7 ms·
Doctorow: American tech cartels use apps to break the law
- legitster 1y ago> Competition is an essential component of effective regulation, for two reasons: First, competition keeps the companies within a sector from all telling the same lie to its regulators. I'm as pro-competition as anybody, but I don't actually buy this argument. Firstly, regulating a thousand small players is much harder than regulating a few. Which is why there is a lot of evidence that regulation (even when good or needed) eliminates some amount of competition - crash and emission testing put an end to new car manufacturers for a long time. Secondly, in industries with lots of competition and individual actors (real estate, healthcare, finance, etc) regulatory capture is actually far worse! Increasing the sheer number of special interests does not, in fact, improve regulation. And if anything, smearing it across as many voting districts as possible gives a level of political entrenchment that software companies could only dream of. Let me flip the Airbnb argument on its head - why are hotels allowed to build dense dormitory-style housing in cities where it's otherwise illegal to do so? Because their regulatory capture is so entrenched that we don't even think about it.
- lokar 1y agoHotels are allowed to do that because democratically elected representatives passed laws to allow it, subject to strict regulations.
- dleeftink 1y agoIt's process over product, but somehow we've come to regard the 'product' as end goal over all else. Yet no product lasts forever.
- legitster 1y agoThis is backwards. Hotels have always existed, but zoning restrictions on who or what could be a hotel came afterwards through law.
- lokar 1y agoMost modern (20th century) regulations on topics like hotels were formalizations of existing socially accepted practices and often attempts to address obvious issues (eg many guests unable to escape a fire).
- dingnuts 1y agoHotels are a specially designated category for temporary housing so that permanent residents can exclude travelers from their neighborhoods. You aren't flipping it on its head at all, the reason hotels exist is because travelers exist and need somewhere to go. Why does Airbnb think they have a right to invert the social contract that has created a designated place for people who are likely to not know local norms and be operating on strange hours?
- aag 1y agoI like the modern social contract and hotels, but to be fair, AirBNB is inverting what had already been inverted. In some sense, AirBNB is returning to the old model before hotels were everywhere. A traveler would reach a new town and ask for lodging in someone's home. In many countries, providing lodging to strangers is still the norm.
- Scrapemist 1y agoYes, inverting it back to before there was regulations and a massive tourism industry.
- piva00 1y agoThe only travelers at that time arriving by the thousands would be armies, it's not comparable when scale matters.
- Aloisius 1y agoEm. Tourism has been a thing, complete with travel guides, tour operators, souvenirs made for tourists and tourist attractions for millennia. Plenty of major destinations (holy places, resorts, etc) would bring in thousands of tourists at a time. The ancient Olympics, for instance, brought in tens of thousands of visitors.
- piva00 1y agoSurely, those existed since ancient times, there's a reason why Romans had inns and waystations. There was some expectation to host strangers traveling as an act to please the gods, etc. but for any mass events there would be lodging at inns, camps, and so on... Not an expectation that everyone hosts thousands of strangers when they pour over for such events. The scale is massively different, they didn't have millions of people coming through a city during the summer, like Paris, Barcelona, or Lisbon gets. Just Lisbon gets some 5-6x its population as tourists per year, it's in a very different scale to some tens of thousands in ancient times, which wouldn't expect the same relative level of amenities as modern tourists do.
- agentcoops 1y agoCompletely agreed: the way he articulates the problem is self-defeating. Apologies if this sounds absurdly abstract or hand-wavy, but I think the correct framing really has more to do with a sort of essential clash between law and software as technologies of social regulation. Written law was something very important historically: from unwritten norms to codified representations that, however imperfect and provisional, were more or less accessible to all and changeable through whatever process, democratic or otherwise. Over the last decades, we -- and this could be taken rather literally as "the readers of hacker news" -- have been encoding so many aspects of the world into software in a way that doesn't clearly coincide with the legal norms of any particular let alone every country. On the one hand, software is clearly "better" than law in at least the sense that the former eliminates the necessary ambiguity of the latter: the interpretation or "implementation details" of even just a particular law are always disputed. Perhaps a particular implementation of cross-border financial transactions, say, or of personal identity doesn't in fact reflect what the developers or product managers intended, but if that is identified it can be changed. Yet, on the other hand, it is certainly true that, from the perspective of regulators let alone the masses, the resulting situation is much closer to pre-law. Nobody has any idea how or why they were suddenly banned from Instagram or their PayPal account closed, let alone how money actually moves around the world when they send a friend funds through Transferwise. Certainly, if we don't even know how things are working there is no process by which it could be decided that things should work differently, let alone a process by which software would concretely be made to work differently. Indeed, I am skeptical that law as such will ever be able to regulate software: even just considering the problem in terms of a single country/legal system, how does one actually guarantee that the ever-changing corpus of code complies with the ever-changing and essentially ambiguous body of regulations? One of course sees this with the EU as the "avant-garde" of the struggle to regulate software. They pursue either these incredibly general wars on "cookies" that don't solve real problems, or endlessly deliberate when it's already too late about how to handle AI, or produce something relatively well-conceived like GDPR where enforcement is then incredibly unclear if not impossible. TLDR I have no idea what the solution is, but I think the intrinsic problem of law and software is incredibly important to take seriously as software eats the world. At the very least, it's not just a problem of "competition" since, as you note, monopoly is at least one sufficient condition [1] of eventually rendering the way software regulates the world transparent and open to change. [1] Undoubtedly, there are other ways this could possibly transpire through open source etcetc -- however, even in that case there has to be a guarantee that particular software defines the operations of a particular domain, i.e. that there exists software through which one can understand that domain and hypothetically change, which is in some sense just a "public" monopoly.
