Hey everyone, I started this petition. Very glad we made it to 100k, and excited to see how the White House responds.
I'm well aware that the WH may not take any real action though. Please sign up at http://fixthedmca.org if you care about this issue and want to continue helping the move to fix this issue permanently.
Yeah, I hate to be that guy, but the 'petition to end all petitions' comes to mind. Particularly the bits about 'politically safe non-answers' and 'channeling public activism into a cul-de-sac'.
It argues that the reason for petitions to exist is the possibility to open a dialog to the people who are concerned about certain topics (because the petition website gets your email adress), and that in the time of fractioning news consumption it is a useful way to keep communicating, whatever that means.
edit: Ok, why the heck do they call their page Swampland?
Maybe I'm just cynical (okay, I'm probably just cynical), but that looks like a slightly more positive spin on essentially the same idea: a whole lot of 'communicating' and no action.
> edit: Ok, why the heck do they call their page Swampland?
Probably because it's about politics, and according to popular myth, DC was built on a swamp.
Its worth noting that Barack Obama, even before he was President, was very big on encouraging people to reject the "big hero to rescue us" model and take action to make change themselves.
If you recognize that people who want change have been writingindividually to the White House to get it for generations, redirecting some of that mostly-invisible-to-others mechanism of feedback (which, because of the volume, is pretty much guaranteed to generally produce generic responses and little action) to a mechanism where requests and the responses can be highly visible and serve as vehicle for groups to raise interest and propel a conversation that then extends beyond the WH petition forum, it has some value.
If you look at the response from the WH as the end of the process that the petition starts, sure, its not particularly useful. But that's, I think, misunderstanding the point rather badly.
First step to action is communication. Politicians aren't mind readers, they need to communicate with their constituents to understand their wants.
Whether or not a petition is an effective means of communication I'm not qualified to answer, but it seems like a better option than doing nothing at all.
In response to both you and dragonwriter, those are all totally fair points. My thought is this might be a case of poorly-managed expectations.
Specifically, people generally think of petitions as things where, given n signatures, some kind of action is going to be taken (as in 'the right to petition government for redress of grievances'). In that context, it's easy to forget that the most you can 'win' is a response. Hence, 'victory' feels hollow, which can take more energy away from a movement than not having had a petition to rally around in the first place.
Hope that makes sense. I'm not arguing against the system itself, but I think it's overplaying its hand by calling itself a petition system.
There seems to be quite a crowd of you saying the same thing every time the subject of a petition comes up. Perhaps you could club together and have a support group.
Do you have a problem with the comment or the people?
It's just a gentle way to deliver constructive comments that are sensitive. You bring them down softly. There's no need to be especially cruel in delivering negative opinions, and this is a forum. Negative opinions are warranted; so long as they are at least valid, they need not be particularly liked.
I'm not convinced that the negative opinions are valid in this case. The petitions are an imperfect and newly implemented system, but the denunciations of them are sweeping, final, and tend to substitute speculation for fact when it comes to discussing the intent of the system architects. Most of the time, comments like the grandparent are little more than a reiteration of the poster's personal outlook.
Seems like we'd be better off with a system just like the Whitehouse one but designed for petitioning both the President and our representatives at the same time. At the end of the day, the executive branch doesn't make laws. It just signs them at the end of the process.
Fixing the DMCA needs to start in the legislative branch (or be ruled unconstitutional by the judicial).
The petition system should geolocate you, suggest who your representative is and make sure that you sign a petition on a national issue that is delivered to your representative together with only the signatures of other constituents in that representatives district. I reckon the system should also prompt you to forward the petition not only to friends and family with the same representative as yourself, but also friends and family who live in districts that haven't received many signatures yet (i.e. it should help fill in the holes).
Yep, these are all great ideas. Building a platform for doing this is going to be tricky though. If anyone out there wants to help, please email me at sina.khanifar@gmail.com. I'm an amateur ruby/rails dev, and a pretty decent designer, but I definitely need help.
What kind of effect were you expecting? The president promises to do whatever you want as long as you get N "signatures" on a weakly authenticated website? Even if you got those N people to all show up in person at the White House door, wrapping policy around the desires of a vocal minority is not a valid or just way to structure a government.
They promised to respond, which is about all they can promise. And this gives them a reasonable metric for how many voters care about an issue, which is a good thing. And they can probably even infer some demographic data from the results, which is another good thing.
