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Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet
- palata 1y ago> What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services. Let companies jailbreak Teslas and deliver all of the features that ship in the cars, but are disabled by software, for one price; that is a much better way to hurt Elon Musk, rather than by expressing outrage at his Nazi salutes, since he loves the attention. "Kick him in the dongle." > Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it.
- like_any_other 1y ago> making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services It's amazing that merely learning about how items that we own work (so-called "reverse-engineering") and exercising control over them (jailbreaking - this time the term is apt) has been made illegal. A heinous overreach by corporations into the lives of people that own their products, and a ridiculous expansion of IP rights - as if patents weren't enough, they want to treat as trade secrets products with mass-market availability.
- zoobab 1y ago"a ridiculous expansion of IP rights - as if patents weren't enough" Expanding patents to software, in Europe they replaced the 2005 software patent directive by the Unified Patent Court, which will ignore the exclusion of 'computer programs', like the EPO did, with no way for the question to be escalated to the CJEU: https://ffii.org/unified-patent-court-has-an-eu-treaty-legality-problem-says-ex-cjeu-judge-melchior-wathelet/ https://ffii.org/unified-patent-court-has-an-eu-treaty-legal... Multinational corporations also became part time judges, because rubberstamping software patents is easier when you can also corrupt the judicial system: https://ffii.org/nokia-and-airbus-elected-as-judges-at-the-kangaroo-unified-patent-court-kupc/ https://ffii.org/nokia-and-airbus-elected-as-judges-at-the-k...
- krzyk 1y ago> making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services Is anywhere in EU reverse-engineering, jailbreaking, and modifying any products illegal?
- Mindwipe 1y agoEvery country has an anti-circumvention law in the EU. It is a condition of membership. Not that that makes Doctorow's argument any better or make any more sense.
- krzyk 1y ago(all below - IANAL) Strange, my country (Poland) has a law that allows reverse engineering to allow given software to work on given hardware. If (and only if) consumer has bought given software. So e.g. I could reverse engineer MS Word to make it work on Linux and that is within my legal right, any EULA prohibiting that is void. Same probably applies for jailbreaking - all withing legal right of customer. I think there is something in EU law also about that, considering SAS Institute Inc. versus World Programming Ltd.
- eimrine 1y agoGoogle refuses to translate this webpage to me, are there any chances it does it because Google refuses to ship the criticism of Google?
- blueflow 1y agoGoogle services might be banned from LWN due to excessive traffic from their AS: https://social.kernel.org/notice/AqJkUigsjad3gQc664 https://social.kernel.org/notice/AqJkUigsjad3gQc664
- bandoti 1y agoYikes. Pretty soon we’ll have to go back to newsprint.
- croisillon 1y agoworks on my end https://lwn-net.translate.goog/SubscriberLink/1021871/4bec46993258f6b7/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=fr&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://lwn-net.translate.goog/SubscriberLink/1021871/4bec46...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pabs3 1y agoFirefox's offline translation is pretty reasonable these days.
- usrme 1y agoThe link to the discussed talk is at the very bottom of the post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydVmzg_SJLw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydVmzg_SJLw
- isodev 1y agoJust watched the talk, it's one of the best opening tech keynote I've ever seen
- whinvik 1y ago> In particular, the companies purchase financial information from a data broker before offering a nurse a shift; if the nurse is carrying a lot of credit-card debt, especially if some of that is delinquent, the amount offered is reduced. "Because, the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come into work and do that grunt work of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying." I think this should be made illegal. But I also think judging from how bad people are at making laws, what we will get is something that will make it worse for everyone.
- bootsmann 1y agoIt's really funny to me that with both the AI act and GDPR, you will see swathes of threads of people on HN bashing the law only to then later discover the purpose of this legislation from first principles.
- octo888 1y agoThe same could come to Europe (lowballing broke people), because you can just make employees give their consent by baking it into all employment contracts. Just like the working time directive opt-out (HR say "take it or leave it" to 99.9% of people). It probably already happens where it's already acceptable to request financial checks such as the finance industry.
- actionfromafar 1y agoYou could try, but that would most likely be illegal and also fought tooth and nail by unions, which aren't as neutered as American unions. In Europe, sympathy strikes aren't Verboten like in the US.
- Mindwipe 1y agoIt depends on the territory, there's no pan-Europe regulation on it. Even when the UK was in the EU sympathy strikes were illegal (to a much greater extent than the US).
- jocoda 1y ago> "He believes that changes to the policy environment is what has led to enshittification, not changes in technology." This is the root cause, and as it looks, there is no cure.
- AvAn12 1y agoAgreee. Also money. Once we go from making things because they are cool / helpful / useful / amusing to making things to personally get rich, is enshitofication inevitable?
- kubb 1y agoIt’s evitable, we need to make it impossible to get excessively rich from it (by capping capital accumulation through redistribution).
- conartist6 1y agoI think it stems from there not being enough engineers. In aggregate, companies have been able to take over the market for engineering labor and ensure that the only good-paying jobs on the job market at any given time are working for companies that want to use engineers to corner some consumer market so that they can enshittify it. The cure is to make so much new engineering talent that this is simply impossible
- keiferski 1y agoIt’s unfortunate that he is continuing to use the term enshittification, because that pretty much guarantees that no serious academic, legal scholar, or politician is going to engage with these ideas publicly. Which is a shame, as many of the solutions here are explicitly legal ones. Words and names matter, especially when it comes to political actions.
