Watching the government try to catch up with the forces of technology and globalization is like watching a lumbering ox chasing its runaway cart. In fact, the near-sighted beast still seems to think it’s pulling its load.
For example, the Justice Department’s current effort to reign in Microsoft will provide jolly entertainment for years to come. However, to belabor the farmyard metaphor, the government is trying to close the barn door after the horse is out. Yes, Microsoft stomps on competitors. Yes, Bill Gates rules the world. But the millennium bug, not to mention Netscape, will be but distant memories by the time the courts do anything to cramp the Microsoft style.
Or look at Al Gore, speechifying before regulators and businesspeople from more than 180 countries last month. He outlined five principles to shape the future of the internet: telecommunications access, translation technology, ‘knowledge networks’ in areas like healthcare and agriculture, a free flow of ideas to encourage democracy, and new ways to link businesses to world markets.
Who is he kidding? Market forces are a million times stronger than Gore’s oratory. His contribution to the development of the internet began and ended with coining the term ‘information highway’. In fact, government is as likely to shape the internet’s future as it is to invent a male birth control pill. Competition and consumer demand are driving the market, just as they will probably drive Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign into the ground.
Closer to home for Investor Relations readers are governments’ efforts to catch up with public companies and their investors. Typical of the pattern is the tale of a Canadian web site declaring itself a ‘stock exchange’. Shut down by regulators, it popped up in the Cayman Islands then Antigua, beyond the reach of regulators. But only the most gullible group of investors and equally clueless issuers could ever let the fly-by-night exchange survive, and it will inevitably die a natural, market-driven death.
Or consider the securities lawyer who shows an SEC enforcement officer online investor chat rooms for the first time – ‘like introducing technology to a primitive society.’ How can the SEC catch internet fraudsters if, for the most part, they don’t have internet access?
Recently a New York Times feature on corporate governance appeared not in the business section but on the front of the Metro Section. The same buzzwords pepper mainstream media from Wired to Vanity Fair, along with ‘selective disclosure’ and even ‘investor relations’. These issues are now being debated at street level, and your ultimate consumers – the people on the street – will be your judge, not government.
