8 ms·

How is that legal? Isn't that just incompetent government?

by hugi 5y ago

bogwog 5y ago
Yes, Google and Apple's current situation is the result of incompetent government.
partomniscient 5y ago
We're living in a time where if you don't have a mobile phone you can't complete the online form and therefore the transaction becomes impossible. This is even worse if you're on the phone and the person on the other end of the phone that works for the company is the one filling in the digital form. The fact that its now further embedded in an app. owned by international conglomerates is hardly suprising. They're slowly losing what control they had. Governments are incapable of doing sensible things involving ever changing technology. There are too many things understood by too few people for sensible decisions to be made, let alone worrying about do these things age well and just add to the behemoth of red tape^H^H^H^H digital bureaucratic cloud storage. Paper systems didn't have these problems (although they certainly had some disadvantages). The ACCC is one of Australia's few good independent bodies, but pretty much all of the others have had their funding greatly reduced over time. Whatever good ideas they come up with just get ignored a lot of the time, because corruption pays and ineptitude is normalised. The financial watchdog is basically toothless at this point. The Robodebt scheme [1] is just one of their recent screwups. Interestingly, there's now something similar that's come to light regarding Post Office budgets in the UK from a few decades ago. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
- stanislavb 5y ago
  "Governments are incapable of doing sensible things involving ever changing technology." - I moved to Australia about 4 years ago. I'm pretty convinced that the Australian Gov is much ahead in regards to tech adoption compared to most places in EU and US. In my 4+ years in Oz, I had to visit an offline institution exactly 3 times (you can do almost everything online). Everything's been flawless, super easy and very well integrated - from procuring various docs to submitting a tax return. - Yes, we can always find something that could be improved; however, if you compare how things are run in Oz to most other countries, you will find out it's much ahead.
  - partomniscient 5y ago
    Its all fine until you have to complain about something going wrong and it becomes very trying to comply with whatever they need despite it being their fault. I got stuck in a bureaucratic loop because an OCR reader interpreted a 0 as an 8. The fact that the automated process changed status and started throwing more forms at me, even though none it makes sense in context. Just because it was programmed that way. I still get them. Filling in forms with 0's is easier than dealing with people who insist I should be getting them in the first place (one person worked out what had happened, but transferred me to another department to get it fixed where I inevitably had the internal phone system fail and hang up on me. The horrible hold music/talk experience where they tell you how wonderful everything is just makes me loathe to attempt it again. These things should happen less when human judgement is involved rather than cause-effect programming. You may be right though - I can't speak for many overseas systems. I did also get stuck in the UK tax system. They were sending me threatening letters, ironically I had to fill in multiple years worth of forms to escape the system even though I was in another country, and then they eventually worked out they owed me money. Then there were the server failures due to load, for a specific online petition. Noone cared, but it was basically due to using old MS technology called Webforms which creates gargantuan data blobs per user/session called ViewState, which ran the servers out of memory. I think the online census submissions process had a similar issue too. I do agree its nice to deal with these things from home rather than queue in some official building somewhere though. Maybe I just have a natural tendency to attract flies to bypewriters or something. Maybe I'm bitter because I've built entire sites for the government only for them to throw the lot away once it was done, because the site might make them look bad. I'm just very aware of the downsides of over-automation. If you're a valid case, but the existing system doesn't cater to you, then you become the problem rather than the system being the problem. Anyway, I still think its awesome that the ACCC noticed this entanglement and brought it to peoples attention, and are one of the few indepedent bodies left that have some teeth.
    - hyperman1 5y ago
      The horrible hold music/talk experience where they tell you how wonderful everything is just makes me loathe to attempt it again. It did exactly what it was supposed to do: lower their costs by making it your instead of their problem.
- barbecue_sauce 5y ago
  Interesting how in the US "scheme" already has the connotation of an evil plot, but abroad it just means "government program".
- stephen_g 5y ago
  I think the ACCC actually hasn't been that great for a while, unfortunately. We have awesome consumer protection, but they've made serious missteps more recently, especially under their current commissioner, Rod Simms. They made a terrible ruling forcing the NBN to have 121 points of interconnect (basically peering POPs) back in 2009 (originally, NBN Co wanted to have 14), to protect the seven or so long-distance fibre providers. In the meantime, these providers merged with each other so now we only have three, and the 121 POI policy made it extremely difficult for smaller ISPs to compete on the NBN, because most couldn't afford transit to all of them, so we saw huge consolidation in the ISP space. So the ACCC ruling directly caused a reduction in competition in the ISP space, and it didn't help prevent what they were trying to prevent in the transit market either! Then, look to the insanity of the media bargaining code. May have been some coercion from some Government donors behind the scenes there, who knows... But at the end of the day, which there were some legitimate concerns about Google and Facebook, most of their conclusions didn't really make sense (they conflated what actually happens, where Google and Facebook publish a link and one-sentence excerpt as if it was the same as publishing the whole article, and their solution was to force Google and Facebook to pay money to the big media organisations, which just happen to be big donors of the political party in power). The resulting law was so bad that Facebook threatened to pull out of the country altogether and removed news from Australian timelines for a while, until the bill was watered down. In terms of these policies, the ACCC strikes me as not having a great deal of competence, but at the same having huge delusions of grandeur. I really don't want to see another episode like the tiff with Facebook, where even though Facebook do super scummy things and I generally dislike them, in that circumstance they were absolutely in the right... I vaguely recall being angry at the ACCC about a bunch of other things over the years, but I can't remember any specifics - will have to try and look it up. I think it was blocking some mergers that wouldn't have reduced competition, but then approving some that posed potential serious damaging consequences to the market etc.
  - partomniscient 5y ago
    At least there's still a bunch trying to do the right thing by the people as a whole rather than the people currently in charge. I agree the ACCC has been a little hit and miss lately, but its one of the few good things we still have. I'm really hoping they leave medicare alone as much as possible. Then again, somehow Newscorp got their way vs. facebook/google - only fair the ACCC does too.
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
> How is that legal? You are forgetting the number of democratic countries which forced their COVID app from Appstore/Playstore on their citizens. They came short of calling it mandatory download but mandated the app as entry pass for several services. You don't use a monopoly powered smartphone? You cannot afford a phone at all? Tough luck buddy(/s). Only reason these COVID pass apps didn't stick around in the democratic countries is because the apps didn't do what's it's supposed to do; Ironically because the app couldn't be made mandatory download thereby not achieving the critical mass.
- hugi 5y ago
  What countries were that?
  - Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
    Not going to name countries and trigger a slugfest. But will include the List of countries with official contact tracing apps[1] and you can search for which services those apps were mandated. EFF commentary on these apps[2]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_apps#List_of_countries_with_official_contact_tracing_apps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_apps#List_of_countrie... [2]https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/09/covid-19-tracking-technology-will-not-save-us https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/09/covid-19-tracking-tech...
    - hugi 5y ago
      My country (Iceland) has an official contact tracing app listed there. It was developed by volunteers and contributed to the government and the source is open on github. Nothing you said applies to it.
      - Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
        Good to know, Good for Iceland residents. Note that I didn't say 'all democratic countries'.

