14 ms·

Demonopolizing the Internet with Interoperability

• amelius 5y ago
  Big tech should be making just that: big tech. They should not be touching our data. Let them produce hardware and software independently, like in the old days of the internet. That way, they empower companies by providing the modules they need rather than the monolithic products that work against the interest of both consumers and smaller companies.
  • dr_dshiv 5y ago
    I know I'm alone in this, but i trust Google with my data more than the government, more than my family and more than myself. If they don't handle it well, they lose billions of dollars of value. On the other hand, I don't trust Facebook worth sh##. I would love to have an decentralized alternative (blog culture & the FOAF dream was nice while it lasted)
    • Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
      Not handling your data well will not cost google billions of dollars in value. Dealing with mega-corps that treat you poorly always remind me of this exchange from hhgttg: Builder: Do you have any idea how much damage this bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you? Arthur: No. How much? Builder: None at all.
      • dr_dshiv 5y ago
        You don't think that if Google has a data accident (e.g., my Gmail data gone or leaked) that their stock price would fall? Of course it would.
        • danielheath 5y ago
          If they lost everyones? Of course. Yours? No. You can join the choir of people complaining that google has locked them out of their accounts.
        • afarviral 5y ago
          if your individual data was leaked? Um, you'd open a support case and likely get some bottled response... before then needing to go a media outlet or trying to gain some traction on social media... even then the impact would be minimal. Maybe if you are a famous person or the data leak occurred en-mass itd be a different story? Id be curious if this sort of thing has happened.
          • jefftk 5y ago
            I think this would be a major news story: I'm pretty sure it has never happened. (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
        • amelius 5y ago
          Just like Facebook brand value plummeted after Cambridge Analytica. I.e., not at all.
          • dr_dshiv 5y ago
            Yeah, exactly. If that happened to Google, they would lose value in a way that Facebook wouldn't. That's why I trust Google. I'm sure millions of others at least implicitly share my opinion. And, I'd argue, the more explicit this opinion becomes, the more real the value and the greater the risk to Google for being a poor data steward.
            • infinitezest 5y ago
              > Yeah, exactly. If that happened to Google, they would lose value in a way that Facebook wouldn't. Why do you think that it would be different for Google?
              • dr_dshiv 5y ago
                Because they offer a very different service than Facebook.
            • olah_1 5y ago
              There is nothing Alphabet could do to lose money. Nothing. They have already completely screwed people many times over. Deleting all of their drive data and locking them out of 10 year old accounts for false alarms on some “bad content” or something. One does not simply sue a company like this. It is larger and more wealthy than a nation state and unaccountable to all. The Butlerian Jihad seems more plausible every year.
          • jefftk 5y ago
            Aside: Cambridge Analytica was a scandal of interoperability. People gave CA access which it then abused to collect data about others. In the kind of highly interoperable world that is being proposed here, this is not something that you could prevent.
    • Lambdanaut 5y ago
      It doesn't really matter whether you trust Google or the government more with your data, because either way the government gets it. * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
      • hengri 5y ago
        PRISM is old news, google encrypts data between datacenters now
        • jefftk 5y ago
          The government can still get it with a valid warrant, though. (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
          • 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
            And with a gag order to boot!
  • andrey_utkin 5y ago
    Hardware and software is not the game at big tech. The game is profiting off data and comm channels ownership. Hardware and software is the game for "hobbyists" like Purism and Pine64 now.
    • shadilay 5y ago
      Google made a custom video encoder for youtube which further entrenches their monopoly. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-alphabet/google-s-new-custom-data-center-chip-improves-youtube-videos https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-alphabet/google-s...
• barnabee 5y ago
  I strongly believe platforms should be forced to allow interoperability and it should be illegal to prevent or frustrate access from other clients or services. The idea that someone hosting a product on the internet should be able to control how I access my data or services is utter nonsense and it’s amazing that we’ve allowed it to become the norm. This should include interoperability that allows “unbundling” such as using a site/app’s messaging feature alone with a different client or service and replacing the platform’s feed curation algorithms with your own or third party algos. If they can’t make money under these conditions, tough. They either need to start charging for the core product instead of extracting value in hidden ways, improve their own money making services so people don’t go elsewhere, or die.
  • Proven 5y ago
    > I strongly believe platforms should be forced to allow interoperability That is ludicrous. What gives you the right to decide how people run their business and what services should or shouldn't be available to their consenting customers? > The idea that someone hosting a productt on the internet should be able to control how I access my data or services is utter nonsense and it’s amazing that we’ve allowed it to become the norm. Your data is yours before you share it. If you don't want to share it, don't use such services, or use services which provide contractual guarantees that address your concerns.
  • dageshi 5y ago
    The lesson of the internet is that lower friction always wins. If people had charged for everything on the internet from its inception, it would have died. I'd rather have good than perfect, I think the internet is pretty good at the moment.
    • pharke 5y ago
      I see it more as capture of unwitting content producers. It's the same faustian deal made by medieval landlords to their serfs. The social media companies own the real estate and tools for improving it and allow their users to live and work there for free so long as they sign over everything they produce to their lords.
• k__ 5y ago
  You can say about Ethererum what you want, but the payable keyword in Solidity blew my mind. Having a globally available standardized decentralized and transparent way to pay for all APIs calls baked into a programming language is a pretty awesome feature.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • chubot 5y ago
    It's a nice idea, but what can I pay for now? Does it rely on a centralized notion of identity?
    • matheusmoreira 5y ago
      Right now Ethereum smart contracts don't have access to real world data from outside the Ethereum virtual machine. This is why most contracts are financial in nature. There are projects attempting to fix that but so far nothing has materialized yet.
      • k__ 5y ago
        What about Chainlink and TheGraph?
      • draygonia 5y ago
        I believe Civic is working on a sort of identity verification blockchain integration but I haven't heard much come out of the space as of yet. In fact, I think it might dissuade people who don't want their identity linked to their crypto transactions.
• shadowgovt 5y ago
  I agree with Doctorow's goals here, but framing it as he does at the start of the piece doesn't make any sense. He claims we need to fix big tech abuses, then gives as examples of issues to fix disinformation and copyright infringement. Those aren't big tech abuses; they are two systemic side effects of the internet itself... Of a technology that disintermediates gatekeepers from peer to peer communication. If anything, big tech serves as a gatekeeper that has any chance at all of addressing those issues. Empowering communities and individuals to escape monopoly platforms decentralizes disinformation and copyright infringement and increases the severity of those problems. I think there are good reasons to decentralize the current mega platforms we have, but addressing disinformation or copyright management aren't them.
  • chaosite 5y ago
    The longer piece on CACM touches on this: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/10/255710-competitive-compatibility/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/10/255710-competitive-co...
  • kisil_reboot 5y ago
    I came here to say just this. The pivot at "rather than fixing tech companies, we can fix the internet" makes absolutely no sense.
• neiman 5y ago
  I work on a project, Esteroids, who has a goal of creating a democratic Internet. I also wrote about it in my previous project Almonit (currently discontinued). https://almonit.club/blog/2021-01-08/self-governing_internet_organizations_part_I.html https://almonit.club/blog/2021-01-08/self-governing_internet...
• sbt 5y ago
  Another problem is that Big Tech owns the relatively corrupt US government.
  • AniseAbyss 5y ago
    Yes but only authoritarianism can make big business kneel. But that has it's own problems.
    • orthecreedence 5y ago
      > Yes but only authoritarianism can make big business kneel I'd say this only applies within a capitalist mode of production.
      • dane-pgp 5y ago
        If Big Tech is too powerful, and the US government is too corrupt, then combining them together in a planned economy is unlikely to improve matters. If, on the other hand, you're instead suggesting an alternative to the capitalist mode of production that doesn't involve state-run monopolies, then I think you need to draw the rest of the owl before we can judge whether your system will end up with authoritarianism or not.
• raghavtoshniwal 5y ago
  Browsers are cited as an example of interoperable tech in the article. While it maybe true that *anyone* can write their browser, we see that Chrome does have inordinate amount of power. Even though it's literally based on an open-source engine that people can (and have) fork to build competing browsers, there isn't a wildly competing browser market. Maybe just enforcing interoperability won't cut it.
