeit the prejudice of good intent.
Recently, I was warned by LinkedIn that I would be barred from posting on the site because I had transgressed — and two transgressions merit banning. The offending item was an historical piece about a World War II massacre in Greece. The offense may have been a dramatic photograph of skulls, taken by my wife, Linda Gasparello, displayed in the museum at Distomo, scene of a barbarous genocide.
I followed the appeal procedure against the two-strikes-you’re-out rule, but I have heard nothing. I expect the censoring algorithms have my number and are ready to protect the public from me next time I write about an ugly historical event.
The concept of “hate speech” is contrary to free expression. It calls for censorship even though it professes otherwise. Any time one group of people is telling another, or even an individual, what they can say, free speech is threatened, the First Amendment compromised
The problem isn’t what is called hate speech but lying — a malady that is endemic in the political class.
The defense against the liars who haunt social media is what some find hateful speech: ridicule, invective, irony, satire, and all the other weapons in the literary quiver.
The right to bear the arms of free and open discourse shouldn’t be infringed by the social media giants.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Chris Powell: Stupid Facebook post by GOP legislator distracts from Connecticut’s real problems
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Connecticut was pretty normal this week. The cities again were full of shootings and other mayhem. Group home workers went on strike because, while they take care of people who are essentially wards of the state, their own compensation omits medical insurance.
Hundreds of health-care workers were suspended for refusing to get a COVID-19 vaccination. Tens of thousands of children went to school without learning much, since at home they have little in the way of parenting and thus no incentive to learn.
The two longstanding scandals in the state police -- the drunken retirement party at a brewery in Oxford and the fatal shooting of an unarmed and unresisting mentally ill 19-year-old in West Haven -- remained unresolved, the authorities apparently expecting them to be forgotten. They're probably right.
And Gov. Ned Lamont called for sticking with football at the University of Connecticut despite its worsening record and expense.
Nevertheless, the great political controversy of the week was something else -- a Facebook post by state Rep. Anne Dauphinais (R.-Killingly). It likened the governor to Adolf Hitler on account of the emergency powers that Lamont repeatedly has claimed and his party's majorities in the General Assembly have granted him in regard to the virus epidemic even though there no longer is any emergency -- at least none involving the epidemic.
Rather than apologize for her intemperance and hyperbole, Dauphinais "clarified" that she meant to liken the governor to the Hitler of the early years of his rule in Germany, not the Hitler of the era of world war and concentration camps. This wasn't much clarification, since the Nazi regime established concentration camps just weeks after gaining power in 1933 and unleashed wholesale murder on its adversaries just a year later, on June 30, 1934 -- the "Night of the Long Knives" -- more than five years before invading Poland.
But so what if a lowly state legislator from the minority party got hysterical on Facebook?
Her name calling did no actual harm to anyone. The governor's skin is far thicker than that. Indeed, to gain sympathy any politician might welcome becoming the target of such intemperance and thus gaining sympathy.
Besides, Dauphinais's hysteria wouldn't even have been noticed if other politicians didn't make such a show of deploring it over several days. The top two Democratic and top two Republican leaders of the General Assembly went so far as to issue a joint statement condemning the use of political analogies to Nazism. In separate statements they criticized Dauphinais by name.
They all seemed to feel pretty righteous about it.
But meanwhile they had little to say about the state's problems that really matter, problems affecting the state's quality of life, problems on display throughout the week. Maybe they should thank Dauphinais for the distraction she provided them.
xxx
Will his support for University of Connecticut football be Governor Lamont's Afghanistan? Is the state just throwing good money after bad?
Now that Hartford wants to tear up Brainard Airport for commercial development, could Pratt & Whitney Stadium in East Hartford be leveled and Rentschler Field rebuilt as the airport it once was, replacing Brainard?
And will anyone ever take responsibility for anything at UConn?
Probably not. For even if UConn football is a disaster forever, it will cost far less than the disasters of Connecticut's education and welfare policies.
Why get upset at UConn football when the more Connecticut spends in the name of education, the less education is produced and the poorer students do, or when the more that is spent on welfare and social programs, the less people become self-sufficient and the more they become dependent on government?
The problem with UConn football is that results are still the object of the program and the public easily can see them -- the weekly scores during football season and the losing record.
By contrast, the education scores -- the results of standardized tests -- are publicized only occasionally and not on the sports pages, while the results of welfare and social programs are never audited and reported at all. With education and welfare, results are no longer the objective. They have become an end in themselves.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
Pratt & Whitney (the aerospace company) Stadium at Rentschler Field, in East Hartford. It is primarily used for football and soccer, and is the home field of the University of Connecticut Huskies.
