Jay Thompson, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy, clued me in to an email he got yesterday, which I was supposed to get as well. Mine didn’t come because the email address was wrong. Jay deals with the substance of the email in the post linked above, but here’s the meat of the matter:
Why are Jay and I, and other principled Realtors, rising to Zillow.com’s defense in response to the attempts at persecution of the net-based real-estate start-up by the Arizona Board of Appraisal?
I speak only for myself, but I can always speak at length about the positions I take. First, it’s important to understand what this is not about, in my opinion:
- It’s not about Zillow.com.
- It’s not about real estate.
- It’s not about appraisals.
- It’s not about job-protection, although this seems to me to be the objective behind the persecution.
- It’s not even about Arizona.
I think what is really going on here is the first campaign in a long war to determine whether internet-based commerce will be suffered to grow as it has until now, without restrictions or impediments. Or: Whether the combined forces of power-mad “statesmen,” progress-hating “progressives” and hand-out-hungry “businesses” will be able to break the net to the saddle they have strapped onto every other enterprise in America.
In a sense, I’m not defending Zillow.com’s business, I’m defending my own. I’m about principle before everything, so that doesn’t matter to me, although I do admire the necessary integrity of rectitude: The moral is the practical. But this is so much larger than Zillow that the instant matter blends into the background.
Many of the pioneers of internet technology are hard-line Capitalists, stout defenders of the idea of free enterprise. That’s not universal, but there is also a very strong gut-level libertarianism among entrepreneurs generally.
In fact, the internet has grown so quickly, and so unpredictably, that the reactionary forces determined to tax, regulate or forbid everything have been stymied. A few very far-sighted people have successfully argued against regulating the net, and, meanwhile, the would-be arbiters-of-everything have been held in check by their own monolithic ignorance of technology. People who see the net as Read more
minute podcast. This is my first interview so you’ll notice two things: