Comment by nucleative
4 months ago
We really need an internet Bill of Rights. Google has too much power to delete your company from existence with no due process or recourse.
If any company controls some (high) percentage of a particular market, say web browsers, search, or e-commerce, or social media, the public's equal access should start to look more like a right and less like an at-will contract.
30 years ago, if a shop had a falling out with the landlord, it could move to the next building over and resume business. Now if you annoy eBay, Amazon or Walmart, you're locked out nationwide. If you're an Uber, Lyft, or Doordash (etc) gig worker and their bots decide they don't like you anymore, then sayonara sucker! Your account has been disabled, have a nice day and don't reapply.
Our regulatory structure and economies of scale encourage consolidation and scale and grant access to this market to these businesses, but we aren't protecting the now powerless individuals and small businesses who are randomly and needlessly tossed out with nobody to answer their pleas of desperation, no explanation of rules broken, and no opportunity to appeal with transparency.
It's a sorry state of affairs at the moment.
I know someone with a small business that applied for Venmo Business account (which is the main payment method in their community industry) and Venmo refused to open the account and didn't provide any reason as to why saying that they have the right to choose to refuse providing the service, which they do. But all the competitors of that business in the area do have a Venmo and take payment this way so it is basically a revenue loss for that person.
It's a bit frustrating when a company becomes a major player in an industry and can have a life and death sentence on other businesses.
There are alternative payment method but people are use to pay a certain way in that industry/area, similarly there are other browsers but people are used to Chrome.
Same thing with Paypal - I opened a business account, was able to do one transaction and was shut down for fraud. I tested a donation to myself. Under $10. Lifetime ban.
fuck paypal
That’s not unique to PayPal. Pretty much any payment processor that detects a proprietor paying themselves is going to throw up a red flag for circular cash flow fraud and close the account. Bank-operated payment processors are often slower to catch it, but they will also boot you for this.
4 replies →
I sold some camera equipment on eBay once. PayPal flagged my account as fraudulent, asked for a receipt for the equipment which I did not have (I bought it years before), so they banned my account indefinitely.
Randomly, years later, they turned it back on. Thanks, I guess?
1 reply →
Fuck PayPal.
Fwiw Venmo is run by the same thugs who run PayPal. So go figure.
1 reply →
Force interoperability. In 2009 I could run Pidgin and load messages from AIM, FB Messages, Yahoo... Where did that go?
I suspect the EU will be the first region to push the big tech companies on this.
Or enforce antitrust.
As firearm enthusiasts like to say, "Enforce the laws we already have".
We need to fix the jurisprudence around anti-trust.
> No person engaged in commerce or in any activity affecting commerce shall acquire, directly or indirectly, the whole or any part of the stock or other share capital and no person subject to the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission shall acquire the whole or any part of the assets of another person engaged also in commerce or in any activity affecting commerce, where in any line of commerce or in any activity affecting commerce in any section of the country, the effect of such acquisition may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly.
Taken at face value, that would forbid companies from buying any large competitors unless the competitor is already failing. Somehow that got watered down into almost nothing.
5 replies →
In 2025 you can use Beeper (or run your own local Matrix server with the opensource bridges) and get the same result with WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Discord, Google Messages, etc. etc.
You'd have to break most of those platforms' TOS to do so.
5 replies →
isn't beeper non-free? there aren't that many decent matrix bridges.
1 reply →
The project is still alive and we're trying to finish our next major version to be able to better support modern protocols and features.
We do monthly updates on the status of the project that we call State of the Bird and they can be found here https://discourse.imfreedom.org/tag/state-of-the-bird.
Remind me (in a millenium or two) when you can finally do XMPP MAM + message carbons. Until then: lol
> I suspect the EU will be the first region to push the big tech companies on this.
Supposedly, DMA should enforce this already.
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-announces-next-st...
Haven't heard much about it lately though.
Your Pidgin example isn't even real interoperability - you still needed real AIM, FB and Yahoo accounts for that.
