Comment by snowwrestler
8 months ago
Over a decade ago, a ton of tech companies (including Google) coordinated a “blackout the Internet” day of protest against U.S. legislation that would have required them to alter DNS to fight piracy. Interesting that now that France actually does it, they say they will comply.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PI...
In the last decade Tech has become part of the establishment. They are one of the dominant controlling forces.
The blackout was _not_ about preserving free speech, or any other moral high road. It was purely about control. Tech hadn’t yet cemented their position as a dominant player and didn’t want to cede the control they had.
Now that they’ve embedded themselves in the ruling class they don’t care as much because they already have control.
Tech has always been part of the establishment, funded by capital trying to solve capital's problems. The only part of tech that really deviates from this is the free software community, which has always been hostile to capital. The blackout day emerged from people, not the industry, and people have changed.
idunno, I remember when everything cool I found on the internet was on a .edu domain, because that's almost all there was. But yeah, capitalist tech has always been part of the establishment. A lot of the good stuff comes from non-profit-related motivations, fortunately.
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> funded by capital trying to solve capital's problems
Is this parody?
Should we start against the trade unions and German barbarians next? (The latter to avenge Varus and recapture the Eagles.)
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This is the right line of thinking. My interpretation is slightly different - I think the tech companies have run afoul of various norms when it comes to things like the privacy of customers, anti-trust, taxation, etc. Because they are now reliant on these unethical ways of holding onto economic power or growing their economic power, they need to not get into trouble with governments. This means playing nice with them so that they do not become subject to legislation that will rein them in.
There's also the nuance that while SOPA/PIPA were bills being legislated for potential passage, France is citing laws already in effect.
For better or worse, if you do business in <x> you follow <x>'s laws or GTFO.
> For better or worse, if you do business in <x> you follow <x>'s laws or GTFO.
That does rather imply that the laws are worthless. Obviously there is going to be someone who doesn't do business in France and operates a public DNS server that doesn't censor anything.
Regardless of that, I would challenge your premise. You can violate an unjust law and risk the consequences. And if you get the PR right, there may not even be any consequences:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...
But to your point, this is one of the reasons it's important to get these laws off the books and keep them off the books. Once you have the law, the government gets to choose the test case. You know perfectly well they'll be using it against dissidents and false positives tomorrow, but the test case is going to be some loathsome terrorists or a commercial piracy operation with no shades of grey, and then that's the case that sets the precedent.
They should never be allowed the opportunity.
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> For better or worse, if you do business in <x> you follow <x>'s laws or GTFO.
Except when <x> is ruled by <y>, in which case you impose a small fine as to not upset <y>.
Yeah! Like Uber, or AirBnB! wait, hold on.
If they had control they wouldn’t comply
What? The tech ( dns in this case) is as neutral as you can get, these are french courts ordering the block, and the dns technicians are controlled by american corps. Dns just executes the orders of the corp, which in turn obeys the local courts.
Tech is under corp in the chain or command, which in turn is under national law.
Gross lack of extra-technical nuance here.
Same with tech and China. They fold like paper without any protest:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...
Apple have repeatedly thrown their customers under the bus especially in China. At least Google had the courage to withdraw entirely.
Google never left China, they literally just moved to a new building on the other side of the road (in Zhongguancun, Beijing). They even “left a couple of boxes there”[1].
[1] Blum, Andrew, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. New York, Ecco, 2012. https://archive.org/details/unset0000unse_p9b6
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This is why I can never take their current alleged passion for privacy fully seriously. Sure, I do appreciate some of the features they're coming out with, but I don't trust them to not eventually drop this marketing angle and pull rugs when it's no longer profitable
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Google employees had the courage to force Google to pretend to withdraw.
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Apple leaving china does essentially nothing, the people there won’t get end to end encryption either way
Google had zero courage and went fully under Putin and helped him to silence Russian opposition (Navalny) during the crucial pre-election time.
Telegram did the same, btw.
I think these firms are all compromised. Poisoning dns is such a bad idea.
Yep. Net neutrality, my left foot. MAANG are all about participating in PRISM, monopolizing access, and choosing who can and can't speak because they compromise a for-profit, oligopolic, technocratic cartel.
Piracy is simply Terrible, it's chopping the dear copyright holders off at the knees, they are frequently having to go on food stamps, and it's unclear how they'll continue on.
/s
Fighting online piracy: First world, or even zeroth world problem.
It's not loke the pirates are saying "hmm, should I pay exorbitant rates for this or should I pirate it?"
The real competition is alternatives: "should I bother pirating this or just go do some other activity."
Bottom line: In most cases it's actually free marketing, and has a net positive effect for the copyright holders. The continual attempts to aggressively clamp down really says a lot about the mentality of the Big Market Forces, *iaa, *aa, and now MS and Elgoog. Even when it's good fertilizer for their perpetual evergreen money tree, they still flip out.
It's all about profit protectionism of the moats around streaming to enforce the arbitrary extraction of gotcha capitalism subscription fees from as many people as possible for as much as possible.
It was not about standing up against IP juggernauts in the interest of users, but in the interest of themselves -- it was tech companies flexing their strength to show that cooperation with tech companies was required, and that they are open to cooperation in other ways too.