[HN Gopher] Platforms want to be utilities, self-govern like emp...
___________________________________________________________________
Platforms want to be utilities, self-govern like empires
Author : mikro2nd
Score : 380 points
Date : 2021-08-23 10:30 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eff.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eff.org)
| Causality1 wrote:
| We need public utility alternatives to FAANG. Everyone deserves
| an email address that can't be taken away from them just as much
| as they deserve a mailing address.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Cory Doctorow has been in the slippery slope warning business for
| a solid twenty-five years now, but has he ever been right about,
| well, anything? None of his old predictions stand up. Did DRM
| silence journalism around the world, or did it simply stop few
| people from ripping movies, which are objectively now more widely
| available to more people than ever? Did digital rectal
| thermometers lead to a massive government database of, uh, rectal
| temperatures? No? Why does anyone take this guy seriously? He
| runs this online doom and gloom business to flog his dystopian
| fiction novels!
| annadane wrote:
| Wondering if this comment is typical of people posting on this
| site and I'm getting depressed thinking it might be
| uniqueid wrote:
| I like Cory Doctorow quite a bit, but he's wrong _a lot_ of the
| time. His views suffer from a combination of two flaws:
| 'magical group-think' might describe them. Despite this, his
| tech opinions are worthwhile because he keeps his finger on the
| pulse, and even his bad takes are representative of a large
| number of people in tech.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I used to think he had some points, and for that matter I
| used to belong to the EFF before I got fed up with them, but
| after I saw him speak in San Francisco about the dangers of
| digital rectal thermometers, that was the moment when I
| realized that this is just a crank.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> after I saw him speak in San Francisco about the dangers
| of digital rectal thermometers, that was the moment when I
| realized that this is just a crank._
|
| While that's a funny example, it is hard to draw a sharp
| distinction between various categories of medical devices
| that range from CPAP machines to pacemakers to continuous
| glucose monitors, all the way up to MRIs and external beam
| therapy devices.
|
| Ultimately, if you own a device -- and it is hard to argue
| that you don't own something that is attached to, or
| implanted in, your body -- a whole set of rights should
| apply to your ability to inspect and control the associated
| data, hardware, and software. Any rule that excludes the
| manufacturer of a digital rectal thermometer from
| requirements to honor those rights becomes a huge loophole
| that will be exploited ruthlessly.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Well, see, that's the thing. Those devices and those
| rules have existed for decades. Where is the ruthless
| exploitation?
| webmaven wrote:
| The exploitation would be _of the loophole_.
|
| Since there is no rule that says a device manufacturer
| has to disclose the code to _anyone_ (not even to the
| FDA) in the first place, there is no need for a loophole.
| Device manufacturers largely keep their code secret (and
| yes, in a few cases where such code has had to be
| disclosed anyway because of a lawsuit or the like, it has
| been shown to be pretty crappy).
|
| So, I'm saying that if code disclosure and the like (ala
| Right to Repair, etc.) _was_ required, but some subset of
| devices was exempt, manufacturers would do their best to
| cram their devices into the exempt category.
| trothamel wrote:
| I sort of think that the right solution of like this is to force
| platforms to make a choice. Platforms like youtube or facebook
| should be allowed to choose to be common carriers - carrying all
| (or perhaps all legal) content without being responsible for that
| content.
|
| Or they should be publishers, and treated like publishers - which
| means taking responsibility for what they publish.
|
| I don't think the current regime, where the platforms act as
| publishers but don't take responsibility for what they publish is
| all that tenable.
| shuntress wrote:
| But there _are_ both.
|
| Youtube _is_ a platform that will host anyone 's videos.
|
| Youtube _is_ a publisher that chooses which videos to display
| (and where to display them).
|
| Are you essentially saying you would be satisfied if videos
| that violate Youtube's terms of service (without being illegal)
| were only available by special direct link and rendered on a
| page containing no "related" videos?
|
| That way Youtube as a platform will still host any legal video
| uploaded by anyone regardless of it's content while Youtube as
| a publisher does not publish anything that goes against their
| terms of service.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > Youtube is a platform that will host anyone's videos.
|
| This isn't true? They don't host porn and many other things,
| so they aren't a common carrier.
| shuntress wrote:
| > This isn't true? They don't host porn and many other
| things, so they aren't a common carrier.
|
| This is a reductionist gotcha? YouTube is obviously the de
| facto english-language video host on the internet. That
| position is weakening now vs TikTok and Facebook/Instagram.
|
| Porn is a good example of the overlap between
| platform/publisher and how the publisher keeping it off the
| platform has allowed competition to exist in that niche.
| That could probably form the basis for a strong argument in
| favor of an enforced separation of hosting and publishing.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > This is a reductionist gotcha?
|
| I don't think you understood the post you responded to.
| The point was that if they were a common carrier then
| they would not censor anything that isn't illegal. They
| censor a lot.
| infogulch wrote:
| I don't see a problem with forcing companies to pick a lane.
| If YT wants to publish its own content split it out into
| YouTube Publishing Inc., and the platform treats it like any
| other content.
| shuntress wrote:
| This is the type of thing people mean when they say
| "legislation has not caught up to technology".
|
| Where do you define the boundaries? How do you enforce it?
| If the boundary is "Platforms host video. Publishers
| distribute video.", who is going to make sure they every
| video sent through YouTubeThePublisher.com is loaded from
| some _other_ domain that is _not_ controlled by
| YouTubeThePublisher.
|
| I agree we need some kind of regulation to foster a
| healthier competitive environment but it is a complex
| problem that lacks a single simple solution.
| dalbasal wrote:
| OK so WTF is the game-plan?!!
|
| The game is all about controlling users, gaining rights in a
| standard take-it-or-leave-it "bargain." These companies rarely
| sell you anything just for revenue. It's always a play to
| aggregate data, aggregate users, create network effects and
| dominate their emergent properties.
|
| There's usually no value to data, for example, unless its
| aggregated. I think consumers might need to "unionize^" in some
| fashion. It may not resemble a trade union at all, but consumer
| rights, increasingly, resemble labour rights issues. .
|
| Youtube is a great example. There are multiple classes of
| users/consumers: watchers, youtubers, advertisers. All of them
| are completely expendable, and youtube's relationship with all of
| them is 100% take-it-or-leave it. No one is important enough to
| speak to the boss.
|
| It's actually not hard to see how youtubers would unionize. It
| might even resembles a labour union quite a lot. If enough
| youtubers users strike, for example...
|
| Advertisers I dunno. In some industries/segments, adwords and FB
| are basically a tax. The norm is spending >10% of your gross on
| advertising. OTH... it's hard to see them being a factor.
|
| I don't even have a mental model of how an organized usership
| might look, but data aggregation probably needs to be a part of
| it.
| robbmorganf wrote:
| If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading some of the
| history of how traditional utilities (electricity, water) came to
| be regulated:
| https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c9986/c9986.pdf
|
| Perhaps like cities traded franchises in exchange for access to
| digging up roads, we can trade franchises in exchange for access
| to privileged information. If you don't want to play by the
| rules, then please enjoy a total ban on storing PII or
| confidential data.