  • srtjstjsj 5y ago
    Browser competition doesn't matter much for interoperability, because they don't restrict what sites you can use. It's only a risk if browsers start banning sites like the app stores do. And open source Chromium and Firefox are bulwark against that, with active fork ecosystems.
    • cma 5y ago
      It goes the other way now, Google blocks non-Chrome and select others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25155451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25155451
    • dane-pgp 5y ago
      > It's only a risk if browsers start banning sites like the app stores do. What if browsers start banning apps from their own app stores, though? https://hub.packtpub.com/mozilla-and-google-chrome-refuse-to-support-gabs-dissenter-extension-for-violating-acceptable-use-policy/ https://hub.packtpub.com/mozilla-and-google-chrome-refuse-to...
  • streamofdigits 5y ago
    Its a valid concern. There are so many issues with the current architecture there is likely no silver bullet. The ultimate objective is to align the interests of users with the interest of service providers (abolish the user-as-a-product business model). Interoperability may be used as a fulcrum to force some price discovery about services, or allow building new business models that add value to the users, who knows... Anything but the current dystopia
  • 5y ago
• endisneigh 5y ago
  Too bad the US government is worthless. Say what you will about other countries and the EU, but at least they assert themselves sometimes.
  • ghuin 5y ago
    Maybe if they asserted themselves as much as the EU does the tech situation of the US would be the same as the one in the EU.
    • endisneigh 5y ago
      Maybe, maybe not. Is the EU's situation a result of their regulation?
      • zepto 5y ago
        Probably.
        • endisneigh 5y ago
          Based on what? Any evidence?
          • zepto 5y ago
            Yes, I assume that European are as smart an entrepreneurial as Americans, therefore the kinds of companies they build are likely a result of the regulatory environment.
            • ResearchCode 5y ago
              Reductionist to the point of nonsense of course. It could be any of many factors.
              • zepto 5y ago
• orbifold 5y ago
  I had this thought that it might be possible to define some of the social media interfaces in terms of CapnProto services. Then it wouldn’t matter where the service was hosted. Especially for things like LinkedIn the major draw is that CV data is made available in a convenient and canonical form.
• oblak 5y ago
  It pains me to see even technically literate people referring to the web as the "internet". They are NOT the same
  • lotsofpulp 5y ago
    What is the distinction?
    • lioeters 5y ago
      > The internet is a global network of billions of servers, computers, and other hardware devices. Each device can connect with any other device as long as both are connected to the internet using a valid IP address. The internet makes the information sharing system known as the web possible. > The web, which is short for World Wide Web, is one of the ways information is shared on the internet (others include email, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and instant messaging services). The web is composed of billions of connected digital documents that are viewed in a web browser, such as Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, and others. https://www.lifewire.com/difference-between-the-internet-and-the-web-2483335 https://www.lifewire.com/difference-between-the-internet-and...
      • lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Interesting, I didn’t know that!
    • tialaramex 5y ago
      The Internet is the current incarnation of the Network, this time as a digital packet switched network (its predecessors being the Public Switched Telephone Network, and the Universal Postal Union which enables letters to be sent around the world). The Network is a tremendously powerful technology which enables civilisation on a much larger scale. The Web, or World Wide Web is an application of the Internet made by (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee about thirty years ago to deliver hypermedia over the Internet. The Web is to the Internet as "premium rate" chat lines were to Signalling System Seven.
• hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  I disagree that forced interoperability will somehow make they emergence of "winner-take-all"-style tech giants less likely, and I think the last ~25 year history of the Internet proves that. I mean, in the late 90s everyone was talking about how the Internet would "democratize information", because anyone could become a content publisher from their garage. The story then was about how "the power" was concentrated in huge media companies, and the Internet would change that. But when the barrier to entry is tiny, and indeed the barrier to switching is so low, it means that any competitor that is even just a tad better than the other guys will vacuum up all the business. It's indeed actually this more open framework that leads to higher concentrations of wealth and power, not the other way around.
  • fsckboy 5y ago
    it is difficult to stop the "winner-takes-all" economic dynamics from playing out, but interoperability does allow for small competitors to emerge in niche markets and through technological innovation bite off substantial markets. (AMD uses interoperability to compete with Intel.) and ¿por qué no los dos, interoperabilidad y antimonopolio?
    • hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
      Completely agree. I'm in favor of interoperability for its own benefits (it's not without issues but thank God I can mostly depend on USB-C on all my devices these days), but just pointing out that interoperability as a counter to wealth/power concentration is insufficient.
      • hanniabu 5y ago
        It's less about wealth/power concentration and more about the ability to upset that wealth/power concentration.
        • nitrogen 5y ago
          Yes, for example if Myspace, Facebook, Google+, and all the open alternatives had all been interoperable, it would have been less likely for one of them to become a monopoly on the friends/wall/timeline segment.
• asim 5y ago
  Basically the only way this really works is if we define standard APIs for all forms of cloud services. From infrastructure all the way up to social media and beyond. In prior eras protocols were custom designs on top of the IP protocol. That's not going to fly today and it also won't let us move fast enough. Most API definitions at the likes of Google are now defined in protobuf, another alternative is openapi. Either would suffice but I think protobuf is less verbose and potentially easier to evolve. It also requires open standards for defining those services and potentially open implementations. See github.com/micro/services as an example. Ultimately it's going to take a long time and significant coordination between multiple players for it to happen. I do wish we just had an open set of services anyone could run and contribute to. Then we could either go through the pains of hosting ourselves or paying someone to do it for us.
  • noncoml 5y ago
    > is if we define standard APIs for all forms of cloud services Nope. All it requires is for each company to provide unrestricted access to the APIs of their services. Plenty of interested parties out there to complete the plumbing
    • jacobobryant 5y ago
      Yep, the good old adapter pattern.
• erikerikson 5y ago
  See also CloudEvents[0]. This post misses mentioning the incentives of incumbents who have seen the innovator risk filtering pipelines constricting. Inviting more people to play feeds their futures. [0] https://cloudevents.io https://cloudevents.io
• bitwize 5y ago
  It's funny how interoperability has to be reintroduced as a new concept now, when back in the day it was part of the philosophy of the internet itself. I heard stories about a CS professor who had to teach incoming students what files and folders were. The interoperability thing is like that. 30 years into the Eternal September, we're learning that nothing we were enculturated in computing-wise can be taken for granted and we must re-teach it all to our successors.
  • TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Interoperability is kryptonite to business. It kills whatever one's moat is, the way a microneedle will kill a cell by puncturing its membrane. Most companies avoid it at all costs, except for using it as a weapon to hurt competition. Of note is how upstarts embrace interoperability while it gives them an edge over incumbents - and then abandon it as soon as they establish themselves as a major player (see e.g. Slack, which built their userbase on this trick). Early Internet was interoperable because of low commercial interest. Now it's centralized because it's a big market. Interoperability got replaced by contracts.
• 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  The internet is already widely interoperable. But some efforts of late make it less interoperable, and less able to route around problems in the network. The obsession with HTTPS has to end. Not because of privacy, but because of interoperability. DNS over HTTPS is not interoperable with the whole universe of existing DNS products. But what's worse, it's locking people into centralized platforms. With traditional DNS, you can move to any network at all, and automatically pick up a new local, fast, customized DNS catching resolver designed for the network you're on. If you're on DNS over HTTPS, you've always got the same provider, which does not scale to every network. The solution, people will tell you, is just to disable DoH. Until we no longer can, because everything expects to use it. The obsession with HTTPS has also led to the apologists decrying any technical solution that doesn't use TLS 1.3 and HTTPS, because middleboxes!!!! And because literally everyone is reluctant to design new protocols that can be extended as successfully as HTTPS. If it doesn't work over HTTPS, it's not part of the modern internet. This not only severely restricts how you can design technical solutions today, it's stupid: we have this transport protocol with 65,000 port numbers, but we'll only ever use one of them (443), because a redesigned stack is just unfathomable. Every modern network service today needs many things. Routing metadata, dynamic host/service lookup, federated authentication+authorization, encryption, geo-localized load balancing, error correction, session management, etc. If we build things like these into lower levels of the stack, and build primitives for them into the operating system, then all applications can gain their benefits, and we won't need to rely on convoluted hacks to provide it all. We can't keep on for the next 100 years with the shitty protocols and shitty solutions we have today. We have to start thinking about brand new designs, and how we will upgrade systems to use them. Otherwise, every solution we come up with will just become more and more convoluted and ridiculous, as we build more and more on top of antiquated systems designs from 40 years ago. Phone lines were pretty cool. We were able to extend them to transfer data, from 1400 baud to 1.5 megabits. We could technically do up to 50+ megabits, but it wouldn't scale. So we built new solutions. They were expensive, but we needed them in order to grow. Well, I think it's time for tcp/ip and its related protocols to be replaced as well. Not immediately, but it's time for us to start building the replacement. That new replacement can take everything into account in a variety of new stacks. Federation of data, access, services; new kinds of encryption and privacy mechanisms, new trust models. New routing and service models to make the "last mile" less complicated and more flexible. And more responsive to network partition, including the ability to detect them early, to make applications more responsive. We can do literally anything we want, people! We can start building the future today! But we have to choose to do it!