- Spooky23 1y agoI disagree. Finance is a good example. The core regulated parts of finance like retail and commercial banking are pretty good. Costs are low, they’ve gotten more efficient, services are uniform and poor performers get purged. The issues with finance are on the edges and areas where there are really a small number of industry players. They have an outsized impact and the worst practices are usually skirting the regulatory framework. The Airbnb argument isn’t regulatory capture example - the issue there is that it’s impossible to build anything. You have to build a giant hotel to justify the overhead of building anything hotel. Airbnb fills a gap of creative reuse and provides a tax shelter for rich people.
- anovikov 1y agoHow does Airbnb provide a tax shelter? Also aren't they all doing "buy, borrow, die" thing so don't need a tax shelter?
- Spooky23 1y agoThe “big beautiful bill” essentially subsidizes short term rentals by allowing investors to fully depreciate the properties year 1.
- fragmede 1y agoYou turn personal housing costs into business deductions. The property throws off paper losses through accelerated depreciation while generating cash flow and then you get to reclassify lifestyle spending as investment activity.
- dreamcompiler 1y ago> Because their regulatory capture is so entrenched that we don't even think about it. Nonsense. Residents don't complain about hotels because of the perception that hotels are too expensive for poor and working-class people to afford. Whereas the perception of apartments is that they are cheap enough that such people will choose to live in them. It's all about not wanting to live near "poor" people.
- SoftTalker 1y agoClearly your familiarity with lower-tier hotels is limited. People can and do complain when Motel 6 wants to build. > It's all about not wanting to live near "poor" people. That much is true. And mostly because poor people make poor neighbors.
- yed 1y agoIt depends on whether you're measuring competition as "number of competitors" or "market concentration". You can have a lot of actors but still have high concentration. Healthcare for example has many actors but the concentration is very high among the big health systems and insurance providers.
- lesuorac 1y ago> Firstly, regulating a thousand small players is much harder than regulating a few. I don't agree with this. Get you and a thousand friends to submit fake mortgages documents and let me know how many of you end up in jail. Compare that too how many people went to jail from Wells Fargo. More smaller players is easier to regulate because you can literally use any punishments. If you dissolve Wells Fargo the economy is going to throw a fit (see Enron) but if you dissolve a tiny company then nobody cares. Real Estate and Healthcare seem to be pretty highly concentrated industries imo. Even though there are a zillion agents/doctors they're part of a professional guild and that guild does the lobbying on their behalf. Like good luck getting antibiotics on your own but after a doctor looks at you for 1 minute you have a prescription for the same drug you always take for an ear infection.
- usrxcghghj 1y agoPeople take regulations for granted. The economics not only survive, they thrive. It doesn't exist in a vacuum. Protected citizenry is happier and more productive.
- thomastjeffery 1y agoIt's really quite easy to regulate many small competing entities. There are plenty of people ready to fill the role of IRS agent, and even the cost is relatively trivial. What's practically impossible is regulating a few anticompetitive megacorporations. You can't regulate an entity that writes your nation's laws.
- kcexn 1y agoThere is a bigger issue with any argument around competition as to whether market participants are really competing head-to-head or if they're finding subtle ways to collude.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- SJC_Hacker 1y ago> The death of competition spells doom for regulation. Competition is an essential component of effective regulation, for two reasons: First, competition keeps the companies within a sector from all telling the same lie to its regulators. Second, competition erodes companies’ profits and thus starves them of the capital they need to overpower or outmaneuver their regulators. Yeah, maybe you can start with Rogers Wireless. Eh, Cory?