How is that legal? Isn't that just incompetent government?

by hugi 5y ago

How is that legal? Isn't that just incompetent government?

bogwog 5y ago

Yes, Google and Apple's current situation is the result of incompetent government.

partomniscient 5y ago

We're living in a time where if you don't have a mobile phone you can't complete the online form and therefore the transaction becomes impossible. This is even worse if you're on the phone and the person on the other end of the phone that works for the company is the one filling in the digital form. The fact that its now further embedded in an app. owned by international conglomerates is hardly suprising. They're slowly losing what control they had. Governments are incapable of doing sensible things involving ever changing technology. There are too many things understood by too few people for sensible decisions to be made, let alone worrying about do these things age well and just add to the behemoth of red tape^H^H^H^H digital bureaucratic cloud storage. Paper systems didn't have these problems (although they certainly had some disadvantages). The ACCC is one of Australia's few good independent bodies, but pretty much all of the others have had their funding greatly reduced over time. Whatever good ideas they come up with just get ignored a lot of the time, because corruption pays and ineptitude is normalised. The financial watchdog is basically toothless at this point. The Robodebt scheme [1] is just one of their recent screwups. Interestingly, there's now something similar that's come to light regarding Post Office budgets in the UK from a few decades ago. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme

stanislavb 5y ago
"Governments are incapable of doing sensible things involving ever changing technology." - I moved to Australia about 4 years ago. I'm pretty convinced that the Australian Gov is much ahead in regards to tech adoption compared to most places in EU and US. In my 4+ years in Oz, I had to visit an offline institution exactly 3 times (you can do almost everything online). Everything's been flawless, super easy and very well integrated - from procuring various docs to submitting a tax return. - Yes, we can always find something that could be improved; however, if you compare how things are run in Oz to most other countries, you will find out it's much ahead.
- partomniscient 5y ago
  Its all fine until you have to complain about something going wrong and it becomes very trying to comply with whatever they need despite it being their fault. I got stuck in a bureaucratic loop because an OCR reader interpreted a 0 as an 8. The fact that the automated process changed status and started throwing more forms at me, even though none it makes sense in context. Just because it was programmed that way. I still get them. Filling in forms with 0's is easier than dealing with people who insist I should be getting them in the first place (one person worked out what had happened, but transferred me to another department to get it fixed where I inevitably had the internal phone system fail and hang up on me. The horrible hold music/talk experience where they tell you how wonderful everything is just makes me loathe to attempt it again. These things should happen less when human judgement is involved rather than cause-effect programming. You may be right though - I can't speak for many overseas systems. I did also get stuck in the UK tax system. They were sending me threatening letters, ironically I had to fill in multiple years worth of forms to escape the system even though I was in another country, and then they eventually worked out they owed me money. Then there were the server failures due to load, for a specific online petition. Noone cared, but it was basically due to using old MS technology called Webforms which creates gargantuan data blobs per user/session called ViewState, which ran the servers out of memory. I think the online census submissions process had a similar issue too. I do agree its nice to deal with these things from home rather than queue in some official building somewhere though. Maybe I just have a natural tendency to attract flies to bypewriters or something. Maybe I'm bitter because I've built entire sites for the government only for them to throw the lot away once it was done, because the site might make them look bad. I'm just very aware of the downsides of over-automation. If you're a valid case, but the existing system doesn't cater to you, then you become the problem rather than the system being the problem. Anyway, I still think its awesome that the ACCC noticed this entanglement and brought it to peoples attention, and are one of the few indepedent bodies left that have some teeth.
  - hyperman1 5y ago
