Comment by dns_snek
2 days ago
> If 99% of the population don't care about your issue, you're not going to win the political fight
Indeed, that's why I'm not very hopeful about the future of our privacy.
We will need technical solutions to Chat Control of course, but that's just the last step. First we need to crack open iOS and Android with anti-trust enforcement. An uncensored chat app is useless if we can't install it on our devices without government approval.
Unfortunately a significant portion of the tech community is in favor of these walled ~~prisons~~ gardens. Anything we try to do is doomed to fail without freedom to do what we want with devices we own, so until we get past that hurdle I'm hopeless that we'll be able to do anything about Chat Control.
> Indeed, that's why I'm not very hopeful about the future of our privacy.
I'm not very hopeful about politics generally, for that very reason. The obvious solution is to work to make politics less of a determinant of outcomes.
> First we need to crack open iOS and Android with anti-trust enforcement.
Another political solution? Not going to happen. We need to work towards a functional mobile OS ecosystem that isn't controlled by Apple, Google, or the government. That won't be easy, and won't offer any immediate short-term options, but work is already in progress, and will in the long run be far more effective than waiting for politics to save us.
> Another political solution? Not going to happen.
I hold out some hope that the EU "faction" responsible for the DMA makes enough progress in the coming years to make the lives of Chat Control proponents difficult by fighting for viability and complete independence of third party app stores. That's why I think it's critical for the EU to strike down Apple's (and now Google's) notarization process.
I'd also invite those who support walled gardens and attack the EU for the DMA to rethink their position because if authoritarian legislation like Chat Control succeeds in the EU, it's definitely coming to the US next.
Of course an independent OS would be the dream but I'm even less hopeful about that.
> The obvious solution is to work to make politics less of a determinant of outcomes.
This statement is meaningless. You can’t finance, develop, build, sell, and operate an OS and phone in a vacuum outside the reach of “politics”.
Nobody has the resources like an Apple or a Google to develop an open mobile OS that will be able to run on any hardware
If anything, I'd say it's the other way around. Apple and Google themselves don't seem to have the resources to do that -- iOS and Android are layers built on top of BSD and Linux, respectively -- whereas it's FOSS projects that are the most dominant and pervasive ones in even far more complex use cases than mobile OSes.
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