- mads_quist 1y agoYes, they use apps to break the law. But, still, regulation - when in doubt - should be avoided. Did you know that in Germany, you need to send your employees to a specialised training if they use a ladder in their day to day work? You don't need to regulate what's common sense.
- hedora 1y agoThat’s true in the US too. We had someone come to our house to work on a range hood. They didn’t have ladder training, so the insurance company wouldn’t cover it if they fell off the ladder. The range hood repairman left without doing any work. I do wonder what a normal day at work looks like for this person. We weren’t billed for the house call.
- mothballed 1y agoLol you must not live in the country. Par for the course for a vanload of meth-heads who've never attended an hour of formal training in their life to be walking around a 45 degree roof without a harness, or one clipped into an ornamental non-structural member.
- SoftTalker 1y agoHaha very true. Last time I had a roof done, several cases of Natural Ice were consumed by the working party. The roof was perfect though.
- nathan_compton 1y agoWhat is ridiculous is that you think this isn't a good idea. Safely using ladders isn't common sense and ladder injuries probably cost the state and the places where they occur a lot of money. I think you are mistaking your point of view, which is probably that of an individual business owner, for the point of view of someone looking at the actuarial statistics or whatever and seeing tens of thousands of preventable ladder injuries a year. Just because an event is rare from your point of view doesn't mean that the event costs nothing or that it should be ignored. I can't believe how common this attitude of "if its too small for me to notice it doesn't matter" is.
- tolerance 1y agoWriting/Reading exercise: Consider this article from the perspective of someone who is pro-ICEBlock-being-removed-from-the-Apple-App-Store.
- downrightmike 1y agoWhat does that word diarrhea even mean?
- renewiltord 1y agoPretty nonsensical argument. Uber isn't an employer not because it's an app but because it's a service that connects you to someone. Your phone company isn't an employer just because you use them to hire a handyman. So wordy only to use a nonsensical strawman. I get it: you're trying to create a new buzzword the way you did with "enshittification". So the usual suspects will be big fans. Good luck.
- SoftTalker 1y agoWho pays the driver?
- jeffbee 1y agoI would caution against using this as a discriminator, since the scheme whereby you are billed by the phone company for third-party services has long existed, but that doesn't make AT&T your boss.
- efnx 1y agoDo you mean “but that doesn’t make AT&T _their_ boss”? Because in this scenario I’m paying AT&T, right?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- efnx 1y agoExactly. If Uber is really just providing a service to the drivers, the drivers should be paying a subscription to Uber while taking money directly from the customer. (Edit) And they should be setting their own prices!
- dzhiurgis 1y agoSurely there are alternatives to Uber then?
- lapcat 1y agoI would say that regulatory capture is merely a consequence of political capture. The politicians write the regulations, supervise the regulators, and in most cases, appoint the judges. How did Microsoft avoid breakup in 2001? Simple: George W. Bush was elected President, and the Bush administration decided to settle the court case with a slap on the wrist. Don't blame the regulators but rather the politicians. It's ironic that Doctorow uses the example of "whether you should heed your doctor’s advice to get vaccinated", because the regulators all support vaccination, but again as a result of a Presidential election, HHS has been politically captured by an anti-vaxxer who ignores expert advice.
- cycomanic 1y ago> I would say that regulatory capture is merely a consequence of political capture. The politicians write the regulations, supervise the regulators, and in most cases, appoint the judges. > > How did Microsoft avoid breakup in 2001? Simple: George W. Bush was elected President, and the Bush administration decided to settle the court case with a slap on the wrist. Don't blame the regulators but rather the politicians. > But he addresses that in the post, by saying that these monopoly/olipolyies actors can amass massive war chests that make them become bigger than the regulator. So by the time MS was a monopoly it was already too late.
- lapcat 1y ago> these monopoly/olipolyies actors can amass massive war chests that make them become bigger than the regulator. Bigger than the POTUS? And why wasn't the previous Clinton administration captured? But it's actually quite clear from the article that the regulators are not politicians: > In a modern society, that third party is an expert regulator who investigates or anticipates problems in their area of expertise and then makes rules designed to solve these problems. > To make these rules, the regulator convenes a truth-seeking exercise > the regulator—who is a neutral expert, required to recuse themselves if they have conflicts—makes a rule, citing the evidence on which the rule is based.