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| > Losing your cloud account can cost you decades of your family
| photos. Losing access to your media account can cost you access
| to thousands of dollars' worth of music, movies, audiobooks and
| ebooks. Losing your IoT account can render your whole home
| uninhabitable, freezing the door locks while bricking your
| thermostat, burglar alarm and security cameras.
|
| I keep all my personal data on my local machine, which I
| periodically back up to an external hard drive. My music library
| is a collection of raw audio files in my "Music" folder, which I
| play with Windows Media Player or VLC Media Player when WMP can't
| handle the format. I don't rely on a third party. Same with
| everything else. I don't use any Internet of Things device, and
| never intend to.
|
| I also don't use any Facebook or Apple product or service. If the
| major tech companies failed overnight, I would lose the ability
| to discover new music through YouTube, but my life wouldn't be
| affected otherwise.
|
| Shameless plug for /r/DataHoarders
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Yes, you do that... but many Average Joes and Aunt Marges
| don't... they buy a phone, click the default settings, and
| their data gets sent to the cloud... when the storage on the
| phone is used up, the phone recommends deleting old, backed up
| photos, and they click yes. Then they argue about
| trump/vaccines/... whatever, and get banned, and lose
| everything.
| cube00 wrote:
| Unsolicited backup advice: 3-2-1 - make sure you have a copy
| offsite.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| I do a amazon glacier for most important data. but then I do
| have other cloud storage besides my home NAS. that said I
| wouldn't lose any sleep if all the FAANGs were to go offline
| for a while.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| The future did not turn out as we thought it would.
| lebuffon wrote:
| And nostalgia is not as good as it used to be either. :)
| specialist wrote:
| Once platforms become economically important, they must become
| open markets. That means rule of law, tort, fair and impartial
| adjudication, etc.
| uniqueid wrote:
| Moderation decisions should be transparent, rules-based, and
| follow basic due process principles.
|
| That is not so far from what we have already and it is a
| spectacular failure! No, moderation decisions should be
| transparently arbitrary (as opposed to rules-based), and offer no
| 'due process' whatsoever.
|
| I would prefer a social media ecosystem with dozens of players
| and a philosophy more like this: Remember you are
| a guest on our server; we can kick you off if we think you're a
| liability to our reputation; and if we do kick you off, you won't
| be getting any months-long court of appeals because we owe you
| nothing but an archive of your data. Don't be an idiot.
| naasking wrote:
| > That is not so far from what we have already and it is a
| spectacular failure!
|
| We have nothing like a transparent, rules-based system based on
| basic due process. The rules are vague and broad, the
| transparency is basically nil, and due process does not exist
| at all.
|
| People are banned and then rules are invented post-hoc to
| justify them, there is no discovery, and corporations have
| total authority to do as they please without restriction. In
| what non-authoritarian country does this resemble anything like
| a legal system?
| uniqueid wrote:
| Twitter, FB, etc still try to do rule-based moderation.
| Sometimes they later discover there's problem content that
| the rules don't cover.
|
| They still think they need to do (corporate) soul-searching
| and provide justifications to the public when they moderate.
| Since the way they moderate is awful, they often lie or
| reverse course when doing so.
|
| They still have these complicated appeals boards and
| processes. But since it's absurd to have some committee
| deliberating about most 'tweets' these processes are slow or
| seldom-used.
|
| So I consider what they do 'not so far' from what the essay
| recommends because it's the same paradigm, just terribly
| implemented.
|
| My opinion is that it's not desirable, and maybe impossible,
| to implement moderation well using this paradigm.
|
| If a guy walks into a hotel and takes a crap in the lobby,
| the hotel doesn't check a flowchart before kicking him out;
| the hotel doesn't need any justification aside from 'he
| defecated in the lobby', and if the guy petitions the hotel
| to crap - on a later occasion - in the lobby again, the hotel
| won't assemble a committee to tell him 'no'
| naasking wrote:
| > Twitter, FB, etc still try to do rule-based moderation.
| Sometimes they later discover there's problem content that
| the rules don't cover.
|
| Ex post facto laws are prohibited, ie. retroactively make
| something a crime and then charge people for breaking that
| law. This is something Twitter et all do all the time. The
| law is rules-based, and something like that is what this
| article is recommending. Whatever Twitter et al are doing
| is not that.
|
| We can take a cynical guess at what they're doing though:
| negative PR minimization. Negative PR is proportional to
| the size of the mob that's upset about it, so this
| ultimately reduces to mob rule. The law is intended to
| eliminate mob rule.
|
| > They still have these complicated appeals boards and
| processes.
|
| Their appeals process is not complicated. It's "my word
| goes, so you'll take my judgment and like it; you have no
| representation or say in these decisions, and I'm not going
| to tell you what rule you broke or specifically how you
| broke that rule; I can in fact change any rule arbitrarily
| so that you are ex post facto guilty, and there's nothing
| you can do about it, but we're going to be performative
| about abiding to 'rules' to project the illusion of
| impartiality and fairness, unless of course the rules
| inconvenience us". There are countless examples of this.
|
| Governments also try these tactics from time to time, but
| with the separation of powers they are often smacked back
| in line by the courts. Do you see a comparable separation
| of powers in these corporations?
|
| > So I consider what they do 'not so far' from what the
| essay recommends because it's the same paradigm, just
| terribly implemented.
|
| I disagree. It's not the same paradigm because the
| principles and processes at play are not remotely the same.
| These companies are acting on the principle maximizing
| their profitability, which I think leads to the negative PR
| minimization principle, which ultimately reduces to a form
| of mob rule. This is often the opposite of fair and just,
| and this article is about requiring these corporations to
| legally uphold other principles to re-align their
| incentives for fairer outcomes.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| The hotel can't keep the guys belongings in that case.
|
| When your business transaction is fleeting, you can handle
| exceptions easily. You can just stop selling coffee to the
| guy who refuses to pay or makes rude comments.
|
| On the other hand, you can't kick out a tenant because they
| are rude or even if they shit on the floor. You have to go
| through a process that has external, third party controls.
| The tenant is allowed to retrieve their property. You can't
| prevent the tenant from being rented to again.
|
| Google, Facebook and co are basically digital landlords.
| The tenants get rights too.
| uniqueid wrote:
| I do agree these companies have an obligation to provide
| a user with the data he or she creates. We might disagree
| over how far that goes. Personally I think they just owe
| the user a zip archive.
|
| My hotel analogy probably complicated things. The main
| problem I have with moderation on social media is that I
| think moderation is necessary (to keep the world
| relatively sane) but also impossible to implement
| objectively. So it's better to embrace the subjectivity
| than to obfuscate it with flowcharts and procedures.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Yeah I agree that I don't think any platform is going to
| be objective, and I think a lot of users also don't want
| strictly objective moderators.
|
| One of the reasons I want the fediverse to do well is
| because it can solve this case. Your local instance can
| be moderated as you desire - heavy handedly or barely at
| all - and you can still communicate with other folks.
|
| However, we do need some kind of user rights to enable
| platform migrating. Something like mobile phone carriers
| where they have to unlock your phone and let you port
| your number. Social media companies need to let your
| identity and data be portable.
| CA0DA wrote:
| Most of the problems mentioned can be solved with a little bit of
| teaching - teach these "average users" how to get their data
| (email, photos, etc) backed up in a usable way and use a personal
| domain name as their email address, and most of these problems go
| away.
| mikro2nd wrote:
| I believe you're underestimating just how poor the "average
| user"s understanding is of what's going on in "their"
| computers... they literally have no concept of "where" their
| photos/email/etc. is stored or backed up: in the cloud, on
| device, synchronised,... it's just a single black box. They
| literally have NO mental model of that.
|
| A personal domain? They have no idea how to do that, no
| understanding of _why_ you 'd want to do that outside of
| "marketing reasons" (which don't apply to the vast majority,)
| wouldn't know what to do with one should they obtain one, and
| would not be capable of managing said domain once they have it.
|
| Don't believe me? Go and look at an ordinary user's email
| inbox. ALL the emails they've ever sent/received are sitting
| there. Filing/folders? They've no idea what those are or how to
| use them. If an email makes it into a folder (by mistake: fat-
| fingered or a misclick of the mouse) it's _GONE_ for them.
| Literally no idea that it might still be around, and still less
| notion of how to go looking for it. So every email ever sits
| "safely" in the inbox and "search" is a linear eyeball scan by
| date.
|
| I _little_ teaching? I believe not. A _lot_ of teaching?
| Perhaps. Might have some small effect, and even then you 'll
| not get through to a large minority. This is not intended to
| dis those people or imply that they're stupid -- far from it --
| just that they've never developed/been taught the mental skills
| these sorts of abstractions demand, and there's no way to make
| that happen _at scale_. It 's a massive, persistent, pervasive
| UI/UX failure, and a pisspoor reflection on our "industry"s
| priorities.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| > I believe you're underestimating just how poor the "average
| user"s understanding is of what's going on in "their"
| computers... they literally have no concept of "where" their
| photos/email/etc. is stored or backed up: in the cloud, on
| device, synchronised,... it's just a single black box. They
| literally have NO mental model of that.
|
| It's probably something that should be taught in schools,
| early-on, when people have the neurological flexibility to
| absorb it. Sure, the technology will change after you get out
| of school, but I'm pretty damn old, and filesystems and the
| client/server model haven't changed a whole lot since I was
| in middle school. When I was in school, they didn't really
| have computer classes, and I think the generation after me
| basically got "how to use Microsoft Word", when what we all
| really needed was education in the fundamentals.
| contingencies wrote:
| Business doesn't welcome competition or oversight.
|
| _Competition is for losers_ - Peter Thiel (2014 speech at
| Harvard) ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
|
| Rights have to be regulated in to existence or actively fought
| for. These days the populace is so zoned out on Tiktok and home
| delivery the chances of a popular movement are precisely zero
| unless it's toward a new TV serial.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > YouTubers
|
| Actually it was adsense pubilshers and paypal customers who felt
| the burn first. They 'll be feeling some schadenfreude that their
| desperation is now everyone's
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I spend too much time thinking about and tweaking my digital life
| on platforms.
|
| I am a long time paying customer for all of Proton Mail's
| services, and sometimes I assign my domain to Proton Mail.
| Sometimes, when I will be doing lots of traveling, I instead use
| a secure forwarding service to send everything to Gmail because I
| like calendar integration, etc. better. Speaking of Google: I let
| them permanently track my activity on GCP (a service that I
| love), Google Play Books + Movies; I let them keep usage data on
| YouTube for 3 months; everything else I configure for keeping no
| data.
|
| Re: losing data when leaving a platform: I have never even
| thought of backing up my data from Twitter or Facebook because my
| posts have little meaning except for advertising new versions of
| my books and sharing cool tech papers, etc. that I discover. No
| need to archive any of that. When I go swimming in the nearby
| Verde River, I can enjoy swimming through the water without
| wanting to save any. Same applies for social media.
|
| BTW, a great way to control use of social media and other
| platforms is to use the https://freedom.to service. Very
| inexpensive, easy to configure, and is very effective for
| thoughtful time management.
|
| EDIT: I do fairly frequent backups of Gmail and ProtonMail, and
| keep local copies of my GitHub repos on multiple computers. My
| iPhone pictures go automatically to iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive,
| and Google Photos - funny that my life history in photos is to me
| the most important thing to backup.
| [deleted]
| intended wrote:
| When this topic is applied at scale, I feel that the article is
| discussing "Tech giants don't want to recruit the people they
| need to handle customer support", with extra steps.
|
| Tech scales cheaply. People do not.
|
| The argument here, which I wholeheartedly support, is that people
| deserve transparency - we should know what happens to our data.
| The sum of human interactions, our actions as a group, our
| foibles, best natures and choices are sitting behind NDAs and
| firms that are essentially imperial, a state that no one wants.
|
| Firms like the power, but not the cost. But any more equitable
| state will require legions of people to respond to all of those
| complaints raised in a day. Which costs money.
|
| Making that information transparent, giving reasons, creating an
| appeals process (the santa clara principles) is expense.
|
| I bet that no firm wants to, and if forced to do so, they will
| shift the costs to someone else. Either firms that treat all of
| those escalations as fodder to churn through or upsell, or to tax
| paying citizens.
|
| Kafkaesque bureaucracy? If anyone is willing to take the other
| side of a bet, I'll bet that there is ONLY Kafkaesque bureaucracy
| here. Get more people, then you get more lopsided human bias
| influenced decisions. Get more automation, and then you have the
| current state of affairs - no nuance, no clarity and the
| unfeeling boot of an automaton on your account.
|
| "Which KPI defined the fate of humanity? Appeals addressed per
| second"
|
| Final point: In the real world, if you have open transparent
| rules, then it takes human time and physical action to appeal or
| tie up the system.
|
| In a digital system, open and transparent rules mean that someone
| _will_ eventually automate a way to tie up your appeals que at no
| cost. Ban the user? New account shows up in 10 seconds.
|
| I have no idea how to address this last difference.
| rapind wrote:
| To me it just sounds like the business model won't scale if you
| have to solve this problem.
|
| I'm not sure why society has to solve it for the tech giants
| (advertising conglomerates) though. We should just say, via
| regulation, that it needs to be solved or we shut it down. Give
| them a reasonable amount of time to figure it out of course.
|
| My hunch is it's just not workable.
| naasking wrote:
| > Get more automation, and then you have the current state of
| affairs - no nuance, no clarity and the unfeeling boot of an
| automaton on your account.
|
| You seem to be taking as given that they _have_ to be making
| these decisions to boot people off. You can have all of the
| inexpensive automation and little customer support costs you
| want and it works just fine, as long as you don 't try to
| enforce a Kafkaesque set of terms and conditions to begin with.
| sofixa wrote:
| And then you end up with antisemitic child trafficking porn
| ring on your platform, people ( rightfully ) hate you for it,
| and there's legal trouble.
|
| There _have_ to be content rules. Once they 're there,
| various interest groups ( advertisers, religious nuts,
| "concerned parents") _will_ exercise pressure to add their
| "demons" in those rules.
| naasking wrote:
| > And then you end up with antisemitic child trafficking
| porn ring on your platform, people ( rightfully ) hate you
| for it, and there's legal trouble.
|
| What legal trouble? Let's get precise.
|
| > There have to be content rules.
|
| No there don't. You receive a court order, you remove the
| illegal content. That doesn't require a lot of staff, or
| listening to "various interest groups".
|
| That's what being a common carrier means.
| sofixa wrote:
| > What legal trouble? Let's get precise
|
| If there's child porn on your website? I'm fairly certain
| that will bring legal trouble. The same way that torrent
| trackers were sued for "conspiring", "enabling",
| "accessory" to copyright violations.
|
| > No there don't. You receive a court order, you remove
| the illegal content. That doesn't require a lot of staff,
| or listening to "various interest groups
|
| Depending on your size, it can require some staff.
| Furthermore, once you get to a certain size, things can
| be forced - look at YouTube that had to settle and
| implement ContentID to appease copyright holders, or
| OnlyFans having to remove certain types of content due to
| pressure from payment providers.
|
| Payment providers, advertisers, religious, lobbying
| groups will all try to pressure you once you're big
| enough.
|
| Even Cloudflare with their very aggressively
| independent/free speech stance had to bow to the pressure
| and get rid of certain very unsavoury clients.
| naasking wrote:
| > Furthermore, once you get to a certain size, things can
| be forced - look at YouTube that had to settle and
| implement ContentID to appease copyright holders
|
| All fairly automated systems. YouTube has since taken it
| much further though, and this is the questionable step.
|
| > OnlyFans having to remove certain types of content due
| to pressure from payment providers.
|
| Which suggests that payment providers should also be
| utilities. I actually thought this long before the recent
| uptick in censorship, even before they suspended
| Wikileaks' payment processing.
|
| > Even Cloudflare with their very aggressively
| independent/free speech stance had to bow to the pressure
| and get rid of certain very unsavoury clients.
|
| That's not quite how they tell it:
|
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-
| stormer/
|
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-
| for-8chan/
| [deleted]
| hmsshagatsea wrote:
| Am I the only one who doesnt use cloud services/iot for these
| very reasons? Never felt "right" handing all my personal photos
| and messages to Apple or M$, and owning an appliance or gadget
| that's connected to the big bad internet just seems like a
| privacy violation waiting to happen.
| somewhatbetter wrote:
| There is absolutely no problem with those companies. The problem
| is the user. You. Stop blaming others.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Facebook,amazon, twitter, youtube and google are free/cheap to
| hundreds of millions of users. If they started offering the same
| customer service that utilities, offer presumably prices would
| have to go up a lot? My solution: get off google and other
| platforms. I use proton mail. Use duckduckgo (even though it may
| not be as good as google at finding things). use Instagram (which
| although owned by Facebook is not as heavily censored). Use
| substack instead of blogger. Also, do not question the official
| media narrative about covid or the 2020 election. Doing that will
| get your accounts killed fast. make sure your covid and vaccine
| posts are compliant with the CDC and WHO
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I appreciate the EFF putting together some concrete proposals for
| changing the status quo. This is the necessary next step to
| merely identifying the existence of the problem that it seems
| like most channels I see rarely get past.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Let's see.
|
| So, you have an email address at Gmail which you're using to
| authenticate everywhere, which is your username at most services,
| and possibly your main point of contact.
|
| Then you mention something innocuous, I don't know, a cucumber
| maybe, on YouTube in a comment, and now your account is gone
| because apparently cucumbers are a part of some neo-nazi slang or
| a secret pedophile ring slang, and you got reported into
| oblivion.
|
| Since your email address was also a part of getting into your
| bank account, now you've got a problem of getting your money,
| too.
|
| The hoops you have now to jump are worse than changing spelling
| of your legal name or changing the fucking citizenship.
|
| Still, the internet hivemind is raving that "it's not censorship
| if a private company is doing it", "they are a private company so
| they have a right to boot anyone off".
|
| Of course another cohort of smug internet users will say: just
| self-host your email! Well, good luck getting your email
| deliverable if you're a Joe Schmoe and not one of the big players
| in the first place.
|
| The big companies pulled the blanket so much that without using
| their services, you may as well not exist on the internet.
| They've made it extremely difficult, at least. They got, in some
| sense, bigger than many individual governments in regulating
| information channels. And yet they dodge all responsibility on
| the premise of being "private companies".
|
| What a wonderful world to be living in.
| lvncelot wrote:
| >Well, good luck getting your email deliverable if you're a Joe
| Schmoe
|
| I would go further and say good luck self-hosting your email at
| all if you're a Joe Schmoe.
|
| Being able to do that can't be expected of everyone, so for the
| individual (especially the individual reading hackernews) it
| might be a way around the problem - but it's not a solution.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Well, good luck setting up even a Joe Schmoe Email Services
| Company whose email is deliverable.
|
| In the other HN thread about self-hosted email I've heard it
| essentially amounts to paying for racket protection so the
| big players don't "oops we accidentally blacklisted you, good
| luck trying to rectify that" you.
| iammisc wrote:
| Self-hosting e-mail is exceptionally easy. I've been doing it
| for almost a year now without problems. In fact, it's easier
| than a service. I use https://nixos-
| mailserver.readthedocs.io/_/downloads/en/lates... and rent
| space in a data center, so to cloud IP space.
|
| But expecting non-technical people to do it would be a
| nightmare, that I agree with.
| ineedasername wrote:
| My email account is not part of my online banking
| authentication process, and I don't think there's an option to
| do so.
|
| Though it seems the authentication process is not robustly
| secure anyway: a username & password combined with a personal
| question if it hasn't detected a login from your machine
| recently.
| CA0DA wrote:
| > just self-host your email
|
| I have a personal domain name that I host email through
| Protonmail. It is super easy to set up and I do not have any
| delivery issues.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| Even if you use gmail for your domain's email, you won't lose
| your email address when google bans you. You will have to
| take an additional step of changing hosts to recover, but you
| aren't stuck forever.
|
| At least that's what I tell myself to avoid doing the work of
| changing email hosts for my family's domain.
| zensavona wrote:
| You don't self-host, you pay Protonmail to host it for you. A
| step above Gmail but not what the commenter was referring to.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I wonder if government provided personal domains that you
| could point to popular providers of services using a simple
| control panel might be a good idea (they could be on a
| separate tld).
| naturalauction wrote:
| On the other hand, I have a personal domain name that I've
| been using through (ironically) gmail for over a decade. It
| was set up before dkim and dmarc and I (stupidly) never
| implemented them. A few days ago I realized that some of my
| emails were being filtered to spam on Gmail (who knows for
| how long). While it was totally my fault for not acting
| sooner, your average user can't be expected to deal with the
| hassle of using your own domain name, let alone self hosting.
| Aicy wrote:
| Using your own domain is not self hosting, you are still
| using Protonmail's servers to receive and store your emails.
| codetrotter wrote:
| I think that's their point. They have the benefit of a
| custom domain and they pay a good provider to host it for
| them.
|
| I self-host my email on a VPS and have been doing so for
| many many years. But for a startup that I am a part of, I
| said we buy mail hosting from Proton mail and so we did.
|
| Probably eventually I will also begin hosting my personal
| mail with Proton mail because honestly the intermittent
| deliverability problems that I've been having through all
| these years with my self-hosted mail are a bit of an
| annoyance. Mostly it happens that I am marked as spam when
| mailing someone that has never sent mail to me yet. But I
| don't send much email with that address anyways, mostly
| just receive, and rarely to new people, so it hasn't been a
| priority.
|
| For a while I was thinking of starting a paid email service
| of my own, but I just don't think it'll be worth the time
| to try and get into that market. But the idea was that if I
| was making money from it then I could spend the time to run
| such a service for many people and have employees to help
| me run it.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > I host email through Protonmail
|
| Until Protonmail kicks you off for some vaguely specified
| reason.
| lifty wrote:
| So then you switch your domain to a different provider. Of
| course, the real trouble is when you loose the actual
| domain.
| brnt wrote:
| A habit I picked up due to frequent computer system reinstalls
| (intentional and no): learn to be resilient to system failures.
| Know how to setup your system on a whim, and learn to forego
| too much pointless configuration, learn how to deal with doing
| the same takes on different OSes/distros.
|
| I practise the same with email (and other coords): make sure
| changing them is easy, and do it occasionally to test if you've
| thought it through. Compartmentalize by having a number of
| adresses. You'll learn how to combine being lazy with being
| resilient, instead of just lazy and complacent. One email
| address at a company which you cannot hold accountable should
| not and in fact is not your identity. Prove to yourself it
| isn't and in that process learn how to deal with moving your
| identity (since that is how email is used nowadays).
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| There ought to be something like eviction rights for certain
| quintessential Internet services. Requirements to warn users,
| give a reason and chance to rectify, before an outright ban in
| which the user has a generous time frame to move their data.
|
| Your landlord is a "private entity" but you're still a human
| being.
| patmcc wrote:
| This is actually a great idea, and I don't think I've ever
| seen it before. Especially email, I think that's super
| reasonable.
|
| Thanks!
| iammisc wrote:
| This is exactly it. Governments have no problem interfering
| deeply in the private sector when it comes to enforcing the
| public policy. We need that for the internet.
|
| Even worse, when it comes to real estate, the government has
| no problem interfering in the livelihoods of landlords (often
| small operations), but completely absconds its responsibility
| on the internet dealing with giant billion-dollar
| corporations.
| [deleted]
| wutbrodo wrote:
| Unfortunately, this isn't just a question of how much
| governments should interfere, but the manner in which they
| should.
|
| Some analogue to eviction rights is a fantastic idea. But
| the political winds are trending sharply in the other
| direction, pushing more responsibility onto services for
| aggressive enforcement of what people say or do on their
| platforms.
|
| In an ideal world, the guilty would be rapidly and firmly
| dealt with while the innocent would be protected, but this
| is a million miles from the reality of how enforcement at
| scale works. It's a game of false positives vs false
| negatives, and we've recently been steering hard in the
| direction of diminishing user protections.
|
| If I hadn't paid attention for the last ten years, it'd be
| astonishing that begging for corporate overlords to be more
| heavy-handed was coming from the _left_, of all places.
| edgyquant wrote:
| >If I hadn't paid attention for the last ten years, it'd
| be astonishing that begging for corporate overlords to be
| more heavy-handed was coming from the _left_, of all
| places.
|
| It is not coming from the left. Liberals, left and right
| leaning, are demanding corporations take responsibility
| but the _left_ are not liberals (in fact, go to any
| leftist message board and ask them what they think of
| liberals.)
| wutbrodo wrote:
| You seem to be saying that the left, by definition, can't
| be in support of censorship et al. I don't see how this
| follows: in fact, I feel the exact same way about
| _liberals_. Individual negative rights are definitionally
| liberal values, while being on the left (or right) is
| obviously compatible with authoritarianism.
|
| More empirically (though anecdotally), I happen to have a
| decent amount of exposure to honest-to-god self-
| identified Communists and left-anarchists, the type of
| people who talk about praxis and casually mention
| revolution, including a good handful in my social circles
| (though none that i'm extra-close with).
|
| While they're dismissive of the prissier, more
| superficial forms of identity politics that many moderate
| leftists enjoy performing, they're often openly
| dismissive of liberal values. While their preference is
| for regulation, they're fully in support of forcing
| platforms to more heavily engage in banning and
| censorship of undesirables (or as you and they put it,
| "take responsibility" for making the platform "safe"),
| presumably as a strategic move.
| somewhatbetter wrote:
| You are not forced to use that service. Also you don't pay
| anything. What kind of rights do you expect in this case? It
| is not a human right to have access any webservice.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > Still, the internet hivemind is raving that "it's not
| censorship if a private company is doing it", "they are a
| private company so they have a right to boot anyone off".
