Subject: [Asrg] Disabling small (eg home) business and nonprofits

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2003 01:16:19 -0500

> The simplist way to achieve this is to raise the 'bar' for online
expenditure.  Any company that would have a solid outlook on Internet based
trading would be able to afford in excess of =A35,000 a year to pay on proper
digital registration systems and point-to-point contacts with businesses and
clients.  If a company would find this expenditure difficult to reach then it is 
a clear indicator that they are not ready for an Internet Solution.

> It would assist small to medium size firms to seriously evalutate any
proposed web initiatives and detract from failed enterprise ventures.

With all due respect, this is bullshit.

There are **loads** of VERY small businesses which presently use the Net as a 
low-cost way of conducting VERY small amounts of specialized business.  These 
can be nonprofits, or could be negligible-profit.

As an example of the former, there's a local religious volunteer organization 
which gets together volunteers to "glean" in farmers fields following the 
completion of the farmer's normal harvest cycle.  After his harvest is done, 
they go back into the fields with teams of volunteers and try to recover the 
still-usable crops which the farmer judges "not worth recovering" for donation 
to food banks, needy folks, and such.  The farmer gets a tax deduction for the 
recovered additional crops (which otherwise would just rot in the fields), and 
the organization's people can and do recover TONS of food this way, but there's 
basically NO money in it (and certainly no profits).  It's basically a 
near-zero-budget, all-volunteer operation.  Think they'd have thousands of 
dollars to pay for "digital registration systems" and other stuff?  No way.

As just one personal example of the latter, there are political activists 
(myself included) which sell protest stickers and such to other activists 
nationwide.  These sales are more a matter of personal principle and conviction 
than they are based on any profit motive, and the total annual revenues from 
these sales are probably less than a thousand dollars and any profits are 
negligible if any.  So there are a lot of miniscule operations which simply 
don't generate anywhere NEAR enough revenue to justify the kind of expenses that 
you seem to think are required if the fledgling outfit is "ready for an Internet 
Solution".

The fact is that today's Internet makes it possible to conduct a lot of 
legitimate (tiny!) business and charitable operations on a shoestring, and this 
enabling technology increases the diversity of goods and services that can be 
made available to the public, which in turn enriches peoples lives in addition 
to offering them more opportunities for volunteerism and public service (as in 
the local gleaning operation).  I think that anything we might do through simple 
ignorance which cut off these opportunities would be tragic.

Gordon Peterson                  http://personal.terabites.com/
1977-2002  Twenty-fifth anniversary year of Local Area Networking!
Support the Anti-SPAM Amendment!  Join at http://www.cauce.org/
12/19/98: Partisan Republicans scornfully ignore the voters they "represent".
12/09/00: the date the Republican Party took down democracy in America.

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