- mallowdram 1y agoFundamentally the issues precede the end states. Neither present-day software nor law-government are efficient enough to service the users to whom the possibilities (and deficiencies) are now apparent to the developers. Tech didn't create new formats it merely reformatted them into databases. Both are trapped in their inefficiencies which force the reduction of competition or their monopoly. The state is a myth we workaround by going global. Software operates arbitrary things and then automates them as expedient interfaces that disperse and charge access for what is ultimately specific (a good or service). Decent was a trial and error workaround that simply creates status. Doctorow pretends these are the ultimate forms, which s how his answers are palliatives not solutions. It's strange how bureaucratic Silicon Valley has become in relation to his bureaucratic prose, the tech industry once saw solutions beyond the available tech, now it's buried in consultancy rebuttal and Friedman myth ("competition is good"). We have behemoth Goliaths that are living dinosaurs that engage in hierarchical domination of what are really illusions: text, symbols, images. All we need now are the behemoths to mint their own $, copyright it and the circle is complete. Yet these are merely simulations in search of a reality that AI can't deliver, and so the behemoths are using all techniques to remain relevant. It's stillnly one step ahead of a magic act. Obviously they are finished, ready for obliteration by insightful, imaginative succession. Bureaucracies are all targets for replacement, especially Doctorow's type of prose.
- jeffbee 1y ago[flagged]
- Karrot_Kream 1y agoDoctorow is one of those older bloggers from the pre-influencer era who realized that they get a lot more eyeballs on their content by leaning into memeing and rage baiting than by sober analysis. At first it was fun but eventually the rigor of his arguments took backseat to his influencer game. What makes him particularly interesting is he's an influencer for the type of person who claims they hate influencers and the modern social media landscape. I wish he went back to writing cool fiction but I'm guessing that's a lot more effort for a lot less influence. And honestly he's done his bonafides in the fiction world so it's not like he has anything to prove. (Yes I know he had some fiction out last year but he took a long break. Maybe he's back on the fiction horse?)
- reidrac 1y agoI read what I think is his newest book and I liked it. It takes an special author to write a thriller that makes spreadsheets exciting.
- baggachipz 1y ago> I wish he went back to writing cool fiction but I'm guessing that's a lot more effort for a lot less influence. What are you on about, he released a new fiction book last year.
- dreamcompiler 1y ago> The McDonald’s-backed company Plexure sells surveillance data on you to vendors, who use it to raise the price of items when they think you’ll pay more. Finally I understand why when the McDonalds app was introduced it asked for permission to access my contacts. Of course I refused and deleted the app immediately. But to this day whenever I go to the McDonalds drive-thru the first question they ask is "Are you using the app today?" McDonalds seems to care so much about their app that I wonder if selling personal information makes them more money than selling hamburgers.
- lupusreal 1y agoIt sure seems like whenever a corporation grows old, large or expansive enough, it will inevitably morph into an spy agency. Even what is obstensibly a burger flipping business wants to spy on people. Earlier this week I was in a regional gas station getting lunch, they've got maybe 30 or so locations scattered around this part of the state, and watched them tell an old man that he couldn't get a loyalty card from them anymore because they only do apps now. "But I don't have a cellphone" - "Uhhh... You can also do it online?"
- baggachipz 1y ago> Even what is obstensibly a burger flipping business Technically, McDonald's is a real estate company[1] who wants to spy on people, but that doesn't make it any less egregious. [1] https://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com/mcdonalds-beyond-the-burger/ https://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com/mcdonalds-beyond-the-burg...
- xg15 1y agoIsn't that technically true for all franchises? If every restaurant is its own small/medium business and the corporate franchisor only ever interacts with the franchisees and never with the end customers, then all the direct revenue for the franchisor will be from services or licenses provided to the franchisees, not from directly selling burgers. But the franchisees are still much more dependent on the franchisor than they would be in a normal B2B relationship. And many of those "service costs" can be freely set by the franchisor and have the purpose of channeling revenue back from the restaurants - revenue that would not exist if no burgers were sold.