|
| This is pretty disingenuous. Most of these arguments are about
| whether or not you can have a Twitter account, tying it to you
| losing a gmail account is to twist other people's arguments
| around.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Where did I even mention Twitter?
|
| Looks like you just spotted a right list of "trigger
| keywords" and launched a counterattack.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > Where did I even mention Twitter?
|
| Nowhere, but I wasn't actually saying that you were talking
| about Twitter. Rather I'm saying that you're taking an
| argument usually relevant to social media companies like
| Twitter, and using them in a new context in a way that's
| closer to a straw man than anything else.
|
| > Looks like you just spotted a right list of "trigger
| keywords" and launched a counterattack.
|
| No, I saw an argument I normally make being represented in
| an unfair way, and wanted to express my disagreement. Your
| use of the pejorative "hive mind" did not help my
| perception. Nor, frankly, has this response.
| dang wrote:
| "Disingenuous" is a fancy way of saying "liar", which implies
| intent to deceive. Please don't cross into personal attack in
| HN comments.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| josephcsible wrote:
| How so? What's an argument that Twitter should be able to ban
| whoever they want, that wouldn't apply equally to Gmail?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Because the consequences of losing access to Twitter and
| your personal email are different, and we should treat them
| differently?
|
| Email is _much_ closer to a phone than say, Twitter or FB.
| Losing the ability to post on Twitter is annoying, but
| losing your email can have devastating consequences that OP
| delineated.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Indeed, losing email would be worse, but the usual
| arguments to let Twitter ban whoever they want don't rely
| on the premise that getting banned from Twitter isn't
| that bad.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| They absolutely do depend on the premise that getting
| banned from Twitter isn't that bad. I've made this exact
| argument here many times before; Twitter doesn't rise to
| the level of ubiquity and necessity for us to consider
| classifying it as a common carrier. Meanwhile I
| absolutely can see some argument for email getting such a
| classification.
|
| Any time that we discuss whether or not the government
| should step in and curtail the actions of a private
| party, we are explicitly or implicitly balancing the harm
| of government interference against the harm that such a
| private action might cause.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > The big companies
|
| Governments all over the world use email nowadays for all kinds
| of their own services, but which country offers free email to
| all their citizens? What about social networking or search?
| State broadcasters have existed for decades, yet nothing exists
| as fallback from big tech.
| luckylion wrote:
| Would you want to use an email account provided by your
| government?
|
| State broadcasters are a good point, but we tend to claim
| they aren't really "by the state" but "by the public", and
| thus independent from the state. Countries that don't do that
| (e.g. Russia, China) have invested heavily to have their
| local versions of Google, Facebook & friends.
| l-lousy wrote:
| I would use one as a source of universal online ID in
| account recovery, not for everyday use
| fallingknife wrote:
| If it were e2e encrypted or had the same rules as the post
| office has to follow about when they can spy on your mail I
| would be fine with it.
| dantheman wrote:
| The post office tracks who sends mail to who for
| everyone.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| For official functions yes. As for trust, i trust my gov
| more than google
| Aerroon wrote:
| Estonia gives a government email address to its citizens. I
| use it for some real world services, especially related to
| government. I kind of regret it, because the address is now
| inundated with spam. Apparently some of these services made
| that information publicly available.
| SllX wrote:
| You're not going to lose access to your bank accounts merely
| from losing an email address. At worse you'll be inconvenienced
| for a day, and maybe not even that long because with a phone
| call and your SSN and account number, you can get anything you
| need done including a change of email address for your online
| banking.
|
| Every financial or governmental institution is going to have
| some kind of failsafe for verifying you if you lose access to
| an email address.
|
| If you're worried about being put into a position that you'll
| never have what you need to recover from a loss of an email
| address, then the onus is on _you_ to make sure that doesn't
| happen.
|
| I know you had a larger argument you were articulating, but it
| was undermined by your example.
| somewhatbetter wrote:
| >you have an email address at Gmail Gmail is not the only
| provider. Host your own mail. You will have to learn baroque
| things like operating systems, networking, etc., but it is
| doable.
|
| >on YouTube Create your own platform or deplatform those who
| dislike your "cucumber".
|
| >because apparently cucumbers are a part of some neo-nazi slang
| Yeah, icecream can lick back.
|
| >your bank account Make your own bank or deplatform the
| existing ones. They also need water/internet, right? Call the
| providers, they will cancel their subscription to keep their
| renome inmaculate.
|
| >"it's not censorship if a private company is doing it" Why do
| you want to use services where things like this can happen?
|
| >without using their services, you may as well not exist on the
| internet. Many people really greatful for this.
|
| >What a wonderful world to be living in. Sorry, it will be hard
| to swallow but you picked this timeline. Now instead of crying
| try to make the best out of it.
| dexen wrote:
| Mother of bad takes... let's consider the two alternatives.
|
| Every single example you name happens just the same under
| regulation / government bureaucracy. Replacing private services
| with government services or tight regulation of industry
| doesn't improve error rate nor incentives. Consider the three
| key differences:
|
| 1) When the regulators / the bureaucracy causes you trouble, it
| is legally and culturally considered your own fault - "you
| filled the form badly" or any other such. The error rate gets
| _worse_ , if anything.
|
| 2) When the regulators / the bureaucracy causes you trouble,
| the media has little incentive to hound them persistently.
| Private companies buy advertising, and the media can push them
| until they do; conversely the government doesn't buy
| advertising, but instead can launch endless "lawfare" against
| journalists, thus making it rather unprofitable to hound them
| over - what legally and culturally is "your own fault" anyway.
| That's mis-aligned incentives.
|
| 3) There's no competing government to come to, unless you're
| willing to uproot your whole family and move abroad. And in
| particularly egregious cases even that is either illegal or
| made difficult and lengthy - hey, we're having a pandemic right
| now.
|
| That we know and obsess over the mistakes and problems caused
| by private service providers is prim and proper - as it is
| _thanks to_ the interest of journalists and aligned incentives.
| The same would largely pass unnoticed and at larger scale,
| under regulation / bureaucracy. So let's not go backwards,
| shall we?
|
| The third option, un-coordinated / de-centralized services are
| technically feasible, but quite hard to successfully build for
| organizational & financial reasons. Presumably we will get
| there eventually.
| coldtea wrote:
| You missed how with government there are laws, the
| requirement to serve everybody, and legal recourses to most
| offenses.
|
| A private company like Google can kill your Gmail like that,
| and that's it, they don't even owe you a reason. It's their
| "right" to do whatever.
| dexen wrote:
| Not at all: just like platforms "suspend" account and may
| un-suspend it at their discretion, the government arrests
| suspects and confiscates property for evidence. That it
| ends after a year or two is of no help - the business is
| ruined, the person's good name is ruined. At least with the
| private platforms online our fellow users give us the
| presumption of innocence after a "suspension". Conversely,
| having been arrested or indicted is a long-lasting blemish.
|
| Government and regulated institutions have endless ways of
| denying service - whether by finding procedural errors or
| by stalling. Iron property of bureaucracy. For example: KYC
| and AML laws hurt small businesses at random, including
| countless PayPal drama stories.
|
| Again the difference is in culture and in reporting:
| account "suspended" is often reported and perceived as
| unjust and raise understandable outrage (the egregious
| cases aside), while legal proceedings are usually reported
| and perceived as just and proper.
|
| My point is, if we were to change the private platforms to
| strict regulation or outright government provided services,
| almost all suspensions would be reported and perceived as
| the user's own fault, and probably for the better of the
| society. Which puts the incentives of such supposed
| service-provider completely out of whack.
|
| Case in point: a government-provided account would be
| suspended "for the duration of investigation into spreading
| misleading information about
| health/elections/finances/etc.", and reporters and people
| would largely shrug it off as "well that's for the better".
| Oh and trying to open an account with another government
| would raise all sorts of red flags, naturally.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Have you ever even seen, or had to deal with, a real bad
| government? A really hostile government? A government
| determined to make you feel miserable?
| dexen wrote:
| Yes I have, but that's just one personal experience. My
| frustration with your proposal stems from the general trend
| of government monopoly making for sticky and byzantine
| bureaucracies.
|
| For all the warts of private services, there's alternatives
| available, and the journalists & public opinion don't side
| with them by default - but rather with the user.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Wondering what kind of experience it is. I hope you're
| not one of the refugees on the Belarus/Poland border
| where both governments are pushing and shoving them
| around as if they were hot potatoes.
|
| What you described above, about doing paperwork, has one
| trait: those government institutions live by the book and
| die by the book. A frustrated official may act against
| you as long as regulations permit him, but you can use
| just the same regulations against him right back. I mean
| if you live in a democracy, even a shitty one.
|
| There are, though, no restraints whatsoever on what a
| private company may do, and entrusting them with that
| much of one's life is foolish. Because you don't even get
| to see the rulebook, like, ever. Employees reading your
| private messages daily? Well boo hoo, cry me a river, and
| it's probably in one of those ToS amendmends you agree to
| or else get booted out.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Of course another cohort of smug internet users will say:
| just self-host your email! Well, good luck getting your email
| deliverable if you're a Joe Schmoe and not one of the big
| players in the first place.
|
| Or worse, what happens if you do that, but then your domain
| registrar or ISP decides to cancel you? Or Gmail decides to
| block messages to or from your server?
