[HN Gopher] When tech says 'no'
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When tech says 'no'
Author : mooreds
Score : 54 points
Date : 2023-09-04 20:14 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ben-evans.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ben-evans.com)
| doctor_eval wrote:
| > The Canadian government told Google and Meta that if a link to
| a newspaper story ever appears in search, or if a journalist ever
| posts a link to a story on Facebook, then they have to pay the
| newspaper for sending business to the newspaper.
|
| This is first-class bullshit. Google and Meta made their money by
| co-opting third party content, concentrating audiences into their
| own portal, and selling advertising against it - often through
| algorithmic dark patterns. This is a disreputable business model
| that's as old as iframes, but somehow its acceptable for these
| gigacompanies to do it.
|
| To characterise this as "they have to pay the newspaper for
| sending business to the newspaper" is just buying into the kind
| of self-interested "no" that the article purports to discuss.
| They systematically took these audiences away from the content
| providers, and then started to charge a premium to the providers
| for placement in the algorithms. Meta has been the most egregious
| of these but Google has been moving in this direction for years.
|
| These companies have more than enough money to pay for their
| content, but that would break their protection racket business
| model.
| vkou wrote:
| > They systematically took these audiences away and then charge
| a price to get the audiences to return.
|
| How exactly does the existence of search take audiences away?
|
| Or do you mean the 15-word clickbait headline blurb takes
| audiences away? If your news story isn't worth reading after
| reading the headline, it's probably not worth reading.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Google thinks its worth including in the index.
| falcor84 wrote:
| What kind of argument is that? Google's mission was
| literally to "organize the world's information" - of course
| they would include newspapers in the index, irrespective of
| any opinion about the articles.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > They systematically took these audiences away from the
| content providers
|
| Let's not get carried away here. These newspaper businesses
| _choose_ to upload their content to the open web. By making and
| distributing public links, they are accepting the fact that
| others will do the same. They didn 't take anything that wasn't
| on the table.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Posting your content on the open web doesn't give permission
| for somebody to lift the content from your site and display
| it next to their own ads.
|
| (I don't know why I'm defending news here, they could have
| fixed it themselves years ago. )
| slyall wrote:
| Come on, when you say "lift your content" you mean show a
| headline, a picture and maybe the top line of the story
| with a huge link back to the original website?
|
| 90% of the time that data is published as "Open graph"
| format by the website so it looks nice. The website is
| going out of it's way to make links to it on facebook look
| pretty.
| tomComb wrote:
| The law is essentially a tax on links. His characterization of
| it is accurate and is the same as any in depth analysis I've
| seen. If you want a really good, independent analysis read
| Michael Geist, who is a law professor at Ottawa.
|
| Sounds like you are letting your hatred of meta and Google warp
| your analysis of this bill (which is what the government is
| counting on).
| natdempk wrote:
| Or: newspapers opted into the Google + Facebook ecosystem
| because it was beneficial for them to do so, customers choose
| to use Google and Facebook because they provide tangible user
| benefits, and competition is just a click away yet most
| newspapers fail to deliver a competitive value prop to
| visit/subscribe directly compared to the traffic they get from
| Google/Facebook. The reality is that the newspapers derive
| great value from Google/Facebook traffic (lets them get more ad
| money + subscribers) whereas the value of the newspapers to
| Google/Facebook is marginal as they are just more content in a
| feed/aggregator. There's no racket going on here just
| incentives/products/reality all around. If anything the
| Canadian government's asks are the real racket/shakedown.
|
| I recommend reading this article from Stratechery if you want a
| more thorough breakdown of the incentives from when Australia
| tried to do something similar:
| https://stratechery.com/2020/australias-news-media-bargainin...
| riku_iki wrote:
| > and competition is just a click away yet most newspapers
| fail to deliver a competitive value prop
|
| there are many points where big tech abuses their
| monopolistic advantage making competition not fair.
| natdempk wrote:
| I don't disagree there are some instances of this in other
| areas, but in the case of links to news websites I don't
| think there's a meaningful argument against customers
| choosing which URL to visit as it relates to competition.
| riku_iki wrote:
| fb+google have monopoly on links discovery, customers
| can't open news URL unless visit google or fb and watch
| all their ads and give them data.
| vkou wrote:
| That's bad behaviour against users, not bad behaviour
| against newspapers.
| riku_iki wrote:
| For newspapers, datapoint would be to check how many
| users click on URL after reading title + citation at
| google or fb.
| vkou wrote:
| There are legitimate criticsms to be made about those
| practices, but which exact anti-competitive practices are
| employed by Google/Bing against newspapers, in particular?
| kaoD wrote:
| Then how come the media backtracked this exact law in my
| country (which actually came into effect) as soon as they saw
| their audience plummet?
| summerlight wrote:
| > They systematically took these audiences away from the
| content providers
|
| It sounds like those audiences have an equivalent chance of
| organically discovering those news without centralized search
| engines or news feed systems? Then what's the value of those
| systems? If they don't provide any values, then why don't those
| audiences just go to the new website instead of clicking a link
| from Google/Facebook/whatever.
| Affric wrote:
| And only made possible by the fact that levels of neutrality
| were enforced lower in the stack. These tech giants would not
| have been possible if the telecoms companies had the power to
| leverage their platforms for advertising.
|
| That's not to say the social media model wasn't revolutionary.
| It was like the emergence of the Gnathostomata. But it seems
| crazy that people's online identities are tied directly to the
| companies trying to manipulate them.
| ta8645 wrote:
| If you are correct, then those newspaper businesses will now
| enjoy an economic upturn, since Google and Meta no longer allow
| links to them on their platforms. But I think we'll see it hurt
| the Canadian businesses instead. At the very least, it will hit
| the small independent companies very hard, since it was the
| primary method readers found them in the first place. This may
| have the unfortunate side effect of reducing the number of
| players who can meaningfully contribute to public discourse in
| Canada.
| tomComb wrote:
| The move away from globalization has had an unfortunate side
| effect: greater political corruption, where local politicians
| enact laws for the benefit of their local corporate buddies, and
| pretend (usually successfully) that it is an act of nationalism
| and standing up to big tech.
|
| That's what happened here in Canada with Bill c-18, as mentioned
| in the article. It's been rather sickening to watch the
| government defend this bizarre law that is little more then a
| shake down for their buddies at bell and Rogers.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Who are bell and rogers? Some sort of newspaper firm? Plus
| while corruption is possible, protectionism is the less greasy
| term, and equally likely to be driving things
| grzm wrote:
| I assume Bell Telephone (and its descendants) and Rogers
| Communications
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Communications)
| tomComb wrote:
| They are the dominant telecom companies, but they are much
| more than that here and have had the politicians in their
| pockets, protecting them from competition and funneling tax-
| payers money to them, for years.
|
| You might be puzzled that I mention them in relation to a
| bill that is supposed to be for journalism - but the official
| analysis of this bill confirms that the majority of the money
| actually goes to them. That is normal here.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| This has always followed protectionism, I'd guess. Really the
| solution would have been to socialize the domestic losses
| caused by globalization (retraining workers, etc.), but there
| seems to be no interest or political will towards doing that.
| colmmacc wrote:
| I spent a few years in Ireland and the Netherlands lobbying
| against insecure voting machines. I had so many conversations
| with politicians and civil servants where these effects were in
| abundance. In each country I was representing a group that
| included the most eminent and experienced computer scientists in
| the country. Whenever we briefed someone for the first time, it
| would only take a minute or two to cover how without a voter-
| verified paper audit trail, no-one knew how to build a system
| that provided anonymity, verifiability, and resistance to voter
| coercion and vote selling. But it just never clicked, so many of
| them refused to believe that we couldn't simply "nerd harder".
| And of course, there was no shortage of charlatans who would tell
| them that _they_ could solve it.
|
| In Ireland, we put enough pressure on the politicians for them to
| create a cross-body commission to investigate. Because anyone
| could make detailed submissions, and because the commission
| treated these submissions like the clerks of the Supreme Court
| treat amicus briefs; it was pretty effective. The commission
| ended up pausing, and ultimately abandoning, the rollout. Ever
| since I've learned to appreciate any avenues to "de-politicize" a
| controversy and get it to that kind of body.
| [deleted]
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| How did you get that body accepted as an idea as opposed to a
| "kick into the long grass" solution?
| jacquesm wrote:
| That means you know Rop :)
| kemotep wrote:
| The verifiability is the biggest one. One could conceivably
| develop a voting system that had perfect accountability,
| secrecy, and integrity, but would be far far more difficult to
| work out by hand. A zero knowledge roll up is not something
| your average poll worker could work out on scratch paper. Paper
| ballots counted by hand can and can achieve all the things we
| desire in election systems.
| hu3 wrote:
| You should go to Brazil and try your luck there:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/in-a-blow-to-e-v...
|
| From what I gather they banned any paper trail verification.
| Putting 100% trust in digital registry of the votes.
|
| Must be the first unhackable system in history. /s
| dataflow wrote:
| > we can make it secure, or we can let law enforcement have
| access, but that means the Chinese can get in too
|
| How is this in category 3? Give decryption keys to your own
| government and not the others. I get it if you think it'll
| require more opsec from your government than you might trust them
| with, or that it'll have other negative effects (see: category
| 2), but how is this _physically impossible_ (category 3)?