Basically this is a tool to better inform policy decisions, and the evidence is that it's "working". If you were expecting more then I think your hopes were a little unfounded.
> Basically this is a tool to better inform policy decisions
No, it is actually a safety valve. If the public gets a little too agitated about anything they can go sign a petition to let of some steam. This petition site furthers couch-potato politics; it enables people to 'do their bit' without actually moving their ass. It neutralizes those who are naturally prone to apathy already.
Fair enough. Let's just agree to disagree on that. Your explanation is a bit too far on the "been reading a bit too much dystopian pulp" side of the spectrum.
To argue that the practice of policy is cynical and easily corrupted is a truism. To say that the white house deliberately threw up a petition system to actively "neutralize" inconvenient opinions is just ridiculous, sorry. The white house staff are people just like you and I, and they care about many of the same things you do and truly want to do the right thing in the face of many competing interests. Don't turn them into Orwellian villains, it's not helpful.
The less dystopic version of my interpretation is that the site is just a way of keeping people happy, rather than "neutralized". Does that seem so implausible to you?
> The white house staff are people just like you and I
See, that realization is what enables me to believe they would make a petition site just to keep people happy. It is something rather frequently seen in the "real world" from "normal people" (see: suggestion boxes in the breakroom at work), and is exactly the sort of thing I could see myself doing. Hell, I have done it. Have someone that is mad at you? Let them vent for a while until they calm down, then tell them why they are wrong.
This sort of tactic isn't unique bizarre super-villian behavior. It is standard bullshit.
If the intent were completely pure, merely to educate, they wouldn't have people perform a meaningless action before they got their cookie. You don't get that far in politics by being clueless about how to gauge public interest in a topic without resorting to an online tally of interest. That is simply inconceivable.
Yeah, lets just go back to the days of hitting the streets with those paper petitions, and gathering signatures at bus stops and Phish concerts! Why get the internet involved in politics at all?
Because anonymous forums on the internet have proven for a decade sane discourse goes out the window due to the Internet Fuckwad Theorem. It is an entirely different dynamic to be in someones face and have to fear consequences beyond words from your behavior, and honestly, that is what almost any protest in history was for - to try to shake the boots of those who are gifted with power.
An internet petition is just a number and a paragraph that people clicked a thumbs up on. Nobody would ever care unless those people actually started voting differently, and by differently, that means something other than just going across the isle and shaking hands with their neighbor politician in the other camp.
It is the same reason you don't argue with businesses with petition letters, you argue with them with their bottom line. If you are in a state of demanding something, the other party has a power and influence you don't, and you need some pull in the relationship or else you will be walked all over.
After rereading your contribution, I realize you were agreeing. therefore, I had become for a moment the "Internet Fuckwad" you warned me of. Sorry. Dis acknowledge previous post. ... I've been drinking...
>Because anonymous forums on the internet have proven for a decade sane discourse goes out the window due to the Internet Fuckwad Theorem. It is an entirely different dynamic to be in someones face and have to fear consequences beyond words from your behavior
Heh. And here you are, in said forums! Somewhat perfecting the voice of righteous judgement! Bravo, but no. I see what you came to represent here, but if you think trumpeting loudly some bad-ass anti-establishment intellectual philosophy while standing on the tiny issue of "the right to cell-phone-unlocking-regardless-of-lender-contract" as a basis for your purist reasoning, then you sir/ma'am, live in a first world overrun with problems of the same degree! There is wisdom in "choosing your battles," and this, my dear zanny, is not the one. Trust me.
No, his sarcasm came across loud and clear. He was sarcastically "agreeing" with me in order to mock me... except the position he was mocking is not one I have endorsed. On the contrary, I embrace the role of the internet in protest and politics.
Bullshit, the idea that this website is just a plane to place and pacify the public is simply silly. First the issues handled on this site are not the type that will spill out into the streets if ignored people simply will not riot over being unable to legally unlock their phones (this is the definition of a first world problem b.t.w.).
The fact of the matter is their aren't any looming issues facing the US that are likely to result in widespread riots today. But let's assume we are back in the 1950s during the Civil Rights Movement, I can't imagine a non-reply to a "We the People" petition doing anything to quell the Civil Rights Movement. Frankly, I suspect it would just further fan the flames.
