A Green Party View on IT

20/12/03

Tony Cooper, Green Party Management Coordinator, explores the role of technology in a sustainable society.

IT has the potential to play a key role developing a truly sustainable and just society, both locally and globally: it is a key to decoupling wealth creation from making ever more material objects and moving them ever further distances.

IT is also necessary for the creation of much of the sum body of knowledge of humanity, the core of our society's true wealth. For example, it is enabling us to understand how and why the climate is changing, a prerequisite to dealing with this life-threatening problem.

The GP is in favour of the use of telecommunications for travel substitution including telecommuting, telecottaging and videoconferencing, and we would introduce measures to aid the growth in these sectors in parallel with measures to discourage fossil-fuel-dependent business travel.

We see the internet as a powerful liberating force, proving large amounts of valuable information at low cost to people almost everywhere. So we would press for broadband to be provided everywhere across the country, like gas and electricity. This would help reduce the pressure on people to move to the more economically active areas such as the SE - so helping ameliorate high house prices there and low ones elsewhere.

E-commerce and e-government need to be provided in such a way, e.g. as is done in many public libraries, that access is available to all. Adequate promotion and a heavy emphasis on ease of use,together with the continuation of non-e service provision, are essential to ensure universal access.

Government at all levels should promote adherence to IT standards,particularly open standards, and the use of shareware and OSS (Open Source Software) - note that economic theory suggests that for optimal wealth creation goods should be priced at the "marginal" cost of production - the cost of producing one more unit. This is near zero for software, so wider use of OSS is highly economically desirable. This is particularly so in developing countries, where conventional pricing makes much legal software almost unaffordable.

The GP strongly opposes software patenting. Copyright works well enough to protect IPR (Intellectual Property Rights). The flag of IPR must not be used to give more power to rich corporations while preventing the general use of useful cheap software.

IT is also being used to make more effective those forces, centred in TNCs (Transnational Companies), which are increasing what they see as wealth while drastically damaging the biosphere. The IT industry itself is also threatened by increasing centralisation of market-share and power.

The Green Party would seek to mitigate TNCs' power and ideally lead to widespread demergers by measures such as setting up capital controls to ensure profits made by TNCs are reinvested in the countries of origin; legislating against transfer-pricing activities, and by requiring "site here to sell here".

We need an international legal framework to ensure that hardware is manufactured to be long-lasting, energy-efficient, and upgradeable,reusable or recyclable, and to minimise environmental impact such as the contamination of local water supplies by solvent runoff.