joeg8

Good riddance.

If this becomes a business case to bring back something closer to real journalism, it is a good day. The NSA/prism story is really well-suited to this format. Connect the Guardian interview to administration concessions to POTUS conference. Would have been more valuable to the public than the soap-opera story that developed around Snowden's asylum seeking.

The other part is big companies are likely pursuing sustaining or incremental improvements that are perhaps perceived as key to beating out well known incumbents. Startups are likely (read hopefully) pursuing disruptive improvements and might expect incumbents to make classic Innovator's Dilemma errors in assessing risk.

I heard CDixon on PandoMonthly say his key founder questions would surround 'what's your secret?' I think his post provides more context to that line of questioning.

Whenever I hear about corporate influence in Washington I think of Lawrence Lessig's Ted Talk on the need for campaign finance reform:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t...

"Change the incentives and you change the behavior."

And the key point: SOLVABLE.

I hope people pick up on his point that regardless of what a person's top priority might be, fixing this problem should be our first priority.

I agree with your assessment. There was a New Yorker article last week on an unrelated topic (Slow Ideas) that came to a similar conclusion about inherent inefficiencies in our market system:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/07/29/130729fa_fact_...

The key quote is here:

"This has been the pattern of many important but stalled ideas. They attack problems that are big but, to most people, invisible; and making them work can be tedious, if not outright painful. The global destruction wrought by a warming climate, the health damage from our over-sugared modern diet, the economic and social disaster of our trillion dollars in unpaid student debt—these things worsen imperceptibly every day. Meanwhile, the carbolic-acid remedies to them, all requiring individual sacrifice of one kind or another, struggle to get anywhere."

The article continues in a health-care context to discuss the importance of doing-things-that-don't-scale efforts to educate and change behavior. I anticipate the connection here would be some utility-by-utility effort to subscribe to best practice. I worry the opposite will occur.

I wonder if there's a pool of non-profit capital available for purchasing technology meant to foster civic technologies. I'd worry that selling to governments would be too difficult for a startup otherwise. Length, contracting requirements, regulation, etc.