The only way I could see this working as a "safety value" is if people confuse signing an online petition with actually voting. Something I find unlikely. Now if the government uses the site inform their opinions of the populace and shape their actions this could influence policy but only if it has been shown that if you oppose a petition than you will get voted out next election. The elderly are great at doing this which is why no one touches Social Security and Medicare. A lot of people think the Internet is a representative sample of the general population, and if something is massively popular online than the fact the the government isn't doing is means that they are usurping the will of the people.
Now come on, the reason they raised the bar from 25,000 to 100,000 is to keep up with the site's increasing popularity. They could have set the bar to 100,000 at the site's launch instead of 5,000, but no petitions would have reached the threshold.
As for petitions actually having results, I imagine they are the weakest form of lobbying possible. The executive branch sees them and that is all.
Instead of setting a hard number (that requires adjustments) they should change it to responding to the top X petitions with the most signatures each month.
I disagree. Setting a hard number gives a threshold for people to fight for, and allows for a variable number of issues to make it to the top each month. It gives people a number to push for.
Are they new? We've had them in the UK starting from about 7 or 8 years ago, unsure if we still do.
All that ever happened when one reached the 'must get a response' threshold was some staffer would write a couple of quick sentences about how they weren't going to do whatever the thing was, and how you were wrong for wanting it.
Actually in the UK anything getting 100k signatures is considered for debate in the House of Commons. You can see a list of debates that began in this manner (warning, pdf) here:
"but it doesn't seem like any of them have had an effect."
100,000 out of 300,000,000 people. What effect do you imagine it should have?
If you really want to give these petitions some weight, they should raise the threshold to 150,000,000. And there should be some way of letting people without computers sign it too. Maybe we could have places where people come to sign the petition. But that sounds like a big undertaking. Maybe we could gather several petitions and let people sign the ones they like, every say 4 years.. maybe with a smaller event in-between. And the results should be counted, and then the government forced to do what is decided.
Hmmm... If only there was something like that. That would be awesome.
You're thinking of referendums. A petition is a small number of people pissed about something that not everyone may be interested in. I'm sure my grandparents have never heard of Aaron Swartz and don't know what "jailbreaking" means, so it makes no sense to make them take a decision.
We have elections. Demanding that a petition from 100,000 people override the results of an election is ridiculous. The administration is responding to the petitions with their position -- I think that's about all they have the right to expect.
Hell, 40,000 people are demonstrating on the National Mall about climate change/Keystone XL, getting arrested, and the Obama administration doesn't give a damn. Why the hell would anyone think 100,000 "signatures" on an online petition site would make a difference?
Obviously there's other political considerations going on besides demonstration size. The March for Life draws ~300,000 people every year, but I doubt the Obama administration changes its position on abortion anytime soon.
Well, they've done a good job at ignoring the subject matter even for those petitions which elicited a response. No reason to suggest they'll do anything different this time...
We need to stop calling these "Petition to <thing>". These are not petitions for things to happen. This is not a petition to make phone unlocking legal again, it's a petition for the Whitehouse to write a response.
Furthermore, these petitions aren't going to be seen by lawmakers, as someone in the below comment says. Strictly speaking, the President is part of the executive branch, not the legislative branch, so in any event, no "lawmaker" will be seeing these petitions at all.
Well, for this specific issue, it was an executive branch decision that allowed, and now doesn't allow unlocking. Laws are often just "hey, executive, do this", and the executive figures it out (see also: EPA, FTC and lots more).
I sure hope so, but I just wanted to be clear that it's not part of the workflow for one of these things to pass in front of any elected member of congress.
I have this fear that people will think signing these petitions is "enough" (or "anything" really) and won't do more to push their particular issue. This literally does nothing but solicit a response from the White House, and 99% of the time (likely 100% but I don't know that for sure), the response could have been written by anyone familiar with the White House's already-public stance on the issue.
I am glad this thing is happening. Unlike most other petitions that require changing law through Congress, this rests on a single individual. DMCA exemption can be made, and in case of phone unlocking have been made, by the Librarian at Library of Congress. He is appointed by the President and works at the behest of the Congress. The decision to allow the exemption to DMCA is completely up to him, and could be potentially influenced by such a petition.
It's funny how you have to petition to have lawmakers pay attention to an issue, when by definition, those people are there to represent the interest of the majority in the first place.