- smitty1e 1y agoMarket decay?
- keiferski 1y agoSurely there is a better synonym: decay, decline, rot, degradation, etc. Enshittification sounds like an immature bad joke.
- piva00 1y agoAcademics are completely free to rebrand the naming if they need to sound more pompous and serious, the semantics are the same.
- keiferski 1y agoIt has nothing to do with being pompous, and this attitude is precisely why none of these solutions will ever go anywhere. If you want laws to be passed, you need senators and judges and legal scholars to engage with your ideas. None of those people are going to take the idea of “enshittification” seriously with a name like that, nor are they going to put their name on a bill referencing it. There are plenty of examples of citizen activism that lead to a bill, and these bills often are name directly after the activist/movement name. I’ll say it again: if you want political change, accept that you need to care about the names of concepts.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y agoThis is tone policing. "Why are you being so impolite about your abuse?" The terminology is irrelevant. Senators and judges won't deal with this because they're being paid not to, not because there's a rude word in the name. Government itself has been enshittified, clearly and comprehensively.
- tmjwid 1y agoFor further listening, Cory has produced a podcast for CBC that might be a good accompaniment to this article called "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?".
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- mrpotato 1y agoDidn't know this[1] existed, thanks [1] https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353 https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353
- bambax 1y agoThe article is very long; that part is fascinating and a fantastic suggestion: > Europe and Canada have passed strong right-to-repair legislation, but those efforts ""have been hamstrung by the anti-circumvention laws"" (like the DMCA). (...) That raises the question of why these countries don't repeal their versions of the DMCA. > The answer is tariffs, it seems. The US trade representative has long threatened countries with tariffs if they did not have such a law on their books. ""Happy 'Liberation Day' everyone"", he said with a smile, which resulted in laughter, cheering, and applause. The response of most countries when faced with the US tariffs (or threats thereof) has been to impose retaliatory tariffs, making US products more expensive for their citizens, which is a weird way to punish Americans. (...) > What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services. (...) > Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it. The same could be done for car and tractor diagnostic devices and more. Europe should do this now; it would be incredibly good -- and incredibly fun.
- tgv 1y agoThere already are alternative app stores for iOS and Android. They don't seem to do well. There's no "flocking."
- krzyk 1y agoSo the inevitable end of the world that Apple App store apologists predicated didn't happen.
- isodev 1y agoI believe F-Droid is doing quite ok. So is the Galaxy Store. On iOS, Apple created a very complicated process which is region and even country-specific. Hopefully this will change once the EU, the US, Japan and everyone else currently suing Apple is done with them. But I do share the sentiment from the article - I wish it wasn't necessary to escalate such matters to the level of regulation
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- cebert 1y agoFor the “Uber of Nursing” example, if employers want to play games like this, the best way to combat it is with symmetrical information. Employees should share their salary offers on a website, which would empower them to get a better sense of whether they are being paid fairly.
- kubb 1y agoBut you understand why one of these things is legal and the other is not? Because the employer has power and the employee doesn’t. Of course they should, but they have much more influence on the law so they don’t.
- Voultapher 1y agoCory Doctorow is one of the best contemporary authors that I know, nearly everything he writes is concise, poignant and relevant and he writes new articles nearly every day. You can find his writing here [1]. One of his most memorable articles for me is about remote attestation and the context in lives in [2], absolutely worth a read. [1] https://pluralistic.net https://pluralistic.net [2] https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/ https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/
- offsky 1y agoThe thing I don't understand is how unethical stuff like this comes to be built. Take the example where nurses with debt get lower wages because they are desperate. Some manager had to come up with this idea and then get various people to agree and then get a team of engineers to implement it. Thats a lot of people agreeing to do something so clearly evil (to me at least). Are there that many people who just don't care? Whenever I read stories similar to this I always wonder how many people went along without objecting.
- spacemadness 1y agoJust look at the state of the world for your answer. People sell out their morality for pay all the time. Especially under capitalism.
- er0k 1y agoIf you read the article, he talks about this in this fourth constraint, labor: > The final constraint, which did hold back platform decay for quite some time, is labor. Tech workers have historically been respected and well-paid, without unions. The power of tech workers did not come from solidarity, but from scarcity, Doctorow said. The minute bosses ordered tech workers to enshittify the product they were loyally working on, perhaps missing various important social and family events to ship it on time, those workers could say no—perhaps in a much more coarse way. Tech workers could simply walk across the street ""and have a new job by the end of the day"" if the boss persisted. > So labor held off enshittification after competition, regulation, and interoperability were all systematically undermined and did so for quite some time—until the mass tech layoffs. There have been half a million tech workers laid off since 2023, more are announced regularly, sometimes in conjunction with raises for executive salaries and bonuses. Now, workers cannot turn their bosses down because there are ten others out there just waiting to take their job.
- ragebol 1y ago> There once was an ""old good internet"", Doctorow said, but it was too difficult for non-technical people to connect up to; web 2.0 changed that, making it easy for everyone to get online, but that led directly into hard-to-escape walled gardens. Maybe we should not 'democratize' some technologies and keep a bit of difficulty as a gatekeeper. (Yes, I know this is not really a moral position to hold)
- ethersteeds 1y agoIt might forestall the problem, but not solve. "A ship in harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are built for"