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Big Tech and Democracy Need To Work Together, Microsoft Executives Say (axios.com)
From a report: It's not often that Big Tech calls for more government action. But two top Microsoft executives -- Brad Smith, president and chief legal officer, and Carol Ann Browne, director of executive communications -- write in a tech trends forecast out today. "2018 will be a year when democratic governments can either work together to safeguard electoral processes or face a future where democracy is more fragile. [T]his needs to include work to protect campaigns from hacking, address social media issues, ensure the integrity of voting results, and protect vital census processes," they wrote.
Big tech is well established and politically connected now and so naturally they want more regulation that donâ(TM)t add much aggregate cost to them but make it impossible or at best improbable for a âoekid in a garageâ to start something that replaces them.
I wouldn't want Microsoft, or any other software giant for that matter, near my government. As if legalized corruption in form of lobbying wouldn't be enough...
Because that worked out so well THERE....
Seriously though, Big Tech should be as far away from Democracy as possible, but the voting masses also need to take it upon themselves to learn about the benefits and pitfalls of technology sufficiently to make an educated vote on whether they want/need more or less tech in their voting process. There are benefits and pitfalls to each option and they both require massive amounts of manpower to verify that the chain of trust for the vote talling hasn't been breached.
... and do everything by hand, Microsoft says? What else could they say?
After more than 20 years of acting like Microsoft is the sole source of evil in the world the echo chamber finally relents and embraces Microsoft to run the government as long as it looks like they are anti-Trump.
Incorrect sir! The ladder is rigged with razor wire which makes it impossible to climb.
Just bend right over, America.
Big Tech cares about one thing.
Take your threats elsewhere "big tech". The government (we the people) do not need to work with you for democracy. The government (we the people) will set the terms and if you don't like it then you can do business in another country.
"Democratic governments need to spend their time and resources cracking open the door in closed markets for us to make more money and not pay taxes on."
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Only paper ballots can facilitate that. So, if "Big Tech" can make a better crayon, go for it!
As for majority rule hitting the brick wall due to an ignorant and antipathic majority, well, that's something that needs fixing pronto. We still haven't reached the bottom of that trench yet.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
safeguarding our elections.
That makes me feel soooooooo confident.
This information is public, but is spread out amongst the feds, states, and municipalities. Get it all in one place. Right now it's just the major political parties that have it all in one place.
I wouldn't want Microsoft, or any other software giant for that matter, near my government.
A) They already are involved in the government (or were you under the delusion that governments still run using typewriters and mimeographs?), and B) they could hardly make it worse. Democracies require everyone to be involved to work and that includes big tech companies whether or not you like it.
Crony capitalism or fascism take your pick.
safeguarding our elections. That makes me feel soooooooo confident.
And who exactly would you prefer be involved? The folks in Florida who gave us hanging chad? Honestly I trust those companies as much or more than I do companies like Diebold.
I understand the hesitation against needless tech influence in elections but we can do without the knee jerk reactions.
In the past I felt that I owned my OS and my programs. Nowadays, it feels like renting a patch from a feudal lord.
I could install the OS on my computer, then on another one. Not anymore, at least not all of them.
Democracy appeared in the Ancient Greece where people owned land of their farms. And only owners could participate in the democracy. So if Big Tech really wants a democracy let them make us owners again.
No, this is not Big tech and government working together but big tech should lord over and control government.
Screw Microsoft, Telsa, Amazon and all the other companies who believe that they are the reason to exist and that they should control over lives.
Trump has proven that we can have both at once.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
How much credit should "Big Tech" get for Arab Spring, Brexit, Trump? How about the protests going on in Iran right now? Could similar political waves happen in China or North Korea?
Those who want to control what can go on in social media need to be very careful what they wish for; fake news and government propaganda are the same thing.
The flagrant privacy abuses and monopolistic behavior of the industry are earning them the wrath of legislators, and they are starting to panic that the government is going to step in to tell them what to do.
The version of democracy where tech giants censors voices that do not fit in what their view of the universe should be??
Every election the American People are forced to choose between the lesser of two evils. 300 million Americans seem to enjoy electing cow shit to battle against horse shit in one hell of a crappy race to the bottom.
Worrying about social media election issues is like arguing over what color to paint a nuclear warhead.
The only thing the big tech companies want is an Oligarchy controlled by them.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
>> safeguard electoral processes or face a future where democracy is more fragile
Look around. Nearly all so-called "democratic" governments are already working towards replacing democracy with dictatorship. Doing nothing in this case just speeds up their actual agenda.
It is called lobying. Do they want to cut out the other middleman, the lobyists?