That's why I think financing campaigns should only be done by individuals and with a cap of $100 each to "equalize" the money vote, just like you equalize the regular vote, by giving a person the same vote everyone gets. But the way the system works now, the "money vote" seems to be much more powerful than the real vote, and because certain individuals or corporations can put as much money as they want on that vote, that ends up skewing the election and the way the politician will fight for certain bills, greatly.
So put a cap on how much you can donate, and ban corporations from donating. Only individuals should be able to donate. I don't care that they think they need $100 million to get elected, and with this they'd only get $10 million. The point is their competitors will only get by with that much, too, but in a much fairer system, where the voices of many more people have to be listened to, instead of just the voices of a few.
This is not realistic now, nor will it likely ever be. By hook or by crook, money will always find its way into politics, so long as there's a high ROI (and oh boy is it high).
The only real hedge against this is a return to a constitutional government that doesn't have the power to grant special favors. That opportunity has long since passed.
I think the logic behind corporate financing/lobbying is that if you allow individuals to contribute money separately, there is no reason why organized groups should not band together, analyze the election, choose a candidate and pay $100 for every one of their members to that candidate's campaign. This organized machine is going to always trump a bunch of individuals haphazardly contributing money.
You have two situations when it comes to organizations:
The first, is typically called 'bundling'. An organization, say PETA, organizes a donation drive and encourages its members to make their personal contributions to campaigns PETA has researched and through such bundling the donations have a clear statement of why they were made and what policies are important to those donors.
The second, is an organization donating its money politically, effectively increasing the net donation impact of its members. (as they can donate to the organization and still donate individually)
The argument against the second situation still allows for the first. But conflating the first and second is begging the primary question of whether organizations themselves, in their limited-rights-having-but-clear-non-person status, ought to have their own right to political speech.
Because we can deny organizations the right to contribute directly without denying them the right to bundle. And such a situation would actually massively multiply the power of organization itself: as engaging an increasing number of voters becomes more important than being able to convince a small number of wealthy backers to contribute increasing sums of money.
Organizations should not be able to donate to campaigns or political action committees. Unions, superpacs, all of it.
If an organization wants to petition its members to donate to a campaign or political action committee, go for it. But it cannot coerce, it cannot apply punitive measures to members that do not donate, and it cannot be a religious institution that receives tax-exempt status.
Why does it matter here if the tax-exempt organization is religious or not? Pretty much every tax-exempt organization is going to have an agenda---if it didn't, it probably wouldn't exist. Why are religion-based agendas less tolerable here?
Religious organizations have the bonus of being able to coerce not only through threat of firing and social ostracization, but also through the threat of eternal damnation.
Tax-exempt religious organizations such as churches can (but often don't) have their tax-exempt status revoked for urging their congregation to vote for specific political candidates already.
The real problem is there aren't enough congress people. If we multiplied the number of house and senate seats by 10, in order to bring the ratio of citizens to representatives back to the original levels, then it would solve 95% of the problems even without comprehensive finance reform.
The real problem is that there are too many congress people. We have 535 congress members trying to come to an agreement on important things like actually developing a working budget. Can you imagine over 5,000 people voicing opinions on what a budget ought to look like?
Then maybe we should consider the possibility that it doesn't make any sense to have a country this large.
Why should people living in Florida have any say whatsoever into the affairs of people living five thousand miles away in Alaska? Why vice-versa? How does that make any more sense than people in London having a say in the lives of people three thousand miles away in Boston?
Nevertheless, people in Florida are able to exert control over people in Alaska, and vice versa. That seems incredibly absurd to me, what do they share beyond a common language and currency? Even the distance between Portugal and Finland is only half of that, and the EU is rather different than the US Federal Government.
If we all needed to band together to increase our military might in order to keep razing hoards of Canadians at bay, then I may see the need for it, and clearly the importance of common travel and trade agreements cannot be overstated, but right now our system enables politicians elected in flyover country to tell people living in Portland what they may or may not do in the privacy of their own home. The opposite is equally unfair. Where is the value in that?
These are different communities, different regions, different societies being forced to play politics with each other. If we need to start sacrificing the quality of the democracy (reducing representation per individual) in order to keep a system so absurd running smoothly, then it should be downsized.
Chop it all in half, or more, until the size of it resembles a more reasonably sized country. Two to four federal governments instead of one would make more sense. Representation per individual could increase back to previous levels without resulting in deadlock.