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Yes, I have recently started to suspect that the trend may
| lead to "Possibly undesirable terms, expressions or ideas,
| false information, possible hate speech in your SMS texting:
| telephone number suspended".
|
| Or, on a lighter side: "Our systems have detected that you
| address to your partners-in-fun inappropriately".
| lifty wrote:
| It's almost impossible to get full digital sovereignty with
| existing widely deployed Internet tooling. For the domain
| part, something like Handshake could give us full digital
| sovereignty, but more people need to use it in order to make
| it useful.
| elric wrote:
| It gets better. There is no way to appeal these decisions.
| There is no way to talk to an actual human being at $megacorp.
| You can't even rely on the legal system, because $megacorp has
| terms of use which you probably agreed to. Even if there were a
| way to go for a legal appeal, even defining something as simple
| as the appropriate court (even country!) would be an uphill
| battle.
| softveda wrote:
| India is trying. Under new IT rules 2021 social media
| intermediaries have to publish the name of an actual
| Compliance Officer based in India and acknowledge a complaint
| within 24 hours and resolve within 15v days.
|
| Twitter was forced to do it, almost on the verge of getting
| banned. So was Facebook and WhatsApp.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| It seems that there's a lot of room for resolving the
| complaint within 15 days to just be the compliance officer
| rubber stamping whatever decision is being appealed. I hope
| that's not the case though.
| pkphilip wrote:
| India's "compliance officer" demand is not for the
| corporation to look into customer issues. The compliance
| officer's role is to look into only censoring of content
| and does not AT ALL include looking into customer support
| issues.
|
| The "Compliance Officer" job is for the Indian government
| to have a neck to squeeze if that social media company
| allows some content on their site which doesn't toe the
| official line from the Indian government.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Can't find the link right now but there was a case where
| someone took Google to small claims over an AdSense issue and
| won. The paralegal Google sent did try to argue that they
| were in the right per ToS but the judge still ordered them to
| pay.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Thank you for pointing this out. When a company also serves as
| a universal login system, who the hell gave them the right to
| block you from accessing those third party services because you
| did not comply with the rules on only THEIR system?!
| asdff wrote:
| Most bank accounts use a username rather than an email for
| logging in (at least for all of mine), and if you forget your
| password and don't have access to the email you can revert to
| the 1990s way of doing things seamlessly and call up the bank
| or even visit a branch.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| I share your general concern here, but this is not how email-
| based service logins work. Excluding account creation and
| password resets, third-party services don't require you to
| access your email every time you log into them. For the most
| part, the login process simply treats the address as an
| identifier.
|
| The actual consequence of the scenario you describe would be
| logging in to each service and changing the email address
| associated with it. But the idea that you'd be locked out,
| especially from your money, is just not realistic.
| choeger wrote:
| Did you ever came across the wonderful "sign in with Google"
| functionality?
| wutbrodo wrote:
| That's a good point. Though it is an importantly different
| point: it's trivial to avoid this feature, to the point
| that I've never once used it.
|
| (Though I gather that there have started to be exceptions,
| as with dating apps. If this becomes more widespread, I'd
| agree with your concern)
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| My bank uses 2FA in which they send a pin to my email on
| login (I know it's not the most secure thing, but it is what
| is being used). Though if I lost access to my email, I can go
| to my bank branch with identification to get it changed in
| 2-3 business days - during which time I won't have access to
| a number of online banking services.
|
| Steam also has the same system.
| dundarious wrote:
| In my experience, the "they are a private company..." argument
| is quite often given as an ironic or sarcastic retort, pointing
| out a perceived inconsistency or hypocrisy, rather than a
| statement that "actually, the system works". More of a "by your
| own logic...".
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Since your email address was also a part of getting into your
| bank account
|
| Huh? I've never seen that happen. Banks have you set up a
| username.
| uniqueid wrote:
| Since your email address was also a part of getting into your
| bank account, now you've got a problem of getting your money,
| too.
|
| There must be a billion ways to implement account deletion
| without this happening. The first one that comes to mind is
| giving the user 6 months of email-only access (so they can move
| to a webmail provider who will tolerate them).
|
| At any rate, the root cause is that Gmail, the world's largest
| webmail service, is affiliated with the world's largest search
| engine and the world's largest repository of video. Never mind
| this essay about social media, the connection between these
| three services is a ridiculous, dangerous thing.
| Falling3 wrote:
| Yea, the multiple uses of a single account strikes me as the
| bigger issue here. Why would my email access by tied to my
| ability to comment on a video sharing website? Same issue as
| Oculus requiring a facebook account.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I disagree, it's the tying of your email address to a
| provider. If your email goes to "first@lastname.com", then
| a quick MX change side steps a Google ban trivially.
|
| But if your email address is "name@provider.com", you're
| kind of screwed.
| MandieD wrote:
| Now the problem is making the acquisition, setup and
| maintenance of personal domain names and mapping to an
| email account something the average literate adult can
| manage.
|
| ...and chuckling ruefully as I recall walking recent
| college grads who are far better devs than I am through
| what needed to happen for SendGrid to actually work for
| one of their project, having to start with "what is an MX
| record?" and "where is that controlled?"
| perihelions wrote:
| [edit: This comment is wrong, see the top reply]
|
| _" The big companies pulled the blanket so much that without
| using their services, you may as well not exist on the
| internet."_
|
| It's an edge case (one small country), but in New Zealand you
| currently can't exist *in public* without either iOS or
| Android. They've universally deployed a covid-related tracking
| app, which has been made mandatory this week, and only supports
| those two platforms.
|
| https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2021/08/coronavir...
|
| https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/...
| hypersoar wrote:
| > in New Zealand you currently you can't exist in public
| without either iOS or Android.
|
| This sounds too insane and stupid to be true. Because it
| isn't. From your second link:
|
| > If you can't use the app, download the NZ COVID Tracer
| booklet, keep a calendar or diary or take photos so you can
| recall where you've been.
|
| Moreover, it looks like this is more about getting businesses
| etc to get people to log their visits. Like masked mandates
| in the United States, I would guess that this isn't about
| making sure that individuals who don't comply are dragged
| away by the cops.
| josephg wrote:
| Yep exactly. The way I've been thinking about it lately is that
| we live with a foot in two worlds.
|
| In the physical world, we have a cascading set of governments,
| councils and countries we form part of in a participatory
| process. If someone is smoking next door I can raise it with
| the home owners association. Or my local council. Or if laws
| need to be changed, I can talk to my member of parliament or
| get involved in the local political process. As a society we
| spent thousands of years and countless deaths to reach this
| fragile place where we take collective responsibility for our
| shared spaces and communities. Who pays for the roads? We all
| do. Who sets the rules for public spaces? We all do.
|
| On the Internet, we absconded from our collective
| responsibility to invest in shared infrastructure. So, absent
| other investment, a bunch of US corporations went around
| creating "free" services. You don't want to pay for
| infrastructure? No problem. We'll cover the bill, so long as
| you don't mind us tracking you everywhere, selling information
| about you to advertising brokers, and advertising to you
| directly. Don't like the spaces we created? We'll aim some of
| the best AIs humans have ever created at your mind to
| algorithmically find your attentional weaknesses. All to keep
| you hooked on outrage, so we can show you more ads. You don't
| live in the US? We don't care. We're in charge and we're
| enforcing American "decency" standards on everyone. Don't like
| the feudal empire we built? You're welcome to delete your
| account and banish yourself from our society. If we don't do
| that ourselves first, automatically. Good luck with the other
| feudalist corporate empires down the road.