- cwyers 1y ago```When Uber entered the taxi market without securing taxi licenses or extending the workforce protections required under law, it said the move didn’t count because it did it with an app.``` It's so weird to see the first half of this article written as an ode to the virtues of competition and then see the sharp pivot into defending taxi medallions. Say what you will about Uber, but no Uber driver has ever tried to lie and harass a passenger over whether or not the credit card machine is broken in an effort to cheat on their taxes. It's not even like the anti-consumer hostility of the taxi experience translated into better rights for workers, the high price of a medallion meant in practice your typical cab driver was in a situation damned close to indentured servitude to a medallion company. And to top it all off, taxis demonstrate the fallacy of thinking that hundreds of market participants provides meaningful benefits from competition. In a market with a suitably large number of cab drivers and passengers, the odds of repeat business between any pair of driver and passenger is low enough that neither party is incentivized to treat each other well. It's not like anyone was pulling out a Yelp-like site or review book to pick the best-reviewed cab drivers, or like you went out of your way to stick with a cab driver you'd had a good experience with. Meaningful competition requires that people can make _informed_ choices, and without repeat business you don't get participants informed enough to make meaningful choices between market participants. It also requires leverage. It doesn't matter if you threaten to take your business elsewhere next time if you and they both know _you were going to anyway_. I'm not saying that Uber is perfect, or even that Uber couldn't be productively regulated better by the government. I'm saying that taxis were a terrible experience, and I don't trust Doctorow to have a good lay of the land when he focuses more on his ideology than the evidence. If subscribing to Doctorow's beliefs requires services to look more like taxis than Ubers, you can count me out.
- usrxcghghj 1y ago> sharp pivot into defending taxi medallions. This is a deflection. Cory is not coming out in defense of taxi medallions so much as it is a re-iteration of the current laws in place and how tech uses apps to get around the laws. Yes taxis suck, but also so does uber in their own way - This is all beside the point. These tech companies are using 'gig'ified models to get around laws set by the city officials elected by the people.
- gs17 1y ago> In its promotional materials, Plexure uses the example of charging extra for your breakfast sandwich on payday. You would hope this would be awful PR for them and anyone using their services. What disgusting corporate sociopathy.
- kmikeym 1y agoit's awful for us as consumers but it's AWESOME for corporate clients! imagine if workers used a plexure like service to demand higher wages during rush times or if someone called in sick? that would be amazing.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kmikeym 1y agoIt's not new. McD acquired 'Dynamic Yield' back in 2019 and has long been using big data. There is an case study from 2020 about it called "McDonald's: Can A Behemoth Lead in the Era of Artificial Intelligence?" by Fabrizio DiMuro of the University of Winnipeg.
- andy800 1y agoThey must be doing a very poor job of optimizing their marketing. I had a long history or ordering the same items using the same "deal", dozens of times a year. They removed that deal and my spend at McDonald's dropped 90%. I didn't place a single order for 6 months - unprecedented. Have the noticed? Have they adjusted their marketing towards me? Did they bring back that deal or offer alternative promotions on the same items? No, no, and no. The purpose of apps and big data and especially AI is to be able to achieve the goal of 1-to-1 marketing based on individual preferences and patterns. Yet it appears a massive corporation like McDonald's is unable to achieve any of these goals, it's just continuing "mass marketing" - same deals to huge portions of their customer base, without differentiation - the same as the 1990's. I admit to being especially sensitive since I worked in personalized loyalty marketing for nearly 20 years, so failures and missed opportunities really annoy me as both a customer and practician of the art.
- kmikeym 1y agoI think it's hard for us as individuals to understand the scale of McDonald's. They claim that 1 in 8 people in America have worked at McDonald's... that's... INSANE!
- andy800 1y agoSorry, not giving McDonald's a pass. They have a large team of data scientists and technologists working on their app and customer data. Even with a massive base, running a query to find individuals whose spend has dropped 50% y-o-y is not too difficult, and should be an urgent priority at a company that reported "negative comparable guest counts" (i.e. fewer customers y-o-y) for fiscal 2024.
- just_some_guy_2 1y agoIt's the same story all over again with AI. It's legal because there's no law saying AI isn't allowed to copy popular artists, or give legal, medical and physiological advice to random people without possesing any kind of formal qualifications for giving said advice. If I hired a hundred starving artists and a thousand students to provide the same services, my company would quickly be sued into the ground. But just fire the people and add AI instead, and then I'm magically no longer responsible for the output. The picture becomes murky and we start to discuss how the AI was trained, if the training data was sourced legally and so on and so forth.
- gregw2 1y agoThe same thing ("it's legal because there's no law saying AI isn't allowed to copy"... happened with search engines and the web when they took over from human curated lists of links. They made copies of websites en masse without asking permission of the copyright holders. They supplied enough value that laws were really only enforced or expanded by high-value highly organized rights holders (e.g YouTube removing videos with copyrighted audio.)