> 2009 I could run Pidgin and load messages from AIM, FB Messages, Yahoo... Where did that go?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBcY3W5WgNU
But seriously; the internet is now overrun with AI Slop, Spam, and automated traffic. To try to do something about it requires curation, somebody needs to decide what is junk, which is completely antithetical to open protocols. This problem is structurally unsolvable, there is no solution, there's either a useless open internet or a useful closed one. The internet is voting with Cloudflare, Discord, Facebook, to be useful, not open. The alternative is trying to figure out how to run a decentralized dictatorship that only allows good things to happen; a delusion.
The only other solution is accountability, a presence tied to your physical identity; so that an attacker cannot just create 100,000 identities from 25,000 IP addresses and smash your small forum with them. That's an even less popular idea, even though it would make open systems actually possible. Building your own search engine or video platform would be super easy, barely an inconvenience. No need for Cloudflare if the police know who every visitor is. No need for a spam filter, if the government can enforce laws perfectly.
Take a look at email, the mother of all open protocols (older than HTTP). What happened? Radical recentralization to companies that had effective spam management, and now we on HN complain we can't break through, someone needs to do something about that centralization, so that we can go back to square one where people get spammed to death again, which will inevitably repeat the discretion required -> who has the best discretion -> flee there cycle. Go figure.
I run an email server with no specific spam filter. Sometimes I get spam. Then I add a filter on my end to delete it and move on. It's nowhere near as bad as people proclaim. Neither is deliverability, for that matter, even after I forgot to set an SPF record and some random internet server sent a bunch of spam on my behalf (which I know because I got the bounces).
1 reply →
Why should curation be centralized? We do not need a "decentralized dictatorship" (what would that even be? that's antithetical) and we certainly do not need a centralized one. It seems crazy that your solutions to AI, spam, and "automated traffic" (I don't know what that is, I assume web crawlers and such) is that the police control every single transaction.
First off, we can simply let the user, or client software, choose. Why should we let centralized servers do that by default?
At scale, DNS is somewhat centralized but authorities are disconnected from internet providers and web browsers. They're the best actors to regulate this.
For mail, couldn't we come up with a mail-DNS, that authenticates senders? There could be different limits based on whether you are an individual or a company, and whether you're sending 10'000 emails or just 100.
Regardless of whether these are good solutions -- why jump to extreme ones? "TINA" is not a helpful argument, it's a slogan.
4 replies →
So the solution to AI slop and spam is end of anonymity and total state control of the internet? Talk about the cure being worse than the disease.
The issues with todays internet stem specifically from the centralisation of power in the hands of Google, Apple and the social networks.
Bad search results? Blame Google's monopoly incentivising them intentionally making their results worse.
Difficulty promoting or finding events? Blame Facebooks real revenue model - preventing one to many communications by default and charging for exceptions.
AI overrun with slop? Blame OpenAI and Facebook, both of whom are actively promoting and profiting from the creation of slop.
Automated traffic slowing down sites? It's often the AI companies indexing and reindexing hundreds of times.
Spam? Not a huge issue for anyone that I'm aware of.
The closed internet platforms are the problem. Forcing them to relinquish control over handsets, data and our interpersonal connections is the solution. It will be legislative, or it will be torches to the data centres, likely both. But it is coming.
1 reply →
> To try to do something about it requires curation, somebody needs to decide what is junk, which is completely antithetical to open protocols.
The contra-example, of course, is email. SpamAssassin figured this out 24 years (!) ago. There is zero reason you couldn't apply similar heuristics to detect AI-slop or whatever particular kind of content you don't want to accept.
> Radical recentralization to companies that had effective spam management
Only for the lazy.
2 replies →
They're too busy trying to strip encryption to do anything
It’s almost as if those companies have country like powers.
Maybe they should be subject to same limitations like First Amendment etc.
The solution is just to enforce the anti-trust act as it is written.
As long as wealth can be transduced into political power, that boat is beached as
FWIW in some jurisdictions you might be able to sue them for tortious interference, which basically means they went out of their way to hurt your business.