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What I like about your comment is that it points out that all technical work-arounds are moot if people as a whole are not willing to stand up with pitchforks a

• safety1st 1y ago
  Only competition can provide a solution. We have lost sight of this principle even though all Western democracies are built on the idea of separation of powers, and making it hard for any one faction of elites to gain full control and ruin things for everyone else. Make them fight with each other, let them get a piece of the pie, but never all of it. That's why we have multiple branches of government, multiple parties etc. That's why we have markets with many firms instead of monopolies. There has never been a utopian past and there will never be a utopian future. The past was riddled with despotism and many things that the average man or woman today would consider horrific. The basic principle of democratic society is to prevent those things from recurring by pitting elite factions against each other. Similarly business elites who wield high technology to gain their wealth must also compete and if there is any sign of them cooperating too closely for too long, we need to break them up or shut them down. When Apple and Google agree, cooperate, and adopt the same policies - we are all doomed. It must never happen and we must furthermore break them up if they try, which they are now doing.
  • samrus 1y ago
    This doesnt work if the market incentives themselves encourage these rent seeking actions. We have given capitalists more and more power pver the last few decades and instead making things better, its just allowed them to nueter the government regulations that would have prevented them from fucking common people over. The market can not solve for this the same way it cant solve for education or the military. This needs laws
    • safety1st 1y ago
      Of course I'm in support of consumer protection laws but what needs to be more widely understood is that with Google specifically, probably with Apple and maybe with Microsoft, we are at a unique point in history where passing laws isn't enough. There are laws on the books, Google's breaking them, and it's just forging ahead with more of this anti-consumer control crap anyway. Google's unique in American history, it has recently been ruled an illegal monopolist in two cases in two markets and a third ruling against them in a third market is likely to drop soon. Even Standard Oil didn't achieve a rap sheet like Google's. Yeah of course we need government action and I'm calling for that. But people need to realize that this monster is way bigger than just passing a law. The judges need to be choosing harsher remedies including a breakup. The enforcement apparatus needs to be stronger, willing and able to seize direct control of the company if it doesn't comply or complies maliciously. EVERYTHING in the system needs an upgrade because Google is so uniquely huge and criminal in the context of American history. They are a different, far larger and more intractable problem than your standard, garden variety corporate criminals and extreme measures are needed to rein them in. Now, imagine a future where the Web platform didn't become a duopoly and Phone+Tablet+PC OSes didn't become a triopoly. A half dozen vendors globally for one, and a different half dozen for the other. That's a very very different world where someone is going to carve out plenty of market share by letting you continue to install your own apps even if they're ad blockers or whatever else you would like. You just wouldn't get 12 companies plus the US, EU and Chinese governments or whoever to all agree on a single platform. We need the big guys to fight. We need the market to be divided. We need competition. We need to slay Google and never have another Google again.
      • JustExAWS 1y ago
        So exactly what law is Google breaking? They are not a monopoly in the US or even 50% of the phone market. And are you going to force app developers to support all of these platforms?
        • safety1st 1y ago
          > So exactly what law is Google breaking? I mean, why do you need us to repeat these very well publicized convictions that have been all over the news? They've been found guilty of anti-trust violations in multiple cases in multiple American markets. The details are just a Google search away... Are you disputing the court rulings that Google possesses a monopoly? Which court?
  • turblety 1y ago
    I wish this was a higher up comment because it's such an important point, and it's totally an achievable thing. Governments should be supporting this competition, or at the very least not encouraging monopolies/duopolies. Give loads of support/help to startups, small businesses. Let the large corps fund themselves. But instead, we end up giving them huge tax breaks, anti-competitive legislation and even give them a voice in government.
  • NeuralNomaD123 1y ago
    in the face of large monopolies such as today's platforms, to keep competition you must regulate with laws that stop consumer abuse
  • Levitz 1y ago
    >There has never been a utopian past and there will never be a utopian future. I wouldn't call it utopian, but I'd say we are way past "peak democracy" at this point. There was a time in which corporations did get broken up when too large, when we did understand that it's about serving the population first and accumulating wealth after that, when corporations influencing politics was widely seen as a negative. It does seem to me we are now way past that.
    • worldsayshi 1y ago
      There's no reason why democracy can't peak again and reach new heights. But that won't happen automatically. Personally I think there are technological preconditions for stable democracy that have recently been countered by authoritarian leaning technology. We need to invent counter technology to those things.
      • komali2 1y ago
        I disagree that there's a technological solution to late stage capitalism and the slow death of liberal democracy. New technology doesn't change anything about social institutions - the most powerful groups before the technology was invented simply own the technology after it's invented and use it to further cement their power. I think the luddites were on to something. We don't need technology, we need humans doing things a little differently, maybe even doing bizarre things like setting factories on fire. Personally I hope we can try other things before setting factories on fire, see Keith McHenry's version of The Anarchist Cookbook for peaceful resistance solutions as well. The point is though without a restructure, new technology doesn't liberate, in fact it further entrenches existing power structures.