Lest I come off the wrong way, my problem is not that the Federal government is strong, but rather that the Federal government covers a regions and people too diverse. I'm not a "state's rights" nut, just a Cascadia nut.
I'm more inclined to believe that the Federal government needs to turn over more control to the individual states, and that congress is reaching too far over their boundaries.
Don't get me wrong, there are several things I think the government needs to do including managing the economy, maintaining military/ law enforcement just to name a few.
But then you have a congressional hearing about steroid use in baseball. We have government tell us what we can and can't do with our own property (cell phone unlocking, etc). And I think, is that what we pay these guys for? They can't even balance a budget because their scope is way too broad.
I agree that government needs to be downsized, just maybe in a different way.
I've actually thought for some time this is an area the tech community could make a positive impact addressing the inefficiency of a small focused interest prevailing against a much larger, but unfocused public interest.
Thinking more like if 100M people contributed $1 to fund politicians that protect the public interest.
I've been tossing around an idea of setting up a small PAC dedicated to tech issues. It would rate legislators on their stances on issues like net neutrality, patent reform, etc. Additionally, it would have a campaign fund, and each election cycle it would target the most egregiously bad legislators with that campaign fund.
I've written some of the code -- but since that time I've learned a lot more so I will probably scrap what I have to rebuild.
Nowadays you don't want a PAC. You'd probably want to set up multiple organizations including perhaps a 501(c)(4) and definitely a Super PAC expenditure-only committee, which is far more useful than a traditional PAC because it can conduct unlimited independent spending in favor of your preferred candidate (or against your non-preferred candidate).
Traditional PACs, by contrast, can only give $5,000 to a candidate -- they're more useful if you're a company trying to lobby a congresscritter. Their scheduler is going to check to make sure you've given before deciding whether to set up the meeting with the boss, etc. Not as useful if you're an advocacy group trying to influence elections.
How are you going to find 100M people who agree on what is in the public interest?
well how about phone unlocking? I struggle to see the case for having locked phones.
My first cut would be an appeal like 'the phone companies are trying to steal money out of your pocket. It's un-American. You should be free to do what you want with you phone.'
> the case for locked phones is that you can get a $600 phone for $200.
Paying $200 instead of $600 is covered by the two year contract you sign with a carrier to get a subsidized phone, during which you pay them back the cost of that subsidization. If you leave early, an early-termination fee ensures that the subsidization is paid for.
At the end of your two year contract, you've paid back the full cost of the phone, and you should be able to treat it as Yours in every sense of the word -- even if that means unlocking it and taking it to another service provider.
Yes, and that is _NOT_ illegal. You're quite free to unlock your phone after the contract runs out, or if you pay your carrier the fees to unlock it, in the case above that would probably be the $400 dollar difference between your price and the unlocked price.
I'm not sure I see the issue here - if you want the unlocked phone, then buy it and pay for a SIM only type contract, or do such things not exist in the US?
Stop this argument! Regardless of whether you lock or unlock your phone, you're still in a contract with the phone company. The $400 subsidy in this argument was for the value of that contract, which doesn't disappear when you unlock.
That's what the contract is for. You're either paying for the 2 years of service, or the early termination fee will cover the remaining $(400 - amount paid).
Locking the phone doesn't affect the subsidy payback one way or the other.
Imagine a government-run website where you could pledge money to running candidates, up to a cap of $100 bucks. Or better yet, the government supplies the $100 per citizen, and the citizen decides which campaign it goes towards. No other fundraising is allowed by candidates, and the only way to get onto the ballot is through signatures (also doable from the government-run website, each citizen is granted the ability to endorse n candidates).
I heartily support the freedom to unlock one's own phone and so forth, but I'd bet $5 that the majority of people haven't thought about it that much and think carrier lockin is an acceptable price to pay for 'cheap' phones. Just because everyone you know agrees with you doesn't mean you form a majority; it just means you're part of a clique.
Probably since overriding a veto is a lot harder than getting one more Senator to vote for the bill, which means the President has more say in what makes it into law than any individual legislator.
Since at least 1970, when the Controlled Substances Act gave the executive branch of government the power to declare drugs illegal without involving Congress.
Inability to exercise abstract thinking is a big part of what got us into this mess. It's all well and good when an executive power grab results in an outcome that you agree with, after all.
