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Well, as it turned out the computer and internet revolution ended up making the telephone company economic ruler of the data flow and therefore defacto ruler of the planet. When the Earth.gov bankrupted the planetary government with bureaucratic waste the quietly waiting World.TelCo took over the direct management of the Earth.

Not a moment to soon. The World.gov had actually bankrupted the planet quite a while back. They had been getting by by squeezing the Spacer Mega-corps to the wall with Data In/Out and DNA export taxes. The Spacer Mega-corps had been just about forced to resort to violence, when the TelCo stepped in at the last minute, and applied a bit of corporate tightening to the general population.

Next, they applied the Divi.Dole. Profit sharing for the whole planet. Or, at any rate for those who needed help to survive-about seventy percent of the populaton at the time-put out of work by silicone and the servo-mech. And, the comfort level of survival that the out of work population had been given the inalienable right to by the World.gov was a high one indeed.

By creating the publicnet, as well as making virtual reality eyeware and earware implants mandatory much of the consumption associated with those inalienable rights was provided by these humanware input devices and the World.TelCo's data flow.

In the past, corporations have had many different classes of stock. The World.TelCo was no exception. World.TelCo officials and the planetary police held their shares as stock.public.preferred.

Eller Dumaurier was one of the minority of private business owners. He only held stock.private.common as his venture capitalists held all the stock.private.preferred in his company. When one became a business owner with one's own stock any World.Telco issued divi.dole stock automatically reverted to the World.Telco, and they were on their own.

Most Spacers held both stock.private.preferred and stock.private.common. Angels never held any stock of their own. If they had it would have been the same as a TelCo official's stock holdings. However, their stock was held in trust by the Angel.Collective which otherwise provided for all the Angelic caretakers of the Earth's Greens. When they were honorably discharged from Angel Service it was released to them. Dishonored Angels were reduced to the lo.res ranks of the divi.dole