A friend of mine has made me aware of a new and looming 1% vs the 99% battle. Follow the bouncing ball, because this story has many moving parts:

I love Susan Saladoff for reminding us that the word “reform” does not necessarily equal “good.” And I love Stephen Colbert’s line about a jury of a corporation’s peers consisting of twelve other corporations, like Jack in the Box or Burger King.

But the point was, “Hot Coffee”– the film on how the corporations, through “tort reform” arbitration clauses, funding right wing judges (destroying the evil lefties)– are trying to limit access to the courts for civil cases, thus curtailing our 7th Amendment right. Here is a link to what a hypocridiot Rick Santorum is on the tort “reform”issue.

Now let’s see how ICANN fits into all this, and the bogus last-minute push by a few corporate interests that are trying to derail it. What is ICANN, you ask?

ICANN’s Wiki:

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a non-profit corporation… that was created on September 18, 1998, and incorporated on September 30, 1998^[1] to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly on behalf of the U.S. government by other organizations, notably the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which ICANN now operates.

Please go to the Wiki for much more information.

On to how corporations are trying to limit our freedoms as they pertain to ICANN.

Internet addresses will be undergoing a big change by adding to the usual .com, .org and .net dot extensions. You’ll eventually be able to “dot” just about anything, like .apple and .book.

In the GOP’s case, I would suggest .OnePerCent or .gasbag.

In Elizabeth Warren’s case, it would be something like .PresidentialNominee2016. But I digress…

Regarding these new domain names, the usual pesky corporate troublemakers (in this case, ANA, or Association of National Advertisers, that represents about 400… corporations) are none too thrilled and like things just the way they are:

Brad White, a spokesman for Icann, in an emailed statement said the nonprofit corporation appreciates NTIA’s [National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a Commerce Department arm that advises the president on information policy] “support of Icann’s multi-stakeholder model.”

General Electric Co., Johnson & Johnson and Coca-Cola Co. are among more than 40 companies that have joined with the Association of National Advertisers to oppose the expansion, saying it will increase costs for companies, confuse customers and create new risks of Internet fraud.

Broadening access to the Internet is a good thing, as is access to our courts. And as many of us, specifically those actively interested in or involved with the Occupy movement know, the usual special interests continue their quest to stack the deck in their favor with no regard to the impact it has on the rest of us.

Here is an article on why ICANN should go forward, and more about the corporate interests putting up roadblocks:

Their only new claim is that they have the ear of powerful people in the United States government, including Senator Jay Rockefeller.

In effect, U.S. corporate trademark interests are openly admitting that their participation in the ICANN process has been in bad faith all along. Despite the multiple concessions and numerous re-dos that these interests managed to extract over the past 6 years, they are now demanding that everything grind to a halt because they didn’t get exactly what they demanded — as if no other interests and concerns mattered and no other stakeholders exist. What they wanted, in fact, was simply to freeze the status quo of 1996 into place forever, so that there would be no new competition, no new entrepreneurial opportunities, no linguistic diversification, nothing that would have the potential to cause them any problems. [...]

To its everlasting credit, the U.S. Commerce Department, the official governmental contractor and supervisor of ICANN, has not caved in to the cynical corporate obstructionism. They realize what is at stake. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Lawrence Strickling is responsible and intelligent enough to understand what an unmitigated disaster it would be to pull the plug on 15 years of work. [...]

If ICANN blinks, if it deviates from or delays its agreed and hard-fought policy in the slightest way, the coup d’etat succeeds. Everyone in the world then concludes that a few corporate interests in the United States hold veto power over the policies of the Internet’s domain name system.

Corporations don’t want change–they want to protect their supremacy, which in this instance means only a Latin alphabet for URLs with no competition from the little guy willing to move forward and use the new ones.

Just one more example of We the Corporations vs. We the People. Maybe one day we’ll get a jury of non-corporate peers to come up with a final verdict of Not People.