Someone used a petition to the White House/President as an excuse to lament about needing to use the petition process to appeal to 'law-makers,' presumably referring to Congress. I pointed out that we're talking about the President here, who is not a law-maker.
Referencing a specific ability the President has which might qualify him as a 'law-maker' is at best a factoid in this conversation, especially because it doesn't even apply to the petition that we are discussing. The President's ability to classify drugs has little to do with banning/allowing phone unlocking (and one would be hard-pressed to apply a general label of 'law-maker' to the President based on a single power, which might better reside with Congress).
Also, where do I show a lack of abstract thinking? Where do I say that I agree with the President having such power? Are you assuming my response of, "Cool, but that's not what we are discussing here" is akin to, "I don't want to discuss this because I agree with it?" That would be a pretty huge leap to conclusions (if that's what you're reading into).
TL;DR - The President does not fit the generic term "law-maker," except for (maybe) very specific instance(s), none (that I know) of which apply to this situation.
The President is not the head of the party (Debbie Wasserman Schultz is to the extent that the position exists), nor is he in charge of whipping people (for the Democrats that's Steny Hoyer right now).
He admittedly does have a huge bully pulpit. A defined legislative role. And he does personally lean on representatives. But the US has absolutely nothing equivalent to the organization and party discipline that countries. And "President" is an individually elected position by the country, and has no particular relation to his party other than "(very prominent) member".
The chair of the DNC is not (even a little bit) the leader of the party, and the Whip is not the person who determines what policy people are to be whipped to.
A sitting President is always the head of their party.
My understanding of US political parties says that they do not have a rigid structure nor a single head. Indeed if you look through the section on the structure of the Democratic Party on Wikipedia (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_(United_States... - really, go look) you won't find Barack Obama's name anywhere in that section.
The President has a huge bully pulpit. He is in charge of one of the 3 branches of government. The public hears and sees the President.
The president is a member of the executive branch, not the legislative branch. He signs bills into law in his authority as an executive who will be responsible for carrying out the laws that the legislators write, not as a legislator responsible for creating those laws.
You absolutely cannot say that he is "lawmaker number 1", because he's not even a lawmaker. The fact that most presidents happen to have served as legislators (senators) previously is irrelevant; that was their job then, and this is their job now.
He is not the head of his party. Nor is he the one who dictates how they will (or should) be whipped - the President isn't even supposed to have any say in the process of whipping votes - that falls on Reid, Pelosi, etc. (who actually have the resources to whip legislators, since they can make promises of campaign money, etc.)
We live in an era where the power of the executive has been illegally expanded well beyond what it was originally intended to be - we can thank Bush and Obama for the bulk of that (at least most recently). But that does not actually change the role that the president has (or should have) in legislative matters.
You might be interested in the phrase "realpolitik". The phrase comes from Germany in the mid-1800s. "Realpolitik" refers to politics as they actually occur, as opposed to the idealized interpretation you were taught in middle school, for example.
America has never in its history operated according to the ideal. It's just easier to become informed in America in 2013 than it was 150 years ago, so the discrepancies between the ideal and the realpolitik are more obvious.
I guess this boils down to whether you find manipulating the realpolitik to be more or less effective than trying to eliminate it.
The President may be nominal head of the party, but whips take direction, insofar as they take it at all, from the caucus leadership in the house of Congress in which they sit, not from the general leadership of the party. The US doesn't have a strong unitary party system of the kind you might find in a typical Westminster system (of course, in a Westminster system, the head of government would also be the leader of the party sitting in the primary house of the legislature, not a separately-elected official outside of that house.)
No, I think it actually makes sense. How are lawmakers supposed to know every single one of their voter's issues? Plus this particular issue (unlocking phones) might be a particularly important one for you, but secondary for a vast majority of people (myself NOT included). So I find the system of petitions sensible in that respect.
This is something that I like in Brazillian laws, in Brazil carriers are supposed to always provide "portability", this mean that you can keep your phone numbers when you change your carrier.
The "portability" laws, also say that the carriers themselves have to unlock your phones if you want to change carrier.
This ensures that a carrier cannot make you locked to them by using phone lock or number lock. It is highly interesting. Maybe facilitated by the fact that all carriers here use GSM (people think that CDMA is shit, and like the fact that GSM chips are harder to clone than CDMA phones).
In the US, we also get to port our numbers to new carriers. It's been this way for a while.