• NHQ 5y ago
  Interoperability needs to be brought all the back to the protocol. Force ISPs to give people static, public IP addresses. Then the tech industry has to build local-first, P2P apps, and what was once a dominant social network is now just another interface competing with features people actually want. What is broken about the internet is that we don't have our own addresses, like in real life. (Cue security red-scare and condescending technical types who think it's too complicated for the user.)
  • slaymaker1907 5y ago
    I think that would cause a lot of problems if forced to give a static IPv4 address. However, I agree that they should give people an IPv6 address. Furthermore, they should have any dynamic mapping accessible via DNS by default (with an opt out process for people who don't want it). Ideally IPv6 address assignment should be done without NAT as well since NAT is a way bigger hurdle to overcome than dynamic IP addresses.
  • jahewson 5y ago
    > static, public IP address That’s basically a super-cookie.
    • NHQ 5y ago
      Everything would be a different paradigm than we have now. Security, auth, sharing; we can only imagine how things would shift if we turned the model we have on its head. Super cookie? ISP is a private VPN proivder now. Cookies are a good example. That browsers give up a cookie at all—who consented to this specification? GDPR could have changed browser specs so that cookies were truly opt-in; it regulates company behavior instead, which is weak. Fundamentally, our choices are being made for us at the protocol level, and everything we have as a result is emergent, and so people argue about regulating the emergent properties.
      • jahewson 5y ago
        > ISP is a private VPN proivder now. Reality check: ISPs sell your information. They’re pretty much the last people you should trust. > who consented to this specification? Third party cookies (the “tracking” kind) were a bug. The original specification did not include them.
• slx26 5y ago
  When he says "Let's Fix the Internet, Not the Tech Giants", in my mind I translate that to: "capitalism doesn't care directly about human well being. Well, that's not cool, but I believe it's better to try to provide an alternative flow / dynamic / space for competition than trying to stop the immoral practices of these powerful beasts directly. Don't fight the problem face-to-face, try to make it obsolete". Well. One should be shocked: government and laws are exactly what should protect human well-being directly and decisively when other things fail (or in prevention), but now it turns out capitalism is too powerful so we can't do that? We have to ignore morality for a while, and start to leverage government and laws just to create a side pathway that might eventually lead to the possibility to compete against the big beasts of capitalism in their own (or slightly shifted) terrain? Hope we adapt better than they do? I'm not even saying this is stupid. It might actually be the most pragmatic way forward. I tend to take a similar view when looking for solutions... but when we reached this point, we should realize that the problem is not the tech giants, interoperability, Java's error model, APIs, EFFs, js typecasting nor the internet. If having to resort to this kind of strategies doesn't make it clear to us that we are playing the wrong game, we are doomed at a more fundamental level: money sits at the top of the power pyramid, and we have no effective mechanism to balance human well-being against it (which doesn't make patches useless, but maybe we should start prefacing appropriately or writing angry ò.ó comments about it at some point).
