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| Authored by: sproggit on Sunday, May 13 2012 @ 01:57 AM EDT |
In July last year, the US Government's Immigration & Customs Enforcement
Agency (ICE) decided that it has jurisdiction over any internet domain with a
TLD (Top Level Domain Name) of .com or .net, as reported here. As a result of that unilateral (domestic US) decision,
the oversight of ICE became global and had the power to over-rule any nation on
earth.
After 9/11, the US Government was able to enact a broad range
of policies underpinned by the 'war on terror'. One of the things that the US
Government achieved was unfettere
d oversight of the SWIFT network. SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank
Financial Telecommunications, is based in Belgium. Yet SWIFT's European base
(and strict data privacy laws) did not stop the US Treasury from gaining that
access. This might seem harmless, but consider the value of this data as
"commercial intelligence". Whether or not the data is being used in that way, it
would allow the US Government to watch financial transactions between companies
the world over.
In 2007, when Microsoft was facing the very real
possibility that governments across the world might decide to insist upon
software complying with internationally recognised data formats, they embarked
upon a massive campaign to have their "Office Open XML" (OOXML) standard
accepted by ECMA. Many nations voted "No", in part to the more than 3,000
identified defects in the standard. What happened? Why Microsoft engaged the
assistance of the US State Department to "intervene".
The
examples go on and on.
The point is a simple one. As an economic force
(and a military one, for that matter) the US is so powerful that it can leverage
that strength to dictate terms to other nations. The OOXML example is useful
because it shows the lengths to which Corporate America works hand-in-glove with
the US Government to implement policy. If Microsoft can bring about this amount
of influence alone, what would the entire pro-software-patent lobby be able to
achieve? [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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