Do Brazilian carriers offer contract-subsidized phones? Many carriers here will unlock your phone once your contract is complete. See AT&T's unlock details at [1]
Yes, a lot actually, in fact carriers here are infamous for offering phones even for free depending on the contract, resulting into one carrier once making a ad, saying that their bonuses for long term costumers were cash, because "paying" with phones was silly.
But the law says that if the costumer want to end his contract, then he will pay his fines or whatever, but the carrier must unlock the phone.
Also you see "unlocking stores" frequently on metro stations for example, it is perfectly legal, and encouraged by the government, to incentive some free market between carriers (here we have 4 big GSM carriers, some people even own prepaid GSM chips of all of them).
In Greece, all carriers offer subsidies for most phones (some are even free with a plan), and every single phone is unlocked. It makes no sense for them to sell locked phones, since you can't get out of paying your dues for the duration of the contract anyway.
The lock-in is in the contract, not the phone, so locking the phone as well is unnecessary.
In Australia we have number portability and while we have contract subsidized phones they are legally required to be free and simple to unlock. For an iPhone, for example, you just run the reset in iTunes and the phone's unlocked.
> Would be great to have this: collect 1,000,000 votes for petition and it goes to Senate for mandatory voting.
Heck, we don't even have a "collect singatures of a majority of Senators and it goes to the Senate for mandatory voting" rule, so its not surprising that we don't have a "collect signatures of less than 1% of eligible voters and it goes to the Senate for mandatory voting" rule.
What exactly do these petitioners expect? A) there are far more important things to do, IMHO, then spending time wrestling telco companies over this, and B) the White House has to do zilch but respond.
I love petitions, but people getting angry over e.g. repeatedly not legalizing marijuana after 0.03% of americans signed something I find confusing and frustrating.
It's almost as if people are easier to ignore if they solely protest through these petitions....
It appeases the throngs of slacktivists that run amok on the Internet, primarily.
As has been stated elsewhere, the only real effect this can have is if it gains media traction. Which, given than there are celebrities and murders to report on, is always very unlikely in the US.
If 100,000 people wrote personalized letters to their congressmen and women, it would likely have a much more substantial affect. The problem is that people prefer a "fix my problem" button.
I wonder what it would take for the EFF to have, in addition to their "Email/Fax my senators now ..." button, a "Create a printable PDF" (or similar) link which would let me print out the letter, and mail it myself? The biggest thing keeping me from writing actual letters is the writing -- if I had a letter that I could just print, I'd be much more likely to find an envelope and stamp and put them to use.
If there were a convenient way to automatically print the letter as well as an envelope that had the mailing information already on it, that would overcome even more friction.
They should go a step further - mail a physical letter for you with your printed signature on it (some HTML5 app that lets you draw your signature with the mouse). Charge you $1 via Stripe or some other mechanism to recover postage/labor.
This was a recent change by made by the copyright office, to revoke "phone unlocking" as an exception to the DMCA. The copyright office is under the President, IIRC, so the White House has the ability to directly affect this.
The other route is to just codify the exception into law, but pushing a law through about this takes time.
Either you are being naive or you are puroposefully misunderstanding or simplifying the issue.
1. It doesn't matter if there are "more important things to do". If it did, Silicon Valley wouldn't exist, and poverty wouldn't exist.
2. If the Whitehouse invents a petition system to allow people to show what is important to them, people expect the Whitehouse to react and do something about those things.
I tend to agree. Think about the difference between signing a petition and doing what effective grass roots organizations (the NRA is a good example) do. They flood the offices of the legislature with phone calls, letters and emails. Although the numbers may be equal, the impact is much greater because it takes a lot more passion to pick up the phone than to sign a petition. It's the difference between stumbleupon traffic and google traffic.
What about a petition to prevent lawmakers from creating legislation that turns regular people into criminals.
One simple legislation to rule them all. The GOML (Get off my lawn) law.
People have it in their heads that a successful petition is supposed to mean there will be change but that was never promised.
I've always felt petitions were used by lawmakers to help filter noise. If you set a threshold for the amount of support any cause needs before you'll address it (preventing you from having to listen to each person individually) the petition system seems only logical. If the lawmakers now see that 100,000+ people are against their decisions they promised to make a response but have no obligation to change anything.