| falcor84 wrote:
| I would assume that the issue is that the mere idea of
| decryption keys that can be "given" means there is no end-to-
| end encryption.
| dataflow wrote:
| That can't be what they're saying, since asking for "let us
| access this" is already assuming no end-to-end encryption.
| The other governments would have nothing to do with the
| argument in that case.
| benedictevans wrote:
| If you give the key to every government that demands it (USA,
| UK, France, Germany, Japan... ), and every agency (CIA, NSA,
| FBI, DHS, DEA...) then how long will that remain secure? The
| key will leak and then you have no security.
| dataflow wrote:
| You only give it to the government entities your country is
| asking you to. Heck, you could even encrypt each user's data
| with their own government's key.
| naetd wrote:
| The first type of 'no' is summarized as just being annoying to
| implement and not making a big difference, but I think it can be
| a lot deeper and more consequential than that.
|
| There can be regulation that _will_ damage a companies profits,
| but also provides positives to public health or other beneficial
| outcomes. Deeply profitable companies will fight tooth and nail
| against these regulations even if they are full aware of the
| damage they are causing. They will come up with as many
| convincing sounding reasons to say "no" as possible in the name
| of those immense profits they enjoy, and use techniques like
| expensive lobbying, sponsoring pseudoscientific studies, running
| ads, play up fears about economic damage or other negative
| outcomes of the policy, etc. They try to make it sound like the
| second or third kinds of "no" in the article and paint it as a
| bad idea, or impossible to do, or anything else they can to
| prevent the regulation. And if a certain individual at that
| company doesn't want to fight for their unethical profit, they'll
| be swiftly replaced with someone who will.
|
| The obvious (non tech) example is something like the tobacco
| industry, which spent millions on manipulating public and policy
| opinion using misleading scientific sounding language or studies
| to prevent or delay regulation despite being fully aware of the
| many health detriments of smoking. Public health has been
| significantly improved as a result of smoking reduction,
| restrictions on where you can smoke in public spaces, age
| restrictions, whatever.
|
| I think there is a lot of this currently in companies profiting
| off social media, oil and gas, and selling user data.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I think there is a good ole 2x2 grid here.
|
| The socially positive nature of the industry on one axis and
| the degree of strong completion on the other.
|
| So we can have say Retail food stores, sainsbury's and tesco,
| that deliver mostly positive things (food!) in a highly
| competitive manner.
|
| We can also see positive industries (water / sewage) that have
| terrible competitive landscapes (fundamentally monopolies/
| utilities). These need to be regulated differently - ie with
| hands firmly clasped round the throat of all participants.
|
| Bad industries and bad competition looks like the illegal drugs
| trade (I personally think the cut throat nature of retail
| stores is as literal cut throat as we want. When the completion
| stops focusing on making the product better and starts focusing
| on killing the other stores employees we are not seeing
| improved markets
|
| And your example was bad industry / good competition-
| cigarettes are a good example here.
|
| I think it's worth adding a third dimension to the grid - time
| and future shape. The retail food model is a good one but over
| time we can see the effect on out of town car parks, the
| urbanisation vs wqlkability etc etc. Intervening in how stores
| advertise the price of milk won't help this. But neither will
| "nerd harder" - there is no solution to "this business model if
| continued will go the wrong way" that does not involve chnaging
| the business model - ie charging for car parking space or
| something.
|
| Anyway, it struck me as a useful simple graph. As business
| models move to different parts of grid they get regulated
| differently, and adding time/dependencies in means we can shape
| the results.
|
| But in the end I am arguing for smart proactive interventionist
| government.
|
| Let governments be governments
| mdgrech23 wrote:
| 100% - people don't realize what kind of mastermind bullshit
| companies come up with to keep the profits rolling in nevermind
| the damage caused.
| dmurray wrote:
| > Your MPs' WhatsApp group can be secure, or it can readable by
| law enforcement and the Chinese, but you cannot have encryption
| that can be broken only by our spies and not their spies. Pick
| one.
|
| It doesn't seem technically infeasible for WhatsApp to move to a
| protocol where, say, every message is transmitted twice, once
| encrypted with the recipient's public key and once with the NSA's
| public key. Or for the state to ban all messaging systems that
| don't follow that protocol.
|
| Arguments against encryption are generally philosophical rather
| than purely technical.
| lstamour wrote:
| You're making the original point - you can have encryption that
| can include the NSA, but it would also end up including other
| spies too, as secrets tend to leak the more important and
| widely used they are. The original point was not that you can't
| have a secure leak, but that the secure leak ultimately
| wouldn't stay secure forever. You don't want to build the
| weapons your enemies end up using against you, and in digital
| ecosystems it's often trivial to do this.
| benedictevans wrote:
| I am not a cryptographer, but the standard objection to this is
| that the NSA key will leak, either generally or be stolen by a
| Russian/Chinese agent. And in implementation, how many keys are
| we talking about? USA, UK, France, Germany, USA, Australia...
| Every country's law enforcement will demand a key, and how long
| will that remain secure?
| btilly wrote:
| The third 'no' is really well shown in
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg.
|
| (A video about an expert being asked to do the impossible by
| people who have no idea what they are asked.)
