Just Plain NOT Right.
Okay, I’m not just not talking about not making the cut in “People’s” sexiest man alive survey I’m just not talking about this MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY (nice keyword if you can spell it: ) But look when they do the CMA awards in New York and pass over or intentionally ignore just about every decent hillbilly song out there. It’s like a beauty pageant where only the pigs are allowed to show. You all know what I’m talking about; the debutant that wins the beauty contest but still the mystery remains as why anyone would bother to take her to a dogfight… Still hope floats. Which brings me to point of why should any advisor worth their salt be cowered by the likes of Keen. Nice site sure but can they control our privates life choices? I don’t think so but I suppose they can if they have enough lawyers. In this day and age most have lived long enough to experience the O.J. style of American justice.
But hold on one sweet second… they might be tempted to think they can bully their advisors around because a reader may have the audacity to “offer payment option on their personal website” (Section 1 (k) TOS) enough to say “You’ll not work in this city again!”, so to speak, but cyberspace covers a lot of territory. In addition they indiscreetly apply this policy to those they view might be a threat while others are provided very preferential treatment. This works fine if your running a country club but even The Augusta Master’s must obey laws that prohibit discrimination. The entire world understands this concept and then there’s Google open source approach that will guarantee to bring such indiscretions to the top of their search engines for the entire world to see. Hotel California stands to learn a trick or two from the SEO editors or find them forever lost in the wasteland of “who cares or gives a rats ass” if you can’t find your feet in the cyberspace search index. Your stock, even the most potent of Internet portals, can become worthless overnight if no one can find it.
Now Keen can do whatever they decide to do because of their “Terms of Service” but still they are a “Publicly” traded company with a board of directors, bank lenders with share holders of common stock… Not to mention the court of public opinion and the Almighty all of whom we all must stand before and after we leave this world. So although Keen may at first glance appear impressive with their deep pockets and blue army of attorneys ready for any litigious mission of combat that may cross their dockets and clerks of court… However, in the entire schema of theXML world of well formed documents, essentially all they amount to in sum total to a handful of servers loaded with some code and armed with paper with worthless contracts yet to be tested…. Not like we are talking actual brick and mortar buildings with factories producing real durable good. The only thing they produce is information and the only thing that is of value is the quality of advisors they manage to cower into thinking that they are only show in town. Like was once said in Hollywood when you were told that you “Would never work in this town again!” Under the old studio system, they had a way of making their rules and those words stick… So you either would play by the rules set by the Hollywood moguls or you would not play at all…
But the Internet, as Keen is about to discover, is a lot larger than any Hollywood or combination of studios might ever have dreamed but in a sense its just little bits of code that sit upon a desk of some ordinary hillbilly someplace in any small town America. Now there’s a scary thought for any would be Internet tyrant because there are still accountable, no only to the Interstate Commerce Clause but also to local and state laws that can make any ruling on what they deem a “public body”. Still in the entire schema of things in ten thousands years who is going to know or care… Think back to only ten short years ago the Internet was in its infancy and Google was just a bright idea Cell phones did not even exist… Imagine, if you dare the next ten, 20, perhaps even 50 years… Life is too short for any of this nonsense. The market forces will correct any of this, even now Ebay is working with Skype on phone encryption with their partner
Paypal.
Speaking Freely has been a stable voice encryption service that has been in the open source Linux market for almost five years now. Why would Ebay spend almost 2 billion dollars on acquiring the VoIP Skype communication service??? I’m not sure but I’m certain it can’t be good news for “Bye bye Keen”… The free market acts sort of like Robert Duvall’s character in Apocalypse Now… “I love the smell of napalm in the morning! It smells like victory.” And if you’re an advisor with Keen and you’ve done smelled a rat for too long it’s a breath of fresh air. You’ve just got to love it.
