What If Good People Could Network Together?

When conducting business, all parties need to comply with relevant industry laws, local regulations, and consumer protection rules. Most people agree that they just want fairness when they part with their money to buy a product or service. Not something for nothing — just fairness.

However, there’s an underlying component of how governing laws are made that can tilt the playing field away from fairness right from the start.

In a representative democracy, each citizen votes to choose their representatives. In the US all laws are made by house representatives and by senators. As a voter, you get one congressman and two senators. If you need a law made or changed you contact them and tell them what you want.

Does that sound like a story from middle school civics? It should. Because you don’t have a prayer of getting a new law made or a law changed just because you sent one letter to a member of congress.

Simple Annoying Examples

Here are two seemingly trivial examples of terms and conditions no astute consumer would ever agree to if he had any other option. They sound like small potatoes in the grand scheme of life, but they illustrate a larger point I’ll get to in a moment.

Example one. When you rent a car from one of the big rental agencies you have to pay for insurance called a Loss Damage Waiver (LDW). These days they charge you about $32 per day. So that’s an auto insurance policy of nearly $12,000 a year to insure a very basic Ford Focus. And if you want to add your spouse to the rental agreement as an additional driver it will cost you another $13.50 a day, or an additional $5,000 per year. So you and your spouse can both drive a Ford Focus (one at a time obviously, so there is zero increase in actual risk) with insurance that cost you a rate of nearly $17,000 a year. No reasonable person would pay that much to insure their own Ford Focus.

Example two. When you fly on one of the major US airlines they have a ridiculous baggage ‘gotcha.’ A piece of luggage that weighs 50 lb adds $40 to your ticket price. Fine. But if that bag weighs 51 lb. there is an additional surcharge of $100. One pound = $100. Make it 71 lb. and it’s a surcharge of $200 for those extra 21 lb. Again, no discerning consumer would agree to these extra charges if he had a choice in the matter. Especially when you know the passenger that weighs 21 lbs more than you didn’t have to pay an extra $200 for his seat.

I’m guessing nobody likes these terms and conditions.

So how would you go about getting these changed?

Exercising Your Constitutional Rights

Option 1: The airlines and car rental companies could be forced by new laws to stop assessing these surcharges, or to reduce them to a more reasonable and justifiable amount based on the actual operational realities of their industries.

Making a new law means involving your member of congress. The reality is it will take the efforts of millions of citizens to effectively lobby for a law that impacts Fortune 500 companies. And those Fortune 500 companies know how to play this game.

They make generous campaign contributions to your representative and they golf with your senators. They speak with them directly at cocktail parties. They have full-time, very expensive lobbyists in Washington to facilitate the legislative horse trading that can thwart the creation of laws they don’t like. “Senator, forget about that airline luggage nonsense and we can help you get that main battle tank defense contract where the all turrets are manufactured in your state. Why not do the right thing for all of your constituents, instead of pandering to these cheapskate occasional flyers?”

That’s today’s political reality and it’s why Joe Public gets screwed every day of his life with laws, rules, and terms of service he’d never agree to if he had an alternative.

Option 2: Suppose there was a way that people could be easily connected into a network. And suppose because of the utility of Digital ID only “good” trustworthy people with a history of personal contractual integrity could be selected into a group where they all agreed they don’t want to pay outrageous rental car insurance or luggage fees and they will act together as a block.

About 45% of the US population flies on a plane at least once per year. That’s around 150-million people. So what if, say, only 20-million of them join this special network and contribute $1 each into a fund to pay for the very best professional business negotiators to get them a better deal?

Those negotiators, who now zealously represent the interests of this network of flyers, sit down with airlines and essentially say, “We represent 20-million people who fly annually and spend several billion dollars doing it. They’d like to fly on your airline, but they want an agreement with better terms and conditions, including the rules related to luggage fees. However, they have all committed to assiduously avoid your airline unless mutually agreeable terms can be reached. Would you like to have their business?”

What Fortune 500 Company can tell its shareholders that it isn’t going to engage with millions of willing customers offering billions of dollars of annual revenue while they are also promising to withhold that same amount revenue unless fairer terms are mutually agreed?

Do I hear someone saying, “The airlines will just close ranks and none of them will talk to your group.”

I agree. That might be their first impulse. But your high-dollar negotiators know how to deal with that. They pick the most financially vulnerable airline and boycott it alone while flying on the others. After the target airline has gone Chapter 11, they move on to the next one. One by one, the airlines realize it’s better to give people a fair deal than to go bust because of overcharging them for luggage or anything else.

Better Representation

Unlike your political representatives, these negotiators would have only your interests at heart. In fact, they’d be highly motivated to deliver a wonderful agreement to the twenty million people in your digital network because they’d want to be chosen for the rental car insurance negotiation when that specific group is formed.

I believe the desired changes could be achieved in months at a nominal cost of one buck for each consumer. Compare that to the timeline required for new federal legislation and how much total money from both sides is squandered on politicians during on that very long battle.

And this technology scales down to small communities and small groups of people who trade with each other. The playing field can be kept fair and mutually agreeable to all parties without a single politician being in the middle of it.

It also scales up to global digital communities with economic power that would be commensurate with their collective purchasing power and the value of the utility of their work.

The Takeaway

The reality is, having a handful of politicians represent all our millions of personal interests is an astronomically expensive, glacier-slow, and readily corrupted way to achieve even the simplest changes in the circumstances of our lives.

When good people begin to leverage existing new technologies that permit them to network themselves for a clearly stated purpose, a new paradigm of freedom and personal property protection will be enabled.

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