|
| We're all paying for this as we watch social trust fray around
| us. We're paying with a generation lost to outrage wars on
| Twitter, antivaxers on Facebook, the capital hill riots, teen
| suicide, conspiracy theories, and witch hunts. All pushed on
| people by algorithms that _our_ community has created in a
| desperate attempt to maximise "engagement". All so we can show
| more ads at any cost. Never mind if democratic liberal society
| crumbles in the process.
|
| We're kings of the world, and the only responsibility anyone
| can name is to the almighty dollar. Somehow maximising
| shareholder value is held in higher regard than our
| responsibility to leave a functioning society to our children.
| Help us all, but we need to do better than this.
| websites2023 wrote:
| Off topic but your response is spot on, and a key
| justification for why I want out. I want out of Silicon
| Valley. I want out of tech, out of screens, out of all of it.
|
| I'm using COVID as an excuse to move away and start drawing
| down my involvement with all of it. I spent years trying to
| work my way into one of the few tech companies I considered
| at least nominally not trying to ruin the world for money but
| that's not even enough.
|
| We have built a dystopia, and short of finding a way to
| dismantle it that still lets me pay the rent and eat and not
| resign myself to a cat food retirement, I just want to get as
| far away from it as possible.
| nicoffeine wrote:
| The endless treadmill of tech fads is brutal, and I agree
| that the current state of affairs has a lot of dystopian
| elements. Remember that there are lots of SMBs who need
| talented IT, and some startups that are trying to tackle
| real issues like hunger and climate change.
|
| If you're set on getting out of the SV bubble, look around
| for needs in regenerative agriculture, or even carbon
| offset projects that need real estate to operate. If I had
| a different family situation, that's what I would be doing.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Keeps me wondering what you're gonna do for a living with a
| nickname like that.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| Or, spare yourself the histrionics and work for one of the
| hundreds of SV companies that don't build megascale ad-
| supported services?
| websites2023 wrote:
| I already do, but I can't shake the feeling that it's all
| bound up together and there are no choices I could make
| that mitigate the deleterious effects the industry has.
|
| You're free to label that histrionics, but I'm the one
| who has to face myself in the mirror.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| > All pushed on people by algorithms that our community has
| created in a desperate attempt to maximise "engagement".
|
| And remember, the maximum engagement one can possibly get is
| the open warfare. Facebook has been a tool of war propaganda,
| too, Zuckerberg is all for it if he can display some ads to
| the participants, last I've heard.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The early Internet was the Wild West, but people didn't
| notice the lesson of how the Wild West was tamed, or perhaps
| assumed there was something ineffable about a digital network
| still rooted in physical infrastructure that would make it
| untameable.
|
| After the frontier era came the company towns and the large
| independent communities... Then, eventually, government
| incorporation and legal control.
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _In the physical world, we have a cascading set of
| governments, councils and countries we form part of in a
| participatory process._
|
| This doesn't really work in practice though. For most people
| they keep their head down and hope that nobody finds fault
| with them, because everything is filled with so many rules
| and gotchas that you're almost guaranteed to be breaking some
| of them. You're supposed to follow rules that you don't even
| know. And this is considered fine by society, because as long
| as you keep your head down you're not going to be bothered.
|
| The internet is the way it is because people in the real
| world are the way they are. When a real world business bans
| you on a technicality you don't really have recourse either.
| xunn0026 wrote:
| This is sadly somewhat correct. The power is have in the
| real world is about the same but the illusion of power in
| the real world is higher.
| heurisko wrote:
| > When a real world business bans you on a technicality you
| don't really have recourse either.
|
| It depends. In the EU, a bank account is deemed a right, as
| an essential utility.
|
| If a bank bans a customer on a technicality, it could be
| construed as breaking this obligation.
|
| Whether or not something like that could apply to something
| like an email address, however, is another question.
|
| https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-
| content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32...
| josephg wrote:
| > When a real world business bans you on a technicality you
| don't really have recourse either.
|
| But there are vanishingly few real world businesses that
| have the kind of editorial power Facebook, Twitter and
| YouTube have over what information people consume. The only
| other industry with that sort of power is the news
| industry. And they (at least used to) have very strict
| legal codes and professional ethical codes which hold them
| accountable to society. It's not ok for journalists to
| slander people or give bogus medical advice. But somehow we
| think it's fine if a witch hunt is trending on Twitter, or
| YouTube patiently convinces people that the earth is flat,
| or vaccines don't work.
|
| You can talk all you want about the sovereignty of
| businesses and I get it. The problem is, when those
| businesses are so big and form such an essential part of
| how people connect in society, we (society) collectively
| depend on those businesses to be responsible actors.
|
| Not all governance is bad governance. Where did you get the
| idea that governments can only ever be part of the problem?
| There are plenty of people doing good work in the US
| government at every level. And plenty of world governments
| that work well. And plenty of historical examples of
| fantastic US public policy measures - like the space
| program.
|
| And if government isn't working properly, you think digital
| feudalism would work better? A world some rogue AI at
| Google is able to shut off your online life because they
| don't like the contents of your email or Google docs. So
| they brick your gadgets and shut you off from the world.
| With no recourse or human appeal process. No thanks!
| meiraleal wrote:
| Your post is the best explanation of blockchain's necessity.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| I think recognising the internet as a utility would go a long
| way to solving most problems with it. Enter hordes and hordes
| of bureaucrats and regulators. maybe not, but I'm sure a
| middle ground exists but were not there yet.
| intended wrote:
| It is a utility, it's largely recognized as such. The issue
| is what to do after that.
|
| That conversation is where things get muddled up.
| kokekolo wrote:
| The internet access is largely recognized as utility. The
| internet services (email, hosting, video sharing,
| messengers, cloud storage, etc) aren't really a part of
| that utility. Many ISPs offer some of their own services
| in addition to the access (@aol.com email anyone?), but
| that can cause issues if the user moves to a location
| where their old ISP is not available, or if ISP goes
| bust.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Though it is worth pointing out that it was in that
| earlier model where ISPs covered most "infrastructure
| services" that the internet was most often classified as
| a utility. Your utility provider gives you all the
| services that you need to use your utility.
|
| Now we are in a much weirder situation where services to
| use the utility are provided by companies you don't have
| a direct utility provider relationship with. That's not
| necessarily a bad thing, but it's a _new_ thing that
| doesn 't follow the traditional "rules" and analogy
| models of traditional utilities. If you have electrical
| problems you call your energy company. If you have
| telephone problems you call your phone company. If you
| have internet problems you can't just call your ISP to
| fix them.
|
| I think a lot of these growing pains with "is the
| internet a utility?" and "is email a utility?" and "is
| Facebook a utility?" are happening precisely because
| we've passed a boundary of what "utility" means both
| governmentally and culturally. When your ISP was your
| email provider, the government had power to regulate it
| is a utility service: if your ISP didn't support things
| that kept you safe the government in theory could mandate
| it as a part of the limited regional monopoly rights
| granted to an ISP. When Google is your email provider the
| government has no such rights, and yet Google has far and
| away de facto become much of a "regional monopoly" for
| email than was ever expected to possible pre-internet. A
| lot of the specifics of Facebook weren't exactly on the
| radar as 1990s internet services, but suddenly for many
| people are required services with monopolistic lockdown.
|
| There aren't easy answers here. We've passed beyond the
| 20th Century definitions of "utility". We probably need a
| new vocabulary for all of this. We probably need to
| collectively "sit down" and establish what all our new
| boundaries are, what powers we expect corporations to
| have over our lives, and which we expect to return to
| governments (as regulatory powers), and which we expect
| to collectively need to disrupt (through existing
| monopoly laws and trust busting exercises). Unfortunately
| no easy answers, just a lot of work to do that we'll
| probably collectively continue to procrastinate.
| foxfluff wrote:
| I'd go deeper and consider not just the internet. How does
| it affect your life if Visa and Mastercard decide they
| don't like you while Paypal freezes your account and keeps
| your money? What if the transportation services decide
| you're not welcome on board the local cabs, coaches, trams
| and subways?
