Last week the six biggest operators – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and ByteDance – were forced to toe the line on competition, advertising, interoperability and more. It was a gamechanger
I was around during the IE/ Netscape war. It occurred to me back then that given the same set of opportunities, any business would likely do the same. It sucks.
And not just businesses. I am always horrified by how many people are obsessed with protecting the precious intellectual property of their posts on the Fediverse from “scraping”. It’s exactly the kind of “Private Property! Keep out!” thinking that gives the tech monopolies the stranglehold over their users.
Maybe they’re just worried about meeting an AI trained on cat memes and inflammatory racist rants from socially awkward incoherent individuals with anger and self love issues.
It’s normal. In today’s social media it just takes more time to ask the author whether you can use what they’ve created, especially relative to clicking that repost button.
In the 00s you’d just ask and most likely get permission and also the author would be flattered. If you wouldn’t ask, though, that’d be very impolite and the author would be pissed.
EG have you ever heard about Power Ventures? That was a social media aggregator. You gave the website your credential for Facebook and others. It would fetch contact lists, messages, and so on, and present them in a single place. That gave you a kind of interoperability, or even a kind of federation. Obviously, Facebook didn’t like that. This kind of thing just weakens their hold on users.
You’d think users here should like this sort of thing. But it’s full here with people who passionately hate it, just as much as Facebook did. Facebook completely destroyed the company in court. The Fediverse is full of people who think that that’s exactly right.
Tech looks like magic to the average person. It’s even hard for tech people to definitively tell if something inappropriate is happening, unless they have access to the source. And even so, companies will hide behind the ‘trade secrets’ excuse. Most of the time we can only imagine the shenanigans happening behind the veneer of the corporate copy, because it’s what we would do, given the vast amounts of data and lack of accountability/ transparency available for exploitation.
All true, but they are also failing at simple stuff. Requiring a closed company’s format or services is a monopoly. Especially if “everyone else is doing it”. That is when regulators need to step in as it’s a market failure when there is a single vendor “everyone is using”.
Correct. I feel the regulators lost the plot when they didn’t keep up with market demands for next gen messaging, leading first to the proprietary protocols and then the proliferation of third party apps growing out of a person’s social clout. It’s sucks having to check which app someone is on before I can communicate with them. Some of us here in Asia have 10+ messaging apps on our phone, a combination of pre installed bloatware and apps installed because someone else didn’t have my one, esoteric app. Each time we are handing over more and more of our personal data, network, metadata (so they say) etc.
It was a problem before IMs on phones. Or smart phone. (Maybe not IMs because of IRC). Microsoft have been conflating monopolies with standards since forever. Not only dominating desktop operating systems, but office software on it. Using monopoly of one to get a monopoly of the other. And lets not forget what they did with browers. The EU is only body in the world dealing with the problem at all.
Phones in Asia sound even more dystopian than here in the UK. Surely you can still go LineageOS, GrapheneOS, etc?
I was around during the IE/ Netscape war. It occurred to me back then that given the same set of opportunities, any business would likely do the same. It sucks.
And not just businesses. I am always horrified by how many people are obsessed with protecting the precious intellectual property of their posts on the Fediverse from “scraping”. It’s exactly the kind of “Private Property! Keep out!” thinking that gives the tech monopolies the stranglehold over their users.
Maybe they’re just worried about meeting an AI trained on cat memes and inflammatory racist rants from socially awkward incoherent individuals with anger and self love issues.
I kid! I kid!
Maybe…
It’s normal. In today’s social media it just takes more time to ask the author whether you can use what they’ve created, especially relative to clicking that repost button.
In the 00s you’d just ask and most likely get permission and also the author would be flattered. If you wouldn’t ask, though, that’d be very impolite and the author would be pissed.
Just like IRL among normal people.
I don’t think you’re quite following here.
EG have you ever heard about Power Ventures? That was a social media aggregator. You gave the website your credential for Facebook and others. It would fetch contact lists, messages, and so on, and present them in a single place. That gave you a kind of interoperability, or even a kind of federation. Obviously, Facebook didn’t like that. This kind of thing just weakens their hold on users.
You’d think users here should like this sort of thing. But it’s full here with people who passionately hate it, just as much as Facebook did. Facebook completely destroyed the company in court. The Fediverse is full of people who think that that’s exactly right.
Aha, okay, I agree it’s not.
Yes, which is why we have anticompetition laws. It’s just for some reason, people can’t always see competition problem when it’s technology.
Tech looks like magic to the average person. It’s even hard for tech people to definitively tell if something inappropriate is happening, unless they have access to the source. And even so, companies will hide behind the ‘trade secrets’ excuse. Most of the time we can only imagine the shenanigans happening behind the veneer of the corporate copy, because it’s what we would do, given the vast amounts of data and lack of accountability/ transparency available for exploitation.
All true, but they are also failing at simple stuff. Requiring a closed company’s format or services is a monopoly. Especially if “everyone else is doing it”. That is when regulators need to step in as it’s a market failure when there is a single vendor “everyone is using”.
Correct. I feel the regulators lost the plot when they didn’t keep up with market demands for next gen messaging, leading first to the proprietary protocols and then the proliferation of third party apps growing out of a person’s social clout. It’s sucks having to check which app someone is on before I can communicate with them. Some of us here in Asia have 10+ messaging apps on our phone, a combination of pre installed bloatware and apps installed because someone else didn’t have my one, esoteric app. Each time we are handing over more and more of our personal data, network, metadata (so they say) etc.
It was a problem before IMs on phones. Or smart phone. (Maybe not IMs because of IRC). Microsoft have been conflating monopolies with standards since forever. Not only dominating desktop operating systems, but office software on it. Using monopoly of one to get a monopoly of the other. And lets not forget what they did with browers. The EU is only body in the world dealing with the problem at all.
Phones in Asia sound even more dystopian than here in the UK. Surely you can still go LineageOS, GrapheneOS, etc?
It’s called “capitalism”. You should avoid it if you can.