Chris Powell: Fight bulimia with censorship?
Internet censorship by country: Dark pink has pervasive censorship; light pink substantial; yellow selective, and green little or none.
The plaster cast of Michelangelo’s ‘‘David ‘‘ at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, has a detachable plaster fig leaf displayed nearby. Legend claims that the fig leaf was created in response to Queen Victoria's shock upon first viewing the statue's nudity, and was hung on the figure before royal visits, using two strategically placed hooks.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Nearly everyone on Planet Earth with Internet access seems to use the social-media platform Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram even as last week's U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing over which Connecticut's Richard Blumenthal presided suggested that Facebook is an evil scheme to push young teenage girls into bulimia and other psychological disorders.
Facebook and Instagram certainly have brought out the latent narcissism of hundreds of millions of people, allowing them to spend half their day inflicting on others every trivial detail of their lives. But of course no one is compelled to participate in social media, and young teenage girls can participate only if their parents provide them with cell phones, computers and Internet access and pay little attention to what the kids do with those things.
This seemed lost on last week's hearing, as Senator Blumenthal read aloud a text message he said he had received from an unidentified father:
“My 15-year-old daughter loved her body at 14, was on Instagram constantly and maybe posting too much. Suddenly she started hating her body -- her body dysmorphia, now anorexia -- and was in deep, deep trouble before we found treatment. I fear she will never be the same.”
So who is responsible? The hearing accused Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
And what is the remedy? The hearing seemed to be demanding censorship by the government.
"Facebook and Big Tech are facing a ‘Big Tobacco' moment," Blumenthal said, referring to the tobacco industry's long struggle against regulation of its product and its concealment of research showing that -- as everyone with half a brain had known for hundreds of years -- using tobacco is unhealthy.
Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen testified that the company knows that teenage girls are especially vulnerable to what may be said about them on social media -- as if anyone needed confidential company documents to confirm the neurotic tendencies of teenage girls.
But Facebook's product and the major product of technology companies is not tobacco. It is speech and self-expression, freedom of which is constitutionally guaranteed even when it is narcissistic, stupid, mistaken and capable of being construed destructively. All other vehicles for conveying expression and information are just as capable of facilitating the harm being attributed to Facebook and Instagram.
Haugen suggested that Congress repeal the law exempting Internet companies from being sued for content posted by their users. That well might be the end of social media, since there is no way to police large volumes of social-media postings except by using computer programs to target keywords, a mechanism that censors the innocent and the guilty alike.
And what about the individual privacy of communicating by Internet? Should the government be empowered to compel Facebook and other social-media companies to become general censors? If government can do that to social-media companies, it can do that to newspapers, magazines, broadcasters, e-mail service providers and even telephone companies.
While the teen years always will be full of psychological stress, most young people in the land of the free have recovered more or less and grown up to be glad of their freedom.
Yet last month the FBI reported a 30 percent annual increase in murders in this country, from which no one will be recovering. The country is coming apart, and it's not because of Facebook and bulimia.
xxx
Farmington's police union president, Sgt. Steve Egan, blames Connecticut's new police accountability law for the severe injury inflicted on Officer James O'Donnell last month when a man driving a stolen car sped off, crushing the officer against his cruiser.
No evidence has been provided for the union president's claim. But a failure of law can be seen here. For the man charged in the incident is reported to have a long criminal record. That is, a state with an incorrigibility law already might have put him away for life, or at least for enough years to eliminate his capacity for crime.
Connecticut is not such a state. Instead of enacting an incorrigibility law the state keeps closing prisons and letting incorrigibles hurt people.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
Llewellyn King: Leave Big Tech alone while it’s still innovating
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
When it comes to invention, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
The chances are good, and getting better, that in the coming year and the years after it, our world will essentially reinvent itself. That revolution already is underway but, as with most progress, there are political challenges.
Congress needs restraint in dealing with the technological revolution and not to dust off old, antitrust tapes. With the surging inventiveness we are seeing today across the creative spectrum -- inventiveness that has given us Amazon, Tesla, Uber, Zoom, 3D printing and, in short order, a COVID-19 vaccine – you may wonder why the government is using antitrust statutes to try and break up two tech giants.
Conservatives think big social media companies are unfair to them. Liberals worry about the financial power of the Big Tech companies: The five largest have a market value of over $7 trillion.
