[Newspoetry] MicroSoft's Conflict of Interest in Virusl Defense Software

[DL Emerick]

Microsoft Says It Will Offer Virus Defense By JOHN MARKOFF
Microsoft said Thursday that it would enter the consumer antivirus business as part of a subscription service that it will offer next year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/13/technology/13soft.html?th&emc=th

Can anyone scream Conflict of Interest? I mean, the maker of the defective operating system software, on which they have a huge and profitable monopoly, should not be permitted to sell cures to a favored few of their customers...

Allowing MicroSoft to sell Virus Defenses invites them to weaken their PC OS software so as to make a bigger profit selling additional software killing viruses that become possible because they were negligent or less otherwise deficiently professionally incompetent.

Even if we can't win an anti-trust battle against the SoBs of the MSoB (MicroSoft of Business), to force them to split their software into smaller, competitive chunks -- we should force them to publicize every line of code in every package they ever produce -- on the grounds that a virtual monopoly compels absolute disclosure of all company secrets to be open to complete public inspection.

It's a quaint notion, this idea of regulating giants who would destroy democracy itself by their sheer size -- this idea that utter bigness threatens freedom.  Let the conservatives whine that regulation is next to slavery, in their mind...  because what is not regulated is slavery itself, so how can those conservatives not see that regulation that is only "near slavery" is better than the outright slavery that regulation is only near?

I guess it's just a matter of having learned to parrot the right right-wing phrases, and to have stopped, altogether, the idea that ideas actually have to be examined by careful thinking, to see where they might run.  Doctrinalism, though, usually starts with non-empirically tested grand claims -- that this or that is true, necessarily, about how the way the world works.  And, from such untested beliefs, doctrinalism jumps to its various conclusions, finally coming to compel the world's data to fit the mold the theory commands that the data must have.

The Bushites are a good example of the extent to which doctrinalism rules over and out reality.  So were the jacobins of the french revolution, or the bolsheviks of the russian revolution.  Shoot the dissenters, promote the loyalists -- close ranks and let tyranny begin its reign.  It's all the same dynamism -- we could see that in all the details of Nixon's plots to end democracy in America and establish a one-party government.  And, now that Nixon loyalists like Rove, Frist, Hastert, Bush are in charge of the GOP?  Why, the game plan is back, the practice of intensified party compettion for a monopoly resumes.

Here, though, we just have to call it "corporate cronyism..."  -- the idea of the elites, that only wealth should be a principle in any society, and that democracy is never there truly to be had, except as a token fig leaf, and as an empty gesture.  Call it not a democracy, by the standards of "free elections" when the board of directors is not chosen in the election -- or else controls the casting and the counting of the votes.

Conflicts of interest is doctrinal -- in its own great foundational idea -- that no man is the guarantor of his own honesty, that all men must be examined, as to the claims that they make, and the desirability of the consequences that might reasonably follow their claims.

That's why I oppose letting MicroSoft sell any software on viral defenses -- when they shouldn't be creating the conditions for viruses to thrive in the first place -- when they should be liable for the consequences of letting some viruses be possible, because of stupidity in their software, and greed in the business plan that invited that stupidity to entrench itself into the software.