Australia or Bust

Was reading this evenings article titled: “Australia to set up antitrust office to police Facebook, Google” and was inspired.

The article outlines Australia’s plan to match a new regulator with the skill, expertise and experience to understand the strategy and power behind large tech media companies.

This is an intelligent and powerful shift in the global power dynamic for large cap technology firms. The word will be watching the progress of this effort.

And Australia may become the first advanced nation to change the power dynamic between the captains of Silicon Valley (the new robber Barrons) and the people.

What also struck a chord was having just learned how the Australian electorate and election process work. Understanding that process gives this announcement far more weight.

This is because Australia has one of the strongest and most moderate-biased election process in the world. (Not that I’ve really measured). The power of this announcement is that it represents a shift in policy against large cap technology firms from the most moderate-centrist thinkers in the country. It’s an example of what can happen if we-the-people take back our electorates and media.

The two major differences between the Australian and American election processes are: 1. Australia has mandatory voting policies. Everyone of legal age must register, and everyone must attend a poll to vote; 2. The Australian voting system requires an absolute majority of 51% of all voters; 3. The voting systems is ranked, meaning it’s not binary or absolute. Meaning you choose your top 1, 2, 3, 4….. candidates in ranked order. Then the votes for each are then tallied by-count, by-rank.

The lowest scoring candidate (J. Doe) gets removed and the ballots cast for him are re-evaluated for their #2 entry. Those second ranked votes get redistributed across the remaining candidates. From there the next lowest scoring gets removed and the process repeats, which ensures the winner has a majority; but this also ensures that the candidates, who are arguably the most informed voters, have a substantial weight in the outcome of the election.

And lastly, maybe most importantly, since people generally only have one preference (left leaning, right leaning or center), then the fringe votes ultimately become drowned out by the center. And elections result in far more moderate candidates winning. This would have the result of limiting the powers of special interests, fringe concepts and populist ideals.

If such an effort to match the skills and experience of large technology firms with able-bodied regulators is the result of a hyper-moderate democracy then the world may simply be at the forefront of Digital World 2.0, the dawn of which may become known as the people’s Digital Revolution.

If we are at the precipice of the digital revolution, then the future will be far brighter than the present.