Comment by throwaway13337
12 hours ago
Centralization of power at all levels is bad. I therefore agree in spirit.
But who is the 'we' in that 'we'? If you defer to a politician, you simply centralize more power into a body of government constrained by only cultural norms and donor interests. Making a change requires the shifting of the overtone window of acceptability. At that point, it executes on it own regardless of mechanism.
The cultural norms are the prime mover.
> If you defer to a politician, you simply centralize more power into a body of government constrained by only cultural norms and donor interests.
You're taking it as a premise that someone should have this power, i.e. that the centralization should actually exist.
Compare two alternatives.
One, each person has (is required to have) a single account across all services. You use the same account for the DMV, YouTube, your bank and the IRS.
Two, you have an independent account for each service. You have separate accounts with the IRS, Medicare, DMV, YouTube, etc. If one of them gets messed up or compromised it doesn't affect the others. If you have a dispute with any of them it limits the blast radius.
The first one is a dystopia regardless of who controls the single account. It's subject to abuse of power whether it's a politician or Mark Zuckerberg. So the solution is to demand the second one.
Open standards, protocols, and interoperability are definitely part of my values.
But you're still relying on a law if I understand you correctly.
If the society lacks them as deeply ingrained values as opposed to somehow to getting lawmakers to force them, then they will be implemented cynically and not within the spirit of the values. The type of thing that happened with apple's implementation of the anti-gate-keeping laws 'enforced' by the eu.
What you describe requires a flexible values system - not a single semantic standard. I'd love to live in a world where if you were big enough to have people wanting to interoperate with your service on behalf of your users and you were actively preventing it, you'd be an outcast in the deepest sense. That no users would touch your service, and it would be politically unfeasible to deal with you.
We don't live in that world because people have not developed this sort of social norm.
This is one of those problems where there are different ways to solve it but all of them require you to put in the work.
We currently have an army defeatists who show up to tell you that if you think companies would get more customers by selling products that screw them less, nobody cares about that and people just want to live in a convenient cage with an unlimited supply of artificially sweetened penitentiary gruel. These people (to the extent that any can be found who are not robots) should obviously be burned alive in the town square to serve as an example to the others, but the most important thing if you intend to solve the problem in that way is to ignore them and build the product that screws customers less anyway. And then shame the services not doing that into irrelevance, once the alternative actually exists. Put it in your advertising so people know there is a difference.
Likewise, there are better ways to do anti-gatekeeping rules than what the EU is doing. For example, require two things. First, that source code be published as a requirement to receive copyright protection -- not that the customer can make unlimited copies, but that they can read it to know what it's doing or make changes to their own copy. And second, require that if the manufacturer/seller can modify any code running on the device, so can the customer. Now Apple can do malicious compliance all they like, but any vendor locks they put in will have someone distributing a patch to remove them the next day, and inhibiting that is the thing which is prohibited.
> Centralization of power at all levels is bad.
I assume that by this you mean something more nuanced than "we should abolish the FAA and let the airplanes crash until private enterprise solves it." Or maybe "Let drug dealers (pharmaceutical companies) sell whatever the free market will bear without testing, safety, or the ability to hold them responsible."
I only ask, because there are some people who unironically think that we'd be more safe going back to the time before OSHA, or medical licensing, and some of them hang out here.
> I assume that by this you mean something more nuanced than "we should abolish the FAA and let the airplanes crash until private enterprise solves it."
Strawman fallacy: It is in the interests of private enterprise to not have their $100-million+ airplanes crash, because it means $100-million+ going up in smoke. The owners of those planes would therefore have an interest in not having them crash.
> Or maybe "Let drug dealers (pharmaceutical companies) sell whatever the free market will bear without testing, safety, or the ability to hold them responsible."
Under this scenario, if the public finds out that a drug is harmful/lethal, the public jerks away from that drug towards solutions that have a reputation of working.
Is the resulting rate of fatality/worse-QOL lower than (a central authority filtering out drugs & holding them to standards)? No, definitely not. But the gap between the two is not infinite, and in most cases falls into an order of magnitude of difference.
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> I only ask, because there are some people who unironically think that we'd be more safe going back to the time before OSHA, or medical licensing, and some of them hang out here.
An axiom of (feeble-mindedness in the average person) is proposed here. People are as good/competent as the standards that they are held to.
> medical licensing
There's a difference between a certification of competency, and a deliberate constriction of the supply of medical residencies.
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/5550556-residency-cap...
If anything, I think software needs more of these sort of top down safety rules. I want to companies held financially / criminally responsible for data leaks. Just like restaurants are held responsible for food safety.
We the people
How?
That is ridiculous. These big tech companies are supposed to be broken up under the current rules. Effective government is not big government, it is right sized.
Rich people and fascists don't want a smaller government, they want a government too weak to protect you from them.
I agree with you. They are in violation of a reasonable interpretation of anti-trust laws already on the books. It's quite clear. And yet those laws are not enforced.
You seem to be saying that there are a group of people who want it this way and they have more power so that is why is it the case.
But how did we get here? It's a complicated question for sure. And for anything that occurred like this, there are many answers depending on where you put the weights.
I put the weights cultural norms of the maybe 100s of thousands of people that had a hand in how we got here in varying degrees. The leaders of the companies of course who didn't get flack in their communities for doing something that was negative to the rest of society. The politicians who played along, the employees who were proud to work at such a place and the family that could be proud of them for it, even us users who sacrificed liberty for safety and convenience.
At every level, it's social norms that caused this to be.
We are, primarily, social creatures. Even the rich - maybe especially the rich - are greatly influenced in how they act by what those they respect think of it.