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Straight talker: Senator Elizabeth Warren has been an outspoken critic of big businesses’ view on their responsibilities to society. Photograph: Steven Senne/AP
Straight talker: Senator Elizabeth Warren has been an outspoken critic of big businesses’ view on their responsibilities to society. Photograph: Steven Senne/AP

So the internet's winners are finally chipping in? About time…

This article is more than 9 years old
The generosity of Facebook, Microsoft et al in the wake of the Heartbleed bug only highlights the degree to which the giants of Silicon Valley are willing to shirk their responsibilities

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something," wrote Upton Sinclair, the great American muckraking journalist, "when his salary depends on his not understanding it." That was in 1935, so let us update it for our times: "It is impossible to get an executive of an internet company to understand anything if the value of his (or her) stock options depends on not understanding it."

There are two things in particular that the various infant prodigies, charlatans, megalomaniacs, sociopaths and venture capitalists who run our great internet companies have a vested interest in not understanding.

The first is that the state is not the almighty pain in the ass that they constantly maintain it is. To listen to some of them you'd think that the only thing standing between us and nirvana is the nation-state, with its clueless legislators, obsolete laws, red tape and regulatory reflexes. When the European court of justice dared to decide that people had what is (incorrectly IMHO) a "right to be forgotten", the heavens were rent with corporate whingeing about how Europeans were opposed not only to free speech but also to innovation itself. The clear imputation was that anything tech companies do is innovation, whereas all public agencies (of which courts are one) do is impose a brake on that sacred activity.

What this crazed neoliberalism overlooks is that without the state and its baleful agencies these corporations couldn't exist, never mind thrive. It's the state, for example, that provides the courts and the legal system that protects their intellectual property, the roads and infrastructure on which their self-driving cars travel and so on.

Or, as Senator Elizabeth Warren put it in a great campaign riff: "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look, you built the factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."

The second thing that the geniuses of Silicon Valley have a vested interest in not understanding is that all of their wealth stems ultimately from something built by the hated nation-state, and some of it depends on things built by people who gave it away for free. For without the internet none of the great digital corporations would exist. And the internet was built not by private enterprise but by the US government which funded the Arpanet and then the "internetworking" project that built the network on which we – and Google, Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft et al – all now depend.

Even more interesting is the fact that the core infrastructure of the network runs on software that is all in the public domain. Almost every broadband modem, for example, runs on the Linux operating system, which is free software created by programmers for the love of it. The corporations who make the modems profit from them; but they never paid a cent for Linux.

I have no problem with that. What I do have a problem with, however, is that these neoliberal free riders on public resources seem to feel no obligation to give anything back. For not only do they go to fantastic lengths to avoid paying tax, but they also feel little obligation to contribute to the upkeep of the public-domain code that enables them to function.

We have finally begun to see the consequences of this myopic corporate selfishness. A few months ago, the Heartbleed bug was discovered in the OpenSSL cryptography library, which plays an absolutely critical role in securing confidential online transactions. We then discovered that for years this critical piece of infrastructural software has been maintained by a handful of overworked volunteers. The industry was rightly shocked by Heartbleed, and some companies – notably Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Cisco and Amazon – agreed to donate $300,000 each over the next three years to support the OpenSSL project. You can interpret this as "corporate social responsibility". I call it common sense. And we need much more of it.

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