The Justice Department has filed an antitrust suit against Google, and the Federal Trade Commission has filed one against Facebook. The only tools it has are outdated, anti-competition statutes -- some passed over a century ago. Sometime in the future, it may be desirable to disassemble Big Tech companies, but not when they are bringing forward new technologies and whole new concepts such as autonomous vehicles and drone deliveries. These need to happen without government shaking up the creators.
Antitrust laws on the books don’t address the internet age when global monopoly is often an unintended result of success; hugely different from Standard Oil seeking to have absolute control over kerosene.
Policy, though, may want to examine the role of Big Tech in relation to startups: the proven engines of change. When today’s tech giants were in their infancy, it was the beginning of the age of the startup as the driver of change. It went like this: invent, get venture-capital financing, prove the product in the market, and go public. The initial public offering (IP)) was the financial goal.
But the presence of behemoths in Silicon Valley has changed the trajectory for new companies. Rather than hoping for a pot of gold from an IPO, today’s startups are designed to be sold to a big company. Venture capitalists demand that the whole shape of a startup isn’t aimed to public acceptance but rather to whether Google, Apple or Amazon will buy that startup.
The evidence is that acquisitions are doing well in the Big Techs, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t be stifled in time. Conglomerates have a checkered past.
Big companies have a lifespan that begins with white-hot creativity, followed by growth, followed by a leveling of creativity, and the emergence of efficiency and profitability as goals that eclipse creativity. Professional managers take over from the innovators who created the enterprises; risk-taking is expunged from the corporate culture.
That is when government should look at the Big-Tech powerhouses and see whether it is in the national interest to break them up, not on the old antitrust grounds but because they may have become negative forces in the innovation firmament; because whether they are still creative or whether they are just drawing rents on previous creations or acquisitions, they will still be hoovering up engineering talents who might well be better employed in a smaller, more entrepreneurial endeavors or, ideally, as part of a startup.
The issue is simple: While the big companies are still creating, adding to the tech revolution which is reshaping the world, they should be left to do what they are doing well, from creating autonomous, over-the-road trucks to easing city life with smart-city innovation.
The time to move against Big Tech is when it ceases to be an engine of innovation.
Innovation needs an unruly frontier. We have had that, and it should be protected both from government interference and corporate timidity.
Happy and innovative New Year! Hard to believe in this time of plague, but much is changing for the better.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Chris Powell: Pursuing war and trivia
For a few days, President Trump seemed to threaten to go to war against Syria and its ally, Russia, on his own, without congressional approval. If the president had bothered to ask for authorization, Congress might have been too busy.
For half the Senate was interrogating Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, about the "social media" company's compromising of the privacy of its users, as if people shouldn't know that putting personal information on the Internet is how not to have any privacy at all.
Meanwhile, the rest of Congress seemed obsessed with perpetuating the special prosecutor's investigation of the president over his campaign's supposed "collusion" with Russia, an investigation that now has extended to a tryst Trump supposedly had with a pornography actress before he became president.
The Trump investigation is becoming reminiscent of the perpetual investigations of Bill Clinton when he was president. Does anyone remember the Whitewater "scandal" and Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern with whom Clinton had a tryst? His lying about it prompted his impeachment, though it too was much ado about nothing.
Like the Clinton investigations, the Trump investigation also is starting to evoke the assurance given to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin by the chief of his secret police, Lavrenti Beria: "Show me the man and I'll find you the crime." Will the special prosecutor find a crime committed by Trump before his unconstitutional bravado reduces the world to ash in a nuclear exchange? Will Congress look up in time to know what hit it?
xxx
AVOIDING FACEBOOK IS LIFE INSURANCE: At least Facebook has been a blessing to news organizations. Before Facebook, when news organizations needed to report an untimely death, they had to solicit a photograph from the decedent's family, an unpleasant and sometimes intrusive task.
But now news organizations need only to look up the decedent on Facebook, where they usually will find not only his photograph but also a full biography, often intimate. These days it seems that no one dies horribly without having neatly laid everything out for news organizations on Facebook.
Conversely, it seems that if you stay off Facebook and other "social media," the worst that will happen to you is that you'll die of old age in bed at home.
xxx
ESTY HAD TO KNOW BETTER: Connecticut Congresswoman Elizabeth Esty, who is ending her political career because she mishandled violence, threatening, and sexual harassment by her former chief of staff, Tony Baker, explains that she wrote a letter of recommendation for the creep to get him out of Washington and away from his former girlfriend. But of course that only risked inflicting him on new victims in his next job.
