Against The Amendment Added to Ohio House Bill 110 And Other Political Rants

By Jordan Hardee

June 10th, 2021

The future of any free society in the computer age relies heavily on the decentralization of power, strong cryptography, and civil liberties protections that go beyond mere negative rights to prevent the social evils of mass surveillance and data capitalism. We have cryptography for now, but the enemies of the internet are relentless. What have they done now? On June 9th the Ohio Senate approved House Bill 110 which contains an anti-municipal broadband amendment. It must be stopped. We can still strip the amendment from the final budget, and if we care about our rights as Ohioans we absolutely must pressure legislatures to do so.

These aging Republican politicians, who in Ohio have sought to impose this total ban on municipal broadband, do not understand even the most fundamental basics of how a computer network works. They cannot even grasp the social issues or implications at hand, let alone propose adequate solutions to them– the sole job of any legislator. That legislators often do not even comprehend the basic social issues at play regarding the laws they draft, do not by default seek to write evidence based policy based on what reason and science and experts deem necessary, and are often extremely old and both historically and politically illiterate is a matter for another post. Their motives in writing this amendment to this particular bill are financial and political— and in both make them enemies of the interests of personal liberty, enemies of the interests of a free society in the digital age. The fact that this amendment was introduced anonymously just goes to show that whoever created it knew it would not be popular.

History proves beyond doubt in matters of both politics and economics that the placement of absolute power in the hands of either private corporations or the state produces far more social ills than it solves. The over-centralization of power anywhere is a menace to individual liberty everywhere. The municipality by its very nature is less prone to these issues than either absolute. Municipal broadband gives a choice to citizens as to where they get their internet where often there is none due to a virtual monopoly of private internet service providers. Not even those who proclaim the supremacy of the market can defend a state which doesn’t allow local government to freely and fairly compete with private companies. Some 30 municipal broadband providers in Ohio will be shut down if this bill passes as-is. Such an action helps only giant ISP’s who already enjoy a de facto monopoly in many areas.

Against this dualist paradigm which seems today to dominate modern politics (broadly, of looking with rosy eyes either towards the state or the market), we have seen in the tech world the emergence of a superior design model embodied by free software (and open source) projects that is far superior to the corporate and state models both in terms of innovation and ethics. Organizations like the Free Software Foundation of which I am a proud associate member, fight for a world free of the social evils the domination of one of these tendencies over another tends to produce in the digital sphere of life. The design model behind these projects, such as the one we see with the Linux kernel, is of the same spirit as municipal broadband— inherently democratic, open, and free. It stands utterly opposed both to corporate monopolies and centralized state-capitalism which are both menaces to individual liberty. If free society is to continue to exist I believe the municipality will play a much bigger role in civic life than it does today, and other social thinkers such as Murray Bookchin— founder of Social Ecology, agree.

The political counterpart to this philosophy embodied by the free software design model is quite well embodied by genuinely libertarian socialist thinkers like Bookchin, whose views I broadly share. Those views are quite well represented in the Ohio and US Green Party. And that spirit represents the gleaming, free, and happy future of the human race for which we are fighting. So many young people today are without hope for the future. It breaks my heart. They expect to die of climate change, they expect to live in a dystopian nightmare, they expect the collapse of democracy and social systems which cannot cope with both climate change the onslaught of the information age. It’s not that these things will happen, but that they can. And while they can happen, they don’t have to. We have agency, and we have a responsibility to use it. I’m not just an optimist, I know what humanity is capable of and I’m fighting for it. That’s why I’m in the Green Party. That’s why I’m in the Free Software Foundation. That’s why I speak Esperanto. That’s why I tell people to watch Star Trek, to imagine what could be, and to fight for it. There is consensus among the scientific community that climate change will be bad, but it doesn’t have to be the end of the human race. Look at people like Greta Thunberg and follower her example. Look at everything we have built; what we can become is so much more than we can imagine. That’s why I look with longing through my telescope up at the planets and the stars and think “one day we will go there”. Things often look bleak today in our post-truth era where the most ignorant are often the loudest. But I believe in doing my part to tell truth to power and to never give up. This amendment to House Bill 110 is just one example. “It’s a marathon and not a sprint”, “the journey of a thousand li starts with a single step”, “nor was Rome conquered in a day”.

It’s a standard trope that Republicans trust the market more than the government, and that Democrats trust the government more than the market. But we must candidly ask, in this instance does one really counterbalance the other? In 2019, the US Congress made it legal for ISP’s to sell the private internet history of their “valued customers”. Since Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed the unconstitutional, warrantless mass surveillance programs of the NSA, hardly nothing has been done to remedy the situation whatsoever— and Snowden still sits in exile having been denied a fair trial in the United States. Private companies by force or by policy have been complicit in these crimes against the American people and the people of the world. Are we to trust giant, faceless corporations with our personal data? The EU has taken an albeit flawed step in this direction with the GDPR, such regulations do not exist here. Are we to trust the federal or state government? Snowden’s exile symbolizes quite candidly the issues there. If trust is to be earned, neither has been shown worthy of it. And now this last refuge, this last area where ordinary citizens have power over the technological infrastructure which dominates their own lives— the municipality, is being stripped from them by “small government” Republican stooges. Ohio deserves better. The world deserves better.

If free society is to continue to exist amidst exponential technological growth; decentralization of the immense power of internet service providers is absolutely essential. They already have far too much power. We should not give them more. This measure must not be allowed to pass. I strongly encourage citizens to contact their representatives to oppose it.