Comment by negura
1 day ago
Middle powers should heed Cory Doctorow's advice [0] and start offering legal protection in their jurisdictions for precisely this type of projects.
America is a hostile nation, who has sought to align everyone with its interests, under a false pretense of mutual benefit, while instead its tech sector has caused much harm at a global scale. America is now doubling down on value extraction, at an obvious expense to everyone else.
Middle powers should not be granting to America any goodwill whatsoever. There is nothing in it for them anymore, except irresponsible reliance on a bad faith actor.
>America is a hostile nation, who has sought to align everyone with its interests, under a false pretense of mutual benefit, while instead its tech sector has caused much harm at a global scale. America is now doubling down on value extraction, at an obvious expense to everyone else.
In India, recently, a bill was passed that can permit banks and the government to add charges on UPI transactions. UPI is one of the biggest digital payment systems in the world, and it was free until now. Insider information from multiple news sources suggests that this was done because of pressure from the US.
Sounds bogus, there's free payment services in the US as well, that's nothing special. What makes more sense in the India context is low value of volume per customer where even the minimal operating costs are difficult to cover. I say that from some amount of experience in the micro-finance world, where even money provided at zero actual interest in terms of the loaned money itself still ended up having to have somewhat painful interest rates just to cover true costs in low income countries.
I do not know a single free payment service in the US outside Zelle and that is not really comparable to India's UPI.
Are you saying that there are services in the US that I can use to accept payments as easily as a credit card with no fees on me as a merchant?
UPI costs about $500 million per year to the Indian government while having a transaction volume of $3.4 trillion per year. That is < 0.001 % of the transaction volume.
I am not going to claim there is no subsidization to the cost to the government by the banks as they get to keep control over the flow of money and that might change in the future but for now the costs to the government vs benefit to the Indian economy is fairly clear to me.
Just the 18% GST returns on the 2.5% extra the merchants would receive when a user pays with UPI over VISA would more than make up for the cost to the government. Not to mention all the cash income that was impossible to track before is now tracked under UPI.
Brazil is trying that and getting a bad look from the USA. Can you imagine a smaller nation doing the same? What would the USA do?
Exactly, what are we going to do? Impose sanctions? Tarriffs? We do that anyways without recourse. Bomb you? We might do that anyways without reasonable impetus. Y'all have no reason to temper your actions for fear of retribution; our President is threatening to rename a lake to Lake America because we "won't be doing business with Ontario anymore". Why? Does it matter? Could anyone have done anything that wasn't just abject groveling? No.
To hell with us. The rest of the world needs to move on from giving a crap what our government thinks of you.
The US is fighting wars with everyone on everything at the same time. They don't have the resources to do anything about it. Every country will develop their own independent payment networks.
China was right to block US tech companies to promote their own, most large and capable countries will do the same over time.
I wouldn't cite China as the example. If they had their way, every country would have its own firewall just like them, giving them significant control over information flow to their citizens. It works very well. That's why they have been pushing "internet sovereignty" for years.
4 replies →
Doctorow's point is that the USA's trade policy is unilaterally capricious and malevolent toward the best of its allies, so other nations' actions ultimately cannot be said to have any mitigating causal effect. Might as well just go for it. F the DMCA.
Unfortunately, DMCA isn't just in the USA's interest and the copyright situation is actually worse in some other countries, notably Germany which, which means I wouldn't have too much hope on the EU moving in the right direction on that front.
i remember when, after 9/11, the US introduced webcams and fingerprint scanners, at airports to take pictures of incoming travellers and Brazil had a similar lo-fi response, with ink blots and cameras only for Americans. Something like this needs to happen more and everywhere now.
Brazil is close with Russia, and Russia does a lot more harm to the world than the US even under Trump.
What would be your principal point to persuade someone Putin is worse than Trump?
Invading a country, pretending it's not a war of aggression, letting your own soldiers die, and killing many innocent people with no authority from your democratic houses... USA would not do that!!! /s
Trump stood to avoid prison, he's used the stock markets to steal from his own people. It looks like the wars against Venezuela, and against Iran were/are solely to enrich himself. Honestly, Putin looks more moral here (a phrase I thought I'd never even contemplate) unless he was also in a club of prolific paedophiles?
I guess Putin has perverted a super power into an oligarchic dictatorship...