Normally the public should be the middleman. Fun times for the few years they pretended that that actually worked.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
ae911truth dot org
ensure big companies aren't escaping their taxes so that the govt doesn't have to tax small companies or citizens making them angry
What we need is to limit the amount of money that any one entity can spend on political causes and require that 100% of funds for Political Action Committees are from donations. This would drastically reduce the amount of political corruption in this country.
That said, websites that are not dedicated to carrying news need to stop carrying news and those that do need to be held accountable for it's accuracy or lack thereof.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
#MAGA
Go to paper ballots and receipts. Simple.
Like when a town of 3k people has 4.5k votes cast in it. That's about the number in one county that Roy Moore lost in Alabama. That's third world level brazenness in terms of voter fraud in a country that prides itself on the "rule of law." Someone please provide a logical reason why state and federal law enforcement have never gone into places like this and announced that the entire election officiating organization is under criminal investigation. You can't because the reason is really simple: politics.
If you want to "safeguard democracy," I have a really simple suggestion: make any sort of organized voter fraud like this covered under the charge of "attempted overthrow of the United States Government." That's what it is: an attempted bloodless coup against the elected government through voter fraud.
Yes, tech needs to be more open, more transparent, and more democratic.
I want to see all the source code for windows.
I want to disable all telemetry.
I want to have control over what I purchase.
I want to see the source code for voting machines.
I want to have copyright actually expire,and not be perpetual.
What? I can't get that?
What? You mant ME to give up my PRIVACY to an algorithm I can't see, audit, and have no input on?
Sounds like "taxation" without any representation. Nothing bad ever happend when that occured.
Is for Good men to sit still and do nothing.
I don't personally believe we can either save or exert sufficient political force to change our modern major societies, at least from within.
But there is an alternative: All of us intellectualists complaining about the lack of democracy and how things are only going to get worse, we need to stop sucking off the teat of corporate Europe, America, Russia, China, India, and Brazil (or their smaller brethren), take what finances we have and invest them in the materials necessary to build our own infrastructure somewhere the common man finds inhospitable. Whether that is the arctic or antarctic, on a little piece of no mans land between egypt and south sudan, or out at sea weathering what nature throws at us. Brain drain civilized society, progress at a rate they can't compete with, prove that democracy can rule just when there isn't an aristocratic class of big money manipulating you from behind the scenes. And most of all, prove how every day you must be learning something new if you want to remain mentally ductile enough to notice when others are manipulating you.
We have the technology, we have the money, all we need is the collective manpower and force of will to make it happen. Within 5 years we could have a society capable of building whatever we needed, and in less than 20 we could have one capable of putting a person anywhere in the solar system we wanted them, at a budget and timeframe that would put current efforts to shame.
But this only happens if enough of us intelligent people start saying 'I have had enough!' and start doing what is necessary to make one or more of these societies a reality.
I can't do it alone, you can't do it alone, but together, enough of us pooling our resources, we can create the world of tomorrow today, instead of waiting for the intellectually rigid masses to begin following the currents of change. Or in a worse case, go against the currents of change and send us back into a darks ages like had happened not a millenia ago.
Shouldn't need to legislate to get corporations to do "the right thing."
There's an effort to flood countries with poor immigrants to manipulate the voting population. It's also a good source of cheap labor and pliable consumers. Somehow, I don't think Microsoft is going to do anything about that.
Thats amazing!
11. Tax Evation
We're going to stop evade taxes and pay the tax where it is due, and in the countries where we make the money, like all decent companies do.
I guess this entry was scratched in the final revision. :-/
I think we'd be best off if tech companies stay out of that process altogether. They are like teenagers impressed with a birthday party magician/clown (probably because they are all inder 30) and that is definitely NOT what our institutions need at the moment. Let the grownups handle things, please. Microsoft etc. can suck my fat one, I will vote accordingly, and I vote for EVERYTHING.
No thanks. We can't be waiting for the fifth iteration, a decade down the line, for them to finally produce a relatively bug free implementation.
Seriously, "Microsoft voting machine" is the kind of thing that might have me waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat screaming for it all to stop.
Unless "Big Tech" (fuck whomever invented the "Big" franchise) and Democracy actually give a damn what Micro$oft overlords have to say. Then, whatever their claims are, just assume it's all bull shit and marketing.
That would be nice along with a new law that gives consumers privacy protections that are third party verified!
Big Tech needs to be working FOR democracy, and there really is only one way to do it. If the big tech companies want to safe guard the election process, its simple, create the platform and voting machines (with a paper record) and then make the entire thing open source. Democracy is not just about the vote but the ownership of the process of voting, and that is for the people. Anything else is just making statements for PR's sake or free advertising. The annoying part is that they are getting so bold as to even say things like this. Any competent person should know that the only responsibility that corporate execs take seriously is their fiduciary one to the company, they are pretty much required to continually make the valuation of the company continue to grow year after year. So how are they going to help the people and protect democracy if their real goal is to improve profits?