Memex 1.1

Insightful post by Mark Anderson.

In my mind, the passage of this bill represents two opportunities, neither of which is contained in the bill just passed.

First, the real meaning of this bill is that it is possible to defeat the insurance lobby. Ask anyone from the past who has tried, and it will be clear that this is really a demonstration of democracy, even if the bill is pretty mild. This passage opens the mind, and therefore the door, to passage of other important legislation, from Wall St. regulation to a stronger broadband network plan, without assuming that powerful lobbies always win.

Second, the real work on healthcare can now begin. Eisenhower Republicans, i.e., those representing business, will see this as an opportunity to begin cutting healthcare costs in a real way. These rising costs are the greatest threat to families (in terms of being the primary cause of personal bankruptcy) and to businesses, from GM (whose greatest liability upon filing bankruptcy was future medical exposure through its pension plans) to the corner store. American businesses, and individuals, need to bring the U.S. healthcare cost juggernaut to a halt, and then reverse it.

We suffer 200% plus pricing for our healthcare because of how this non-business model works, with too many incentives for overspending, and too few for good outcomes. We need to reverse the situation, bringing the doctor and patient back into a business relationship, and reducing defensive treatments caused by the fear of litigation. This is a real opportunity for pro-business and pro- individual interests to work together to really improve the country. Will it happen, or will the Party of No back off again, just when it has a chance to achieve its own stated goals of cost reduction?

What matters more, party politics, or cutting healthcare costs? If it is the latter, now is the perfect time. The GOP will have to throw some of the insurers under the train, but in doing so they will make ALL U.S. businesses more competitive, at home and internationally.

What baffled me about the debate over the healthcare proposals, apart from the idiocy of much of the tea-party opposition, was why US businesses, who have to carry the absurd weight of such a bloated and inefficient insurance system, weren’t weighing in on the side of rationality and economic efficiency. Maybe they will now begin to act in their own best interests.

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Hooray! The Digger has finally unveiled his cunning plan.

The Times and Sunday Times newspapers will start charging to access their websites in June, owner News International (NI) has announced.

Users will pay £1 for a day’s access and £2 for a week’s subscription.

The move opens a new front in the battle for readership and will be watched closely by the industry.

NI chief executive Rebekah Brooks said it was “a crucial step towards making the business of news an economically exciting proposition”.

This is the kind of large-scale controlled experiment that we’ve needed for ages to determine whether there is, in fact, a real market for online news — in the sense of a market in which readers will pay real money for access. Whether the Digger’s experiment succeeds or fails we will all have learned something useful.

Timothy Garton Ash has a thoughtful column about the wider background to the Google-China spat. And he comes to a gloomy — but I think accurate — conclusion.

In thinking about the way information is supplied to us, we have, it seems to me, four possible approaches: (1) the state I live in decides what I can and cannot see, and that’s OK; (2) the big companies I rely on (Google, Yahoo, Baidu, Microsoft, Apple, China Mobile) select what I see, and that’s OK; (3) I want to be free to see anything I like. Uncensored news from everywhere, all of world literature, manifestos of every party and movement, jihadist propaganda, bomb-making instructions, intimate details of other people’s private lives, child pornography – all should be freely available. Then it’s up to me to decide what I’ll look at (the radical libertarian option); (4) everyone should be free to see everything, except for that limited set of things which clear, explicit global rules specify should not be available. The job of states, companies and netizens is then to enforce those international norms.

At the moment, we have a combination of (1) and (2). Developments in technology will give us more of (3), whether we like it or not. (4) currently looks like a pipe dream. Nonetheless, it is to (4) that we should aspire. It’s in the infosphere that the world is coming closest, fastest, to a global village, so it’s the infosphere that most urgently needs a global debate about the village rules. If we don’t have that debate, and have it soon, then what you get to see on your screen will be the result of a power struggle between the old-fashioned power of the state in which you happen to be, the new-style power of the giant information companies, the insurgent force of novel information technologies, and the ingenuity of individual netizens. That’s a likely outcome, but not the best.

LATER: Clay Shirky has interesting things to say about this in the current Guardian media podcast.