This doesn't mean that perpetrators of sexual harassment and worse should never be able to find work again. It means that they should not be able to get jobs by deception and omission -- not be able to get jobs until their misconduct is acknowledged and atoned for.
Esty isn't the only employer who concealed and passed along misconduct this way. The practice long has been common with sexual predators in business, government, education, and even churches. But no one should have known better about this than a member of Congress who often posed as a foe of sexual harassment.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Past time to confront the digital duopolists
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:
What to do reduce the corrosive power of the rapacious and unregulated duopoly of Facebook and Google?
One of the worst of their effects is that by gobbling up most of the digital advertising revenue in the United States they are destroying many local news organizations, whose work is essential in providing oversight of public and private institutions. Their demise is a green light for corruption.
David Chavern, CEO of the News Media Alliance, which represents about 2,000 newspapers in the U.S. and Canada, in a Feb. 26 Wall Street Journal article (“Protect the News From Google and Facebook’’), touted one way to start rectifying this situation: a bill in Congress sponsored by Rhode Island Congressman David Cicilline. The measure would reform antitrust laws to let newspapers and other news media collectively withhold their products from the duopolists at Facebook and Google to pressure them to give those smaller media an adequate return on their investment so that they can employ enough journalists to adequately cover the news.
Why oh why are antitrust laws applied to little publications and not to the gigantic Google and Facebook? Those two empires are in restraint of trade just as much as was the Standard Oil Trust at the end of the last century.
I’m mostly talking about local media; the big national ones, such as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times, will be okay.
Llewellyn King: Notebook --The new publishing giants; failing upwards; U.S. gastronomic capital?
When A.J. Liebling said that freedom of the press meant freedom for those who owned the presses, he spoke in a time when there were nearly 2,000 daily newspapers in the United States. Today there are fewer, and they depend on more than presses to stay in business. They depend on the indulgence of Google, Facebook and Twitter.
Freedom of the press now depends on those few companies that own the algorithms on which all publishers depend to get a wider range of readers, even while making no money off them.
The newsboys and newsgirls of yesterday delivered the papers. That is all. The news deliverers of today control the whole publishing world. They can determine success or failure and, as we are seeing, have the power to censor.
William Horsley, a retired BBC correspondent who is involved with media studies at the University of Sheffield and is vice president of the Association of European Journalists, says that the newsboys are now the publishers.
In the billions of words that have been spouted about freedom of the press here and around the globe, Horsley has identified a new and terrible reality about the freedom of the press and along with it, the freedom of ideas.
Quite simply, we now live in an era in which an algorithm buried somewhere in the secret depths of Google can do more to change what we know, think and say than any dictator has been able to achieve.
While the creators of Google, Facebook and Twitter probably did not dream of such power, such control, such hegemony, it has come to them.
The mind reels with possibilities, each more disturbing than the previous, of what would happen if any of the Internet giants fell into the hands of malicious owners or a dictator. Think of the damage if Steve Bannon, who presides over Breitbart, or some like ideologue, were at the helm of Google, Facebook or Twitter.
George Orwell, at his most pessimistic, could not have imagined the existential evil that could await us, courtesy of technology, plus a sociopath.
Dumb Luck, Sir. Dumb Luck.
A professor at Brown University congratulates me on my life choices. He implies that my peripatetic journey through the world, clutching a press card, has been because of sound choices. To which I have to respond, “My life has been one of dumb luck and failure.”
Luck, I say, because it is what determines your being at the right place at the right time. Failure, I say, because it is possible to fail upwards: I have, often.
Had my career been on an even keel, I would have finished high school, maybe gone to university and then gotten stuck in one of the early jobs, making it my “career.” As it is, I dropped out of high school, went into journalism and failed a lot.
If I had kept any of those jobs I failed at, I might have had a duller life: a jobbing writer in Africa, a news writer at ITN in London, the creator of America's first women's liberation magazine (which failed to liberate any women, but liberated all my money) in New York, an assistant editor at The Washington Post, and a trade journal reporter at McGraw-Hill.
So, Mr. Professor, I recommend that you prepare students for the success of failing upwards. Sometimes that goes for relationships and marriages. Do not bivouac too early on life’s open road.
The Gastronomic Capital of the U.S.: Is it Rhode Island?
In France, it is pretty well agreed, the area around Lyon is the gastronomic capital.