  • dane-pgp 5y ago
    > money sits at the top of the power pyramid, and we have no effective mechanism to balance human well-being against it That's a succinct analysis of the root cause of many problems today, and it helpfully points towards some patches that would address the problems directly. Firstly, the link between money and political power could be severed by having publicly funded elections and limits on political advertising (which might require a narrowly-targeted constitutional amendment[0] in the US). Secondly, the fact that money creates power is not a problem for human well-being if everyone has a similar amount of money (assuming that having power ensures well-being). Progressive taxation already exists in much of the world, but some countries go a step further with a wealth tax. I would advocate for a wealth tax which makes millionaires pay an amount in tax each year which is an equivalent percentage of their net worth as the amount paid by the median tax payer as a percentage of their net worth (to whom the wealth tax would not apply). [0] https://campaignfinancereform.org/explanation https://campaignfinancereform.org/explanation
• asiachick 5y ago
  Interoperability is arguably a hit to innovation. You start with just text messages, one company wants to add images, either (A) they have to push for a standard which takes years or (B) they add a non-standard extension. Then someone wants to add video clips, audio clips. Okay you say, older clients will skip those. But then someone wants to add threading, suddenly the entire format needs to change (see A and B above). Or, you just let each developer go as fast as they want to adding new features and/or selecting the ones they want (Apple putting adding in memoji that works by sending only the parameters, to very specific and copyright protected assets)
  • dane-pgp 5y ago
    > Okay you say, older clients will skip those. Yes, that is what I say. > But then someone wants to add threading, suddenly the entire format needs to change Does it? If older clients don't want to implement threading, they can just receive the message bodies in the order they were posted. The old API should continue to work regardless of the extra metadata which one provider might be storing about it. Ideally, the host with the new feature would also add an "In response to #123456789:" line at the top of each message, so that users of the older clients can construct the threads in their mind (assuming that these older clients have been listing the IDs of the messages), but I don't think anyone's arguing that a service is breaking interoperability by failing to add such an affordance.
• marginalien 5y ago
  This is already happening in banking (Europe): Google for PSD2 and Open Banking. Financial institutions are required to provide Third Party Providers API-acccess to customer data (if the customer has provided his/her consent to do so)
• aabaker99 5y ago
  Health care software is being forced to be interoperable soon in the US. The 21st Century Cures Act requires it (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_Century_Cures_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_Century_Cures_Act). One interesting and, to technologists, disappointing aspect of the regulation is the complete lack of a standard by which to interoperate. There is no prescription for any data format for any type of health information. Health software companies are only required to provide a hyperlink to a web page that describes the data format. This is a step in the right direction but it certainly doesn't enable the anything that looks like the developments we have seen around the internet due to its open protocols. Health care will be "interoperable" without any of the compatibility or interfaces the TFA wants. We need regulators who understand the technology and have a much higher standard for interoperability if we are to demonopolize the internet.
  • jdavis703 5y ago
    We’re much better off letting the market decide on the best standard. Imagine if XML had become the only legal standard for data transfer. Or SAML the only one for authentication. While one single standard is preferable, regulators should give the market time to evaluate which standard is battle proven.
    • aabaker99 5y ago
      I agree requiring XML could have been a disaster. Still, the law seems to need to require more of we are to more meaningfully achieve interoperability. What's stopping companies from coming up with pathological data formats or generally making the data available but not easily available? Could the law specify some necessary characteristics of the data format? What if there already is a popular standard (http://fhir.org http://fhir.org)?
    • ajsnigrutin 5y ago
      If the standard is open (so that anyone can read the documentation and write a fully capable parser), it really doesn't matter what the standard is exactly.
  • dillondoyle 5y ago
• jdavis703 5y ago
  How does this solve the content moderation problem? We’re allowed to upload 18+ content on Twitter. But a nursing parent posting a nipple on Facebook is grounds for account deletion. Or in another case, what if I block a user on Facebook, but they come through on Twitter? Does interop need to be include verified user identity to prevent abuse?
• kaycebasques 5y ago
  Tangential: What a beautiful website!
• johntfella 5y ago
  I don't have much to add here. I will share that one thing I cherish about my doctor is his refusal to go digital record. Everything is paper. He has long been an advocate for repealing medical record retention laws. Keeping it to paper at least adds a speed bump some what. The hope would be that the system splinters. Those that want more data oriented system can have it, those that don't can remain in the past. Other than that, Herbert L Fred's "The Tyranny of Technology" and that of his term 'technological tenesmus' comes to mind; https://doi.org/10.1080/21548331.1997.11443437 https://doi.org/10.1080/21548331.1997.11443437