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| >First, and this is the default, they're saying no because they
| just don't like it.
|
| >Second, though, the tech industry (or the doctors, or the
| farmers) might be saying no because this really will have very
| serious negative consequences that you haven't understood.
|
| >If the second kind of 'no' is 'that's a really bad idea', the
| third kind is 'we actually can't do that'.
|
| I think a big industry is plagued by the first case. On the other
| hand, a specific tech worker is more prone to say no because of 2
| and 3.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| > but you cannot have encryption that can be broken only by our
| spies and not their spies. Pick one.
|
| This doesnt seem true in practice. I would look at prism as an
| example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| Forcing down the throat cookie notifications
| Affric wrote:
| lol... the option to not create a pervasive surveillance state
| online was there. The big players didn't want it.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| There is kind of a "boy who cried wolf" thing going on where the
| tech industry has pushed back hard on pretty much any sort of
| regulation and oversight that the regulators automatically assume
| "they're saying no because they just don't like it.".
| fallingknife wrote:
| And for what proposed regulation of the tech industry was the
| pushback unwarranted?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| A big part of the problem here is that most of the proposals to
| regulate tech companies actually are terribly crafted attempts
| to regulate something the drafters poorly understand, or naked
| power grabs by other industries (legacy media conglomerates
| being a common perpetrator).
|
| A good heuristic is to look at which part of the industry is
| opposing it. If it's opposed by small businesses or individual
| developers or civil liberties organizations, that's a bad rule
| even (or especially) if huge tech conglomerates like it. But if
| it's the reverse -- like antitrust enforcement -- now you might
| be onto something necessary.
| SenAnder wrote:
| There's another kind of 'no' - when the programmers and engineers
| and other technically expert workers are nearly universally
| against something, but the CEO- and lawyer-classes are for it.
| Like software patents.
| dylan604 wrote:
| if only the entire workforce of ad tech would just say no.
| smoldesu wrote:
| You're welcome to offer a more attractive alternative, if one
| exists. The market is always ready.
| gumballindie wrote:
| > Like software patents.
|
| Considering ai folks want to steal people's work without
| honouring licensing a lot more will be in favour of patents.
| fatfingerd wrote:
| Call me a cynic, but I think a patent regurgitation machine
| will more likely have a successfully defended patent against
| the other AI makers than be shut down for the patent
| infringement it enables.
| foobiekr wrote:
| It's hard to claim that SW engineers are against SW patents
| since ICs are responsible for submitting and helping to
| complete the vast, vast, vast majority of the patents filed by
| big tech.
|
| As with a bunch of the sketchy-as-hell "tech" businesses, a lot
| of tech people have zero moral compass if it makes them an
| additional $.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I agree with the principle of your argument, but not with
| "zero moral compass". You may have a moral compass that goes
| against software patents in general, but it would require a
| _very strong_ one to sacrifice your ability to advance your
| career and your family 's quality of life on this altar.
| jonas21 wrote:
| I know a few engineers who are quite proud of their software
| patents. And many more who seem ambivalent, but are happy to
| file them if they get a bonus out of it. So, I don't think it's
| as clear-cut as you think it is.
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| They did say 'nearly universally.' I don't think what you
| said contradicts that?
| rat9988 wrote:
| It's not as nearly universal as he thinks. That's his
| point.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Or, even more banally, open office floor plans.
| jntvjnvutnuvt wrote:
| That's odd because there are tons of engineers with software
| patents.
| refulgentis wrote:
| This is quite off-base, unfortunately. Don't read it as fact, but
| as a vibe, and take note it's an infohazard if you have any
| managerial responsibility in a tech company.
|
| Among many, many, things, the EU was not beat back on messaging
| interoperability -- in fact, it's due to announce the draft list
| next week.
|
| And it wasn't messaging interoperability -- its a set of
| requirements for gatekeeper services with over 45 million users.
|
| I didn't expect this from Ben, but when I think back, I haven't
| seen much work from him over the last 5 years. Did he drop out of
| industry?
| benedictevans wrote:
| Originally, the EU had one paragraph on this. That turned into
| separate 50 page draft once messaging people explained the
| issues.
|
| And no, nothing happened to me ;)
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