        • safety1st 1y ago
          > New technology doesn't change anything about social institutions This is of course demonstrably untrue. Marshall McLuhan devoted his life to illuminating how technology changes society. The printing press, radio, television and the Internet have all undoubtedly changed our social institutions. It's hard to imagine secular democracy ever becoming a thing if we hadn't been able to mass produce books and newspapers, and writing manuscripts had remained mostly under the control of the Church. It seems less probable that the Nazis would have come to power if not for the immense skill Goebbels and Hitler had in the use of radio. And I doubt Trump would have been elected if he hadn't known how to press people's buttons so well on social media. Let's not forget that more ancient things like fire, agriculture and accounting are also technology that irrevocably changed humanity and put new people in power. Or take a look at how railroads remade American society. Or how sufficiently advanced sailboats placed half the world under the thrall of colonialism... Absolutely there can exist technologies which are anti-democracy, and surveillance technologies are exactly that. You become afraid to say or write the wrong thing in public, and then to say or write it in private, and then to even think it, and finally the thing is forgotten. I felt like Orwell made the point well enough in 1984. All that said I don't see technology saving us from our current problems, it needs to be invented, it needs to mature, there needs to be adoption. One might imagine mesh networking and censorship proof distributed messaging or something having an influence on society but we simply aren't there yet.
  • lwhi 1y ago
    In fact true competition is only possible via open standards, protocols and technology stacks. We need agreement to ensure the large corporations adhere to these.
    • _heimdall 1y ago
      This doesn't seem right to me. It is often in companies' best interests to adopt standards, but that is because it allows them both to have an optimized supply chain. Car manufacturers today have a lot of standards that I expect would make competition from any new contenders harder not easier. Tesla would be an example of that, they did survive but the industry thought it was never going to work precisely because of all the standards and regulations required. On the other hand, early car manufacturers didn't have standards and shared technology stacks. At that time new car makers popped up everywhere and we had a ton of competition in the space. Open standards are good for the consumer and good for any features that require interoperability. It has nothing to do with competition though.
      • lwhi 1y ago
        Sorry, but you're incorrect. If a particular product is tied to a specific proprietary tech stack, then the consumer is also tied to specific suppliers. This is known as vendor lock in. Microsoft used this approach with Internet Explorer back in the old days; ensuring that it provided proprietary elements and implementation, that would encourage developers to provide websites that only functioned using their browser. Open standards allow choice.
        • _heimdall 1y ago
          That can be one aspect of it, though I would argue that doesn't mean open standards are always better for competition. I think you're also assuming the only competition that matters is long term. In the short term the potential for locking users into your own ecosystem can incentivize short term competition. Long term competition seems like a good goal, but that assumption wasn't part of it at the beginning of this chain.
• whizzter 1y ago
  The problem is that tech-savvy users are like bikers, most of us are law-abiding and want the best for society. Then there's the 1%'ers, people causing trouble, be it by being biker thugs or malware authors or toplevel pirates, actually disrupting the system but often not in a way that's good for the masses and when clashing authoritans the authoritans win due to the masses good. And yes, the "good" for the masses is more about malware whilst DRM is more of powergrab by media industries that were unwilling to adapt.
• lotsofpulp 1y ago
  Most people don't want to have to learn multiple operating systems or ways of doing things.
• Quarrelsome 1y ago
  > A handful of tech-savvy users with rooted devices and open-source software will not make a difference to the giant crushing machine that is the system. Agreed, although I don't think that's entirely true, its just that post-smartphones we no longer have any political agency over a significant volume of the new traffic. Much of the new traffic represents that faction of people who initially mocked the internet as "nerd shit". But we don't have to get discouraged by our smallness here. Rather we can offer a sub-system that satisifes our demands and is an open door to those willing to find it. We could try to fight our corner, but unless we're incredibly organised, its unlikely they'll listen due to how less relevant we are, now that all the normies transitioned online. So we either jump ship to other, more permissive platforms and help make them good by developing software that closes the gap, or we counter by attacking the systems that prevent people from installing software on the device they have bought. We just shouldn't expect the general population to care about our problems en-masse because they never have and never will. We will make a difference by creating an alternative sub-system that is poised to grow when the giant crushing machine stumbles at some point in the future. We can't hate people for picking the parental wing of Apple because for most normies they don't enjoy the freedoms of technology, its the choice and difficulty that they conversely find oppressive.
  • GoblinSlayer 1y ago
    On Android they do enjoy the freedoms and fall for "side load this random app ignoring warnings" scam.
    • Quarrelsome 1y ago
      I'd imagine the volume we're discussing aren't even aware of options outside of the appstore. A study was done a while back of average user competence and when given the task of arranging a meeting in a calendar app for a time where all participants could attend (given calendar conflicts) a meagre 5% of participants succeeded. The bar is tragically low for technical literacy and 95% of people (ballpark) fail to clear it. I'd imagine the first time these sorts of people are aware of side-loading is when they get scammed by being told to side-load some malware. So for these people they wouldn't even notice their digital rights being eroded or taken away completely, because they don't even understand how or why they'd be important.
• 3abiton 1y ago
  I am looking forward for the day I remote ssh into a <insert kvm solution> controlling my iPhone/Android so I can login to my bank app because they stopped allowing web access, and I don't want to compromise on privacy. Shit is nuts.
• camgunz 1y ago
  > What I like about your comment is that it points out that all technical work-arounds are moot if people as a whole are not willing to stand up with pitchforks and torches to defend their freedoms. If your system requires extraordinary political efforts from large numbers of people, your system will fail. We are the elites, we have to oppose this. If Netflix asks us to implement this kind of DRM, we have to resign. If Facebook asks us to implement sophisticated surveillance, we have to resign. Etc. etc. We can't keep cashing the checks and then point to the body politic like "I beg you to stop me".
  • p1esk 1y ago
    We are the elites Wait, what?
    • GoblinSlayer 1y ago
      Different kind of elites.
      • p1esk 1y ago
        I’m not “elite” of any kind.
• tiahura 1y ago
  Telling people how they have to design their systems is the opposite of freedom.