1 reply →
Most middle powers have robust censorship regimes. As for America being a unique "hostile" phenomena in geopolitics, I believe you are either purveyour or a victim of propaganda.
> its tech sector has caused much harm at a global scale
Like what exactly? Whatever harm US (software) tech has dished out, it has also dished out domestically. What is your nationality and what are your nation's contributions to the rest of the world?
> Whatever harm US (software) tech has dished out, it has also dished out domestically.
Are you saying that, because Big Tech is harming the mental health of American children, this is supposed to redeem the situation somehow?
Or are you saying it contradicts the observation that US has "caused harm at a global scale"? There is no contradiction.
> What is your nationality and what are your nation's contributions to the rest of the world?
Maybe this power posturing would have worked 20 years ago, before America's enshittification showed who its "contributions" were ultimately designed to benefit. I don't disagree that it's urgent for middle powers to contribute to the world. I believe ending their protection of America's value-extracting power is now a great way to do exactly that.
If even a few of the people freaking out here just recreated or rehosted nitter elsewhere out of their reach, we probably wouldn't have this problem. Be the change you wish to see
All due respect, but how would anyone survive, no less find a way to make anything like the average income of any of us on HN, in a world that made not just some 'patents' free but removed property and invention such as the extremities Doctorow's fiction often espouses? America is sorta known for pretense of mutual benefit. We sorta fumbled things after we, to put it bluntly, nuked the Japanese twice. Don't get me wrong, if you read my comments elsewhere you will see how I feel about people/companies claiming swathes of things for themselves too.
Everyone seems to think they either deserve more or they fall for believing people are inherently willing to remunerate fairly for what they use... Def. not my experience, at all... like what if people were all just assuming since your ideas exist, they were for sale or free, or 'offering' things you dont want or arent getting in return...? what if you dont want what they do with it in the first place? what if (heh) you just don't like the end user and you know they will irk you with it?
Doctorow is the furthest from a fair or good example, imho.
> find a way to make anything like the average income of any of us on HN
a) This is not about trying to protect the incomes of people working in Big Tech
b) In his talk Doctorow gives examples of business opportunities that are actually being repressed by the laws against reverse engineering
It's not just about big tech. It's about what enables highly productive societies in general. Without IP, I suppose everyone could share to some limited extent what is already known, but why would anyone ever sink big dollars or time into coming up with something new that'd immediately get stolen by people who did nothing to contribute to it? Indeed, it's part of the problem with manufacturing in the West, there's no robust enforcement of IP with China due to political sensitivities so manufacturers have to have strategies to protect themselves from the fact that if they release a new product they've got maybe 90 days before a copycat hits the market.
I can't help but wonder how much stronger the core of the EU economy would be with actual robust management of their trade relationship with China. The US too but I think the EU is suffering a bit more in real time.
No doubt it makes Doctorow the star of certain types of intellectual circles but the theories have never made a people or country actually well off and never will. But, things don't have to work in the real world to be popular, or even to become policy.
1 reply →
Maybe in the past, but who in the present who isn’t already rich is or would have the income hurt by eliminating IP laws? Keep in mind that most indie projects make barely any money, most of those that do are free + ads or Patreon, any software not under expensive DRM is easy to pirate, and AI companies pirate to train LLMs.
> what if you dont want what they do with it in the first place? what if (heh) you just don't like the end user and you know they will irk you with it?
What if you don’t like what somebody does with “your” ideas in their own personal bubble? Why care? Try to ignore them. I’d rather that than have somebody restrict what I can do with whatever ideas they claim are theirs.
cool. as long as we are clear people are free to commit mass genocide and i dunno peel peoples' skin back or i dunno, something out of a robin wiliams scifi movie or phosphorus bombing or something with what you have invented. just trying to get some clarity on the concept of 'belongings' and property law.
> We sorta fumbled things after we, to put it bluntly, nuked the Japanese twice
What?
I believe OP is saying that the US has not been reliably sane in its public policy since ending WW II via nuclear warfare.
I don't know if I agree with the claim overall, but I certainly think nuking civilian populations was an execrable choice (even if the official targets were technically military ones).
29 replies →
For a very brief window of time, USA did a little bit more good than bad.
Those of us wanting to believe USA was more better than not have struggled to recalibate our beliefs.