    The horrible hold music/talk experience where they tell you how wonderful everything is just makes me loathe to attempt it again. It did exactly what it was supposed to do: lower their costs by making it your instead of their problem.
barbecue_sauce 5y ago
Interesting how in the US "scheme" already has the connotation of an evil plot, but abroad it just means "government program".
stephen_g 5y ago
I think the ACCC actually hasn't been that great for a while, unfortunately. We have awesome consumer protection, but they've made serious missteps more recently, especially under their current commissioner, Rod Simms. They made a terrible ruling forcing the NBN to have 121 points of interconnect (basically peering POPs) back in 2009 (originally, NBN Co wanted to have 14), to protect the seven or so long-distance fibre providers. In the meantime, these providers merged with each other so now we only have three, and the 121 POI policy made it extremely difficult for smaller ISPs to compete on the NBN, because most couldn't afford transit to all of them, so we saw huge consolidation in the ISP space. So the ACCC ruling directly caused a reduction in competition in the ISP space, and it didn't help prevent what they were trying to prevent in the transit market either! Then, look to the insanity of the media bargaining code. May have been some coercion from some Government donors behind the scenes there, who knows... But at the end of the day, which there were some legitimate concerns about Google and Facebook, most of their conclusions didn't really make sense (they conflated what actually happens, where Google and Facebook publish a link and one-sentence excerpt as if it was the same as publishing the whole article, and their solution was to force Google and Facebook to pay money to the big media organisations, which just happen to be big donors of the political party in power). The resulting law was so bad that Facebook threatened to pull out of the country altogether and removed news from Australian timelines for a while, until the bill was watered down. In terms of these policies, the ACCC strikes me as not having a great deal of competence, but at the same having huge delusions of grandeur. I really don't want to see another episode like the tiff with Facebook, where even though Facebook do super scummy things and I generally dislike them, in that circumstance they were absolutely in the right... I vaguely recall being angry at the ACCC about a bunch of other things over the years, but I can't remember any specifics - will have to try and look it up. I think it was blocking some mergers that wouldn't have reduced competition, but then approving some that posed potential serious damaging consequences to the market etc.
- partomniscient 5y ago
  At least there's still a bunch trying to do the right thing by the people as a whole rather than the people currently in charge. I agree the ACCC has been a little hit and miss lately, but its one of the few good things we still have. I'm really hoping they leave medicare alone as much as possible. Then again, somehow Newscorp got their way vs. facebook/google - only fair the ACCC does too.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

> How is that legal? You are forgetting the number of democratic countries which forced their COVID app from Appstore/Playstore on their citizens. They came short of calling it mandatory download but mandated the app as entry pass for several services. You don't use a monopoly powered smartphone? You cannot afford a phone at all? Tough luck buddy(/s). Only reason these COVID pass apps didn't stick around in the democratic countries is because the apps didn't do what's it's supposed to do; Ironically because the app couldn't be made mandatory download thereby not achieving the critical mass.

hugi 5y ago
What countries were that?
- Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
  Not going to name countries and trigger a slugfest. But will include the List of countries with official contact tracing apps[1] and you can search for which services those apps were mandated. EFF commentary on these apps[2]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_apps#List_of_countries_with_official_contact_tracing_apps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_apps#List_of_countrie... [2]https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/09/covid-19-tracking-technology-will-not-save-us https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/09/covid-19-tracking-tech...
  - hugi 5y ago
    My country (Iceland) has an official contact tracing app listed there. It was developed by volunteers and contributed to the government and the source is open on github. Nothing you said applies to it.
    - Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
      Good to know, Good for Iceland residents. Note that I didn't say 'all democratic countries'.