|
| Recently I've been thinking along the lines that the bigger
| a company (or the larger their ability to influence,
| discriminate, and in doing so screw individuals over), the
| greater their social responsibility ( _roughly_ : provide
| the service they've set out to provide without
| discriminating and unjustly taking action against
| individuals any more than is necessary to prevent immediate
| harm & abuse).
|
| That small mom & pop store? Sure, kick me out and ban me if
| you don't like the shade of my mask or my manner of speech;
| I will look for another place to shop. The two big chains
| that own virtually every grocery store and supermarket in
| town? Well it's going to be very inconvenient for
| individuals to be rejected by these behemoths.
|
| Private or not shouldn't matter, there are many companies
| who have huge potential to mess with your ability to live a
| normal life and participate in society and do all the
| things that other people can do.
|
| And I really think this social responsibility should extend
| to all services, not just ones that the customer pays money
| for. So deep pockets and the ability to offer lucrative
| free services that largely displace competition shouldn't
| relieve a company of their responsibility. If anything,
| these seem to give them immense power and huge potential to
| screw people over.
|
| The internet and online platforms are important but still
| just a part of the issue.. which is that corporations take
| over our cities and lives but have essentially no
| obligation to serve you.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The other practical solution from "host yourself" is "maintain,
| in the long-term, multiple email accounts with multiple
| providers" so the blast radius of running afoul of one of these
| providers is curtailed. Fine advice, but in practice few people
| are willing to shoulder the inconvenience of doing it (and the
| bookkeeping to preserve it).
|
| Ironically, this is one of those places where in the US,
| government intervention could help... Not with regulation, but
| with _service provision._ A ".citizen.us" account provided
| through a federal bureau _could_ be constrained legally in ways
| that a private email account currently cannot and serve as an
| authorization provider for citizens who don 't want to entrust
| their digital identity to a megacorporation.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| EFF points to DRM as a driver of vendor lock-in. I would point to
| opaque, often proprietary standards for dynamic, user-hostile
| data formats. Word processing documents come to mind. DOCX and
| DOC never have been fully cross-vendor compatible as far as I can
| tell. And the leading word processor doesn't transparently
| support a format that is. The situation is improper it's an anti-
| social moat for the dominant software vendor to construct.
| pornel wrote:
| Server-side software is even stronger than DRM. DRMd software,
| at least in theory, could be cracked or run under emulation.
|
| You can't crack GMail to run your own version of it.
| jrexilius wrote:
| What magnifies this problem is that unrelated, offline companies
| are more and more frequently requiring you to use these tech
| products in order to do business. On United, you can't buy a
| drink on the airplane without installing an app (only available
| to serfs of the apple or google empires). You can't attend a Cubs
| game in Chicago, again, without an app (no physical tickets,
| before pandemic). You can't see a menu at a restaurant without a
| smartphone and personal internet connection. Order carryout only
| through an app, etc.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| I must presume that at that level of direct interaction the
| evidence of losing customers, and the accompanying insults,
| will be clear.
|
| I also once wanted to go to the theatre to see a company I had
| been dreaming of seeing for decades. They only sold ticket
| online. I told them my insulting part, I used <<dramatic irony,
| metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and satire [and] by a
| combination of violence and sarcasm>> [M. Palin], I left, as
| duly.
| mc32 wrote:
| That seems like a pretty big gap in accessibility.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| In some countries they refrain from it for heavy demographic
| component of the elderly. But if it was not for that, which
| some would call the small part in the issue: no cash etc.
| lbriner wrote:
| It's all very well that a company can disable your account
| without any recourse but I would be interested in someone with
| deep enough pockets to take legal action against an organisation
| that actually posseses your property.
|
| If a bank closed my account and wouldn't give me my money back
| and their "decision was final", I would be rightly outraged. I
| guess the problem is just the massive disparity between some Joe
| Schmo who cannot afford legal action and these multi-billion
| corporates who can actually afford to lose.
| m12k wrote:
| Legislation like the GDPR is a step in the right direction, by
| defining and enforcing your ownership over your own data. It
| seems like we need another similar legislation to define our
| rights when we license IP - e.g. so I can't just lose my Steam
| or Oculus game library.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Oh, but those are not your money, strictly speaking: when you
| make a deposit, you surrender the legal title to the cash, and
| it becomes an asset of the bank. In turn, you get the right to
| cash withdrawal, as specified in the terms and conditions. But
| money itself, those now belong to the bank and the bank can do
| (and actually does) with them whatever it pleases, without
| needing your knowledge, or consent, or approval, or whatever.
| shuntress wrote:
| That money is an asset under the control of the bank, sure.
| But you are willfully ignoring a key aspect of the terms and
| conditions: That when you ask to withdraw your deposit, the
| bank provides that money.
|
| If you want to keep pulling on that thread, you will find it
| connect almost directly to the root problem of large-scale
| human organization:
|
| Some people think that when you put your money in a bank it
| is incumbent on you (it is your _personal responsibility_ ,
| they may say) to ensure that that bank will not close and run
| away with your money and if they do it's your own fault and
| you got what you deserved.
|
| Other people think that when you put your money in a bank,
| you should be able to trust a broad social contract that
| prevents your money from being stolen.
| jlokier wrote:
| > Oh, but those are not your money, strictly speaking: when
| you make a deposit, you surrender the legal title to the cash
|
| You don't own the $10 cash bill in your pocket either. It's
| just a promissory note from the central bank.
|
| When you deposit that $10 cash, you're not surrendering legal
| title, you're transferring liability. Switching from one
| third party to another.
|
| Debating what that _really means_ is where the discussion
| gets interesting. But rather philosophical. Pragmatically,
| you own money in a bank account the same way as you own it in
| cash.
|
| Have fun with the turtles all the way down!
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Not at all wrong. What protects my (in the US) bank money
| isn't that I own the $10 the bank is holding for me; it's
| that the bank is FDIC-insured and if it's ever not able to
| satisfy our contract and give me my money back, the US
| government will step in and hand me my $10.
|
| ... and that $10 has value because the US government says
| it does, and people believe it (including international
| banks and other naton-states, which cram physical dollars
| into secure vaults as back-stops against the implosion of
| their domestic currencies).
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > But money itself, those now belong to the bank and the bank
| can do (and actually does) with them whatever it pleases,
| without needing your knowledge, or consent, or approval, or
| whatever.
|
| Is this actually the situation in developed countries?
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Depends on the country, of course. In Commonwealth (which
| includes the UK, Canada, Australia etc.) Foley v Hill
| (1848) still holds, which contains this absolutely lovely
| passage: Money, when paid into a bank,
| ceases altogether to be the money of the principal; it is
| by then the money of the banker, who is bound to return an
| equivalent by paying a similar sum to that deposited with
| him when he is asked for it. The money paid into a banker's
| is money known by the principal to be placed there for the
| purpose of being under the control of the banker; it is
| then the banker's money; he is known to deal with it as his
| own; he makes what profit of it he can, which profit he
| retains to himself, paying back only the principal,
| according to the custom of bankers in some places, or the
| principal and a small rate of interest, according to the
| custom of bankers in other places. The money placed in
| custody of a banker is, to all intents and purposes, the
| money of the banker, to do with it as he pleases; he is
| guilty of no breach of trust in employing it; he is not
| answerable to the principal if he puts it into jeopardy, if
| he engages in a hazardous speculation; he is not bound to
| keep it or deal with it as the property of his principal;
| but he is, of course, answerable for the amount, because he
| has contracted, having received that money, to repay to the
| principal, when demanded, a sum equivalent to that paid
| into his hands. That has been the subject of discussion in
| various cases, and that has been established to be the
| relative situation of banker and customer, the banker is
| not an agent or factor, but he is a debtor.
|
| Notice how completely different it is from lease of
| tangible property.
| shuntress wrote:
| > _Money, when paid into a bank, ceases altogether to be
| the money of the principal;_
|
| > _but he is, of course, answerable for the amount,
| because he has contracted, having received that money, to
| repay to the principal, when demanded, a sum equivalent
| to that paid into his hands._
|
| These are the two important parts.
|
| The banker _must_ pay back an amount equal to that which
| was deposited but is not required to return the _literal_
| cash. If you hand a banker a physical gold coin to
| deposit you have no reasonable expectation of receiving
| that _exact_ individual gold coin upon withdrawal. But,
| you still get back a gold coin.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-08-23 23:02 UTC)