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Is it possible that Apple and/or Google being the market leaders in China/Russia is better for the world than their foreign counter parts? If they're invested i

Is it possible that Apple and/or Google being the market leaders in China/Russia is better for the world than their foreign counter parts? If they're invested in these markets, could they influence them in more positive ways?

sneak 6y ago
I think that hinges on the assumption that it is better for the world that US military (that has warrantless access to the huge amounts of non-e2e-encrypted-data that Apple and Google collect) becomes stronger and more powerful thereby (relative to the Chinese/Russian militaries). They can't be evaluated independently: a win for Apple/Google/AWS/Microsoft is a win for the CIA, NSA, and the US armed forces by providing access to the end-users' data to the US spying apparatus. I think the US military's record on human rights and violence is roughly equivalent to that of China or Russia (a view not widely shared within the US, but one that at least holds a little water in full view of the historical record, on balance) so I'm pretty skeptical of the "better for the world" claim. I'm also open to the idea that perhaps SV software (which, by circumstance, is subject to US military spying) is so much better and more efficient than that which is available elsewhere (this is certainly true wrt Free Software) that substituting authoritarian mass surveillance by a foreign national military (the US) for an equivalent authoritarian mass surveillance by a local national military (Russia/China) is basically identical on that scale, and that the whole world is better for iOS and Google Apps/Gmail due to the end-user lifestyle and efficiency benefits they provide and the essentially identical human rights bullshit that passes for "national security" in all major jurisdictions. That's also a reasonable argument. In any case I'm not looking forward to additional per-nation meddling in the UX of the major multi-billion-dollar mobile platforms. It's going to shit them up terribly (moreso than their owners are already doing with their services revenue models), and force people who want to avoid it to mobile software that has much, much, much less investment into it (such as Free Software).

sneak 6y ago

I think that hinges on the assumption that it is better for the world that US military (that has warrantless access to the huge amounts of non-e2e-encrypted-data that Apple and Google collect) becomes stronger and more powerful thereby (relative to the Chinese/Russian militaries). They can't be evaluated independently: a win for Apple/Google/AWS/Microsoft is a win for the CIA, NSA, and the US armed forces by providing access to the end-users' data to the US spying apparatus. I think the US military's record on human rights and violence is roughly equivalent to that of China or Russia (a view not widely shared within the US, but one that at least holds a little water in full view of the historical record, on balance) so I'm pretty skeptical of the "better for the world" claim. I'm also open to the idea that perhaps SV software (which, by circumstance, is subject to US military spying) is so much better and more efficient than that which is available elsewhere (this is certainly true wrt Free Software) that substituting authoritarian mass surveillance by a foreign national military (the US) for an equivalent authoritarian mass surveillance by a local national military (Russia/China) is basically identical on that scale, and that the whole world is better for iOS and Google Apps/Gmail due to the end-user lifestyle and efficiency benefits they provide and the essentially identical human rights bullshit that passes for "national security" in all major jurisdictions. That's also a reasonable argument. In any case I'm not looking forward to additional per-nation meddling in the UX of the major multi-billion-dollar mobile platforms. It's going to shit them up terribly (moreso than their owners are already doing with their services revenue models), and force people who want to avoid it to mobile software that has much, much, much less investment into it (such as Free Software).