In the United States, New Orleans is mentioned. Well I have eaten many a meal in New Orleans, especially during a time when I was making a lot of speeches at conventions in New Orleans. But I have to say that good food rolls in Rhode Island. So much so that smart visitors come to Li'l Rhody on gastronomic tours, including friends of mine, who, like myself, have eaten the world over.
Now there are a few quibbles, to be sure. One big one is that there are woefully few French restaurants in the state, and the Italian influence in the restaurants is pervasive. Also I think that there could be more top-of-the line and regional Chinese restaurants, although a Uighur restaurant has just opened in Providence. Other Asian cuisines -- Korean, Indian, Thai and Japanese -- are well represented.
Still, the eating in the Ocean State leaves New Orleans with a way to go in my book.
{Editor’s Note: Rhode Island does have a few good French restaurants, such as Chez Pascal, on Hope Street in Providence.}
Llewellyn King (llewellynking1@gmail.com) is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
Facebook's damage to our democracy and civic life
Linked here is the best piece I've read about the the huge damage that Facebook has done to our democracy and overall civic life. Yes, this link is on Facebook, too, because it's a virtual monopoly, which hypocritical CEO Mark Zuckerberg's lobbyists in Washington assiduously protect. Likewise Google's lobbyists for that virtual monopoly. Where is the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Justice Department?
-- Robert Whitcomb
Facebook vs. America's sense of community
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary'' in GoLocal24.com
Harvard College has withdrawn the acceptances of at least 10 young people because of their nasty postings on Facebook. As in so many ways, the Internet has made life worse, not better. Some civil libertarians, such as writer and Harvard Law Emeritus Prof. Alan Dershowitz, have criticized Harvard’s actions on the grounds of free speech. But Harvard is a private institution that has every right to let in whomever it wants into its community. In this case, it doesn’t want a bunch of young people who are crude and cruel or at least act as if they are.
These kids, smart and generally affluent, if lacking judgment, can apply elsewhere – assuming they can remove most traces of their comments, though that may be difficult, or get colleges to chalk it all up to youthful exuberance. Stuff on the Internet is as enduring as a manmade monster can be. Everything about us that anyone has ever entered on the Internet is there in some crevasse.
If only more people of all ages would spend much less time on social media and more time, well, outdoors, for example, or reading a book onpaper and thus while doing so not being constantly distracted by the gyrations of the Internet and especially of social media, which are engineered to be addictive.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the famous Harvard billionaire dropout, has done far more harm than good for civil society and democracy by creating echo chambers where people see and hear things mostly according to their long-held biases and their insular interests. Facebook is helping to destroy a broader sense of American community and the duties of civic engagement..
But the genie is out of the bottle!
Anders Corr: Professor trying to protect us in Chinese-food fight
Boston.com and Slate Magazine recently poked fun at a young Harvard Business School professor whom I have counted as a close friend for more than 10 years. Ben Edelman ordered Chinese take-out from an online menu that was out-of-date, with prices $4 lower than the restaurant charged him.
He got into a funny e-mail exchange with the owner of the restaurant, a likeable bartender in Boston named Ran. Ben (being Ben) asked for treble-damages -- $12. As he pointed out in the e-mails, treble damages is his right under Massachusetts law, and provides a good incentive not to defraud.
Of course, this story got the interest (and laughs) of writers at boston.com and Slate, and the articles resulted in thousands of likes, op-eds, posts and retweets. Everyone was laughing at “Professor Cranky Pants.” Even me. I immediately hit send on a finger-wagging e-mail telling Ben that he should pick his battles more wisely.
Another restaurant then forwarded 2011 e-mails from Ben about a Groupon coupon that the restaurant sold, but on which the restaurant did not honor its commitments in the fine print. The restaurant did not cover the fixed-price option. Again this looks on first blush to be a man who is not picking his battles wisely. Ben apologized on his Web site.
But after sleeping on it and speaking with other friends of Ben, I realized that if everyone acted as did Ben, the world would be a better place. Most of us just ignore the likes of a $4 overcharge because we have "better things to do," don't want to rock the boat or otherwise fear conflict. But that means that the next guy who orders Chinese takeout also gets overcharged a few bucks. Over years, that can mean tens of thousands of dollars for one restaurant. Multiplied by thousands of small restaurants, taxis, dry cleaners, lawyers, physicians, contractors and other small businesses, small-time fraud can mean billions of dollars filched every year.
We have all experienced petty fraud. Physicians have tried to get me to undergo procedures I later found were totally unnecessary. Taxi drivers have taken me on long, allegedly “fast’’ routes dozens of times in cities around the world. One even seemed to be spinning his wheels (and his meter) on purpose, consequently fishtailing all over the road, during a snowstorm. Grocery stores have charged me for items I never bought.
