Today is Martin Luther King Day in the U.S. So far as I know he never used the Internet, considering that even the ARPANET hadn’t been implemented yet. But he did occasionally talk about insurance:

But not only that, we’ve got to strengthen black institutions. I call upon you to take your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your money in Tri-State Bank-we want a “bank-in” movement in Memphis. So go by the savings and loan association. I’m not asking you something we don’t do ourselves at SCLC. Judge Hooks and others will tell you that we have an account here in the savings and loan association from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We’re telling you to follow what we’re doing. Put your money there. You have six or seven black insurance companies in the city of Memphis. Take out your insurance there. We want to have an “insurance-in.”

—“I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” Martin Luther King Jr., Memphis, Tennessee, April 3, 1968.

So it would appear that those particular S&Ls and insurance companies had additional priorities beyond making money for the shareholders. And that larger companies failing to address issues of interest to part of their potential customer base led to those customers addressing those issues otherwise. Or, paying too much attention to the bottom line to the exclusion of social issues can eventually adversely affect the bottom line. That seems like a risk to me.

What does this have to do with the Internet? Handing the Internet in the U.S. over to the control of a few large telcos, as could happen in the near future, seems like a pretty big risk.

-jsq