This is where people's voting power is supposed to matter. If the representatives are always ignoring the issues that are deemed important by petition/protest groups then why should the be expected to get re-election?
Its sort of a shit deal where we're hoping the channels they provide will show some benefit or marshal of change but I haven't seen that happen yet. I'm not American so I'm somewhat distanced from everything but it has always seemed like these petitions were just another campaign tool and never intended to be taken seriously by gov't.
I have absolutely no idea how you any cause would get even 10% of Americans to actually get up off their couches and away from the tv long enough to make their voice heard on anything.
I mean, the closest thing is recent history, the Occupy movement, was still only a few tens of thousands at most.
If only there was a website where voters could see how every politician voted on every vote they've ever made when in power. It would cut right through any BS.
Not as much as you'd like. Thanks to massive omnibus bills, converting Yes and No votes into meaningful stands on issues is far harder than you'd like. A no vote on a bill putatively establishing $YOUR_FAVORITE_CAUSE as the law of the land may have been because a rider encouraging $YOUR_WORST_CAUSE was attached and the whole was not judged worthwhile, even before we consider mere politics themselves.
This petition asks the President to interfere with the implementation of law, and to politicize the decisions of the Librarian of Congress, a non-partisan post.
While the President may use his office to champion new laws, he cannot make them himself, or overturn them.
In th US, carriers discount the hardware and make it up in the contract. If you pay fully for your hardware, the carriers still charge you the same monthly amount and just make a lot more profit off of you.
We may have voted, but "own my hardware and just pay for service" wasn't on the ballot.
"people have already voted with their money on what they value more"
1. We do not vote with money in America. Poor people get as much of a vote as rich people in this country.
2. By making jailbreaking illegal, the government is giving carriers a special legal status that makes it harder for anyone else to compete. If you want a market-based solution to life's problems, you cannot have the government swoop in and give special privilege to certain players.
Your point number 1 is a little naive. Money and interest groups drive policy. While the poor may have just as much vote in an election, the power to change policy generally is focused on the interest groups that most support that politician. So while people may not "vote with money" policy is very much money driven.
Sure, that is how it works in practice, but nothing in the constitution of this country says, "Money buys laws!" We are generally unhappy with the idea that wealthy corporations have hijacked our legal system, because most Americans believe their vote matters just as much as every other person's vote (or at least every other person in their district).
Dollar voting is not about buying literal votes. "Voting with your money" means you spend your money on the "best" choice and are essentially endorsing what you pay for.
I'd disagree with the notion as applied here, though, because buying an unlocked phone is rigged to be a bad choice because so few carriers offer cheaper service prices for unsubsidized handsets.
Many stores carry unlocked phones, but the locking of phones and the discount are specifically linked. You can buy an unlocked, unsubsidized phone from any carrier, but if you buy it on contract, it will likely be locked.
Not entirely sure this applies across ALL carriers, but it does apply to ATT/Sprint/TMO I believe.
A mere fact that there's a White House petition for something that in other countries is an indefeasible right - use your phone with any carrier you please - greatly saddens me. I find it astonishing how the Land of the Free can tolerate such treatment.
Of course they do. If I buy a new house or car, I don't have to pay the full price up front, but when I have finished paying for it I absolutely do own it.
Subsidized phones are essentially loans. You pay for them over the course of your contract or with early termination fees, and when the contract is over you own them 100%.
It is absolutely ridiculous to compare a property, if modest would steal your treasures to amount of 200K, with a 500 bucks phone. Nice thing would be if people abandon this culture of getting subsidized phones and then blame carriers for implementing restrictions.
The contract you sign with the carrier says you don't own the phone until after the contract period expires. Same reason you can't just make copies of a cd of any band you like and hand them out to your friends, in the eyes of the law you may own a plastic disc but the information stored on it isn't yours to own, it is yours to borrow and use in a restricted set of circumstances the rights holder approves of.
> The contract you sign with the carrier says you don't own the phone until after the contract period expires
You mean like when you sign a mortgage to buy a new home? Only it isn't true. You own your house even if you default which is why you can rip all of the copper and sell it for money before they foreclose on your home.
The contract with the carrier definitely doesn't say they own your phone. It makes no sense for them to say that since they have you for early termination fees.
I'm well aware that the WH may not take any real action though. Please sign up at http://fixthedmca.org if you care about this issue and want to continue helping the move to fix this issue permanently.