Dave Winer’s long-running (in Net-years) DaveNet column recently suggested a “corporate death penalty,” the government-mandated dissolving of companies found guilty of major offenses.
“For example,” Winer writes, “I would have put Exxon to death for the Valdez disaster, to set an example for other would-be rapers of the environment.”
Winer has yet to detail how this might be carried out (government seizure and auction of assets, perhaps?). But he has suggested it’d be the ideal answer to the Microsoft monopoly. Instead of splitting MS up into two firms, “after the death penalty, there would be zero Microsofts, not two.”
There’s a precedent for this in Britain, under the old tradition of crown-chartered corporations (such as the still-extant Hudson’s Bay Co.) existing on the government’s bidding and subject to periodic review and non-automatic renewal.
The modern-day example of this is Britain’s oldest commercial TV network, ITV. As I oh-so-briefly explained recently, ITV was devised as a loose consortium of local stations, with no central corporate management save for the heavy hand of their government regulator, originally known as the Independent Television Authority (ITA). The ITA built and ran the transmitters, then contracted out the programming and ad sales on these stations to 15 different companies. The contracts were for limited terms (four to eight years) and their renewal was not automatic. The ITA would re-hire, fire, or force mergers among contractor companies for any combination of reasons, from financial solvency to programming priorities. Thus major operators such as ATV/ITC (producers of The Prisoner and The Muppet Show), Associated British Corp. (The Avengers), Rediffusion (Ready Steady Go!), and Thames Television (The Benny Hill Show) have come and gone from the ITV airwaves over the years.
Of course the US has always had a more libertarian attitude toward the sacred rights of business than the pre-Thatcher UK. Today’s American regulatory system luuuvs gigantic media conglomerates and other global business giants. To even put teeth back into US business oversight (let alone fangs) would require a far bigger change in Congress than one centrist Republican turning into a centrist Democrat.