Did I take the time to challenge these businesses for a buck or two? Never. It didn't seem worth it. Who knows if that crazy cabbie will pull a crowbar on me? Does this mean that these businesses have little incentive to fix their overcharging? Yes. In fact, they have an incentive to overcharge: Petty fraud is a big source of often cost-free revenue. Not taking action leaves the problem to harm others.
It's a classic public-goods problem -- going after petty fraud helps everyone, but almost nobody is properly incentivized to enforce the law against small-time fraud. Even public prosecutors prefer the big cases that get them media attention and votes. If more of us took Ben's approach, fewer petty fraudsters and fewer bartenders with no incentive to fix their out-of-date menus would nickel and dime us to death. With more Ben-like attitude, we would live in a far better world.
Consider the good that Ben has done in his crusades against fraud. Ben told me a long time ago that in his public high-school in Washington, D.C., he found that heavy chains and a padlock were used to permanently lock an emergency door that by law should not be locked during school hours. If a fire had happened, this could have caused death or injury to a lot of kids.
Ben took a picture of the chained door, with a time-stamp, during school hours, and at some risk to his academic career given the power of his principal, pressured the school to henceforth keep it unlocked during school hours.
Ben is not only risk-acceptant, as pointed out by another defense of his counter-petty fraud activity, he is the kind of guy who loves to read the fine print. He found American Airlines and others lying about nonexistent “taxes” that were actually fees. He got the U.S. Department of Transportation to fine American Airlines, and ever since they aren't defrauding millions of customers in this way. That means that Ben has saved me a few bucks, since I fly American. Thanks Ben!
A couple years ago, Ben realized that Facebook was telling advertisers who its users were (including our names!) whenever we clicked Facebook ads. Facebook had repeatedly promised that it would never do this. Ben told The Wall Street Journal and it was front-page news. Facebook still gives away our names, but at least now explains itself and we know what Facebook is up to. I'm less likely to click those ads, and maybe I get less spam as a result. Thanks Ben!
Even Google's tricks against its customers have been discovered, and revealed, by Ben (who happens to know how to program Web-bots). He used those bots once to discover the Web pages, for example on human-rights stuff, that dictators in China and elsewhere censor from their people. I bet that those folks are happy that someone is looking out for their interests.
See:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/filtering/china/
https://comparite.ch/chinavpnstudy
The Groupon e-mails are part of Ben’s bigger concern for the common man. He was quoted in 2011 in Forbes, where he raised the issue of potential consumer-protection violations by Groupon. When a consumer buys a Groupon from a restaurant or other business, that consumer has the right to expect that the terms of the fine print of that Groupon will be honored. When a restaurant fails to honor a promise it sells, the consumer who purchased that agreement takes a hit. This is petty fraud, and when summed across all Groupon restaurants, could result in millions of dollars of losses to consumers every year.
As with the Groupon dispute, most of Ben's attention is on big brand-name or big-time fraud and other malfeasance resulting in potentially millions or even billions of dollars of costs spread out thinly over all of us. He rightly gets a lot of positive attention for his work.
The Chinese take-out incident, however, reveals something even more extraordinary about Ben than all his achievements. He sent the e-mails not expecting that they would become public and give him fame. They were not meant to advance his career or make him money. $12 doesn't matter to Ben. His efforts resulted from a sense of injustice, and led him to inform a small proprietor of his duties, with an appeal to moral principles and the rights of him and others under the law.
Did it look a little silly when put in the newspaper? Definitely. But Ben took time from his other "more important" pursuits to stand up for a principle. He made an effort to hold the small businessman accountable, expecting nothing in return, as he does when he holds Google or the airlines accountable for billions of dollars of fraud.
Ben is a man of principle, and attempts to be a protector of all of us. Let's learn from Ben and stand up for ourselves when overcharged $4; by doing so, we stand up for each other. Ben's earnest concern for the little guy's nickels and dimes may seem silly at first. But Ben stands on principle, and those nickels and dimes can really add up.
Anders Corr, Ph.D., is principal of Corr Analytics Inc. (www.canalyt.com), which provides strategic analysis of international politics. He is also the editor of the Journal of Political Risk (www.jpolrisk.com). His areas of expertise include global macro analysis, quantitative analysis and public opinion. Dr. Corr maintains a global network of regional and subject-specific political risk experts.