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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 years ago

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Congress's Big Tech trustbusting smackdown

After more than a year of investigations, House Dems have produced a 450-page report on market concentration in the tech industry, with a slate of findings that are obvious and long overdue, and a slate of recommendations that are simultaneously traditional and radical. Start with the findings: the market is concentrated and the companies preserve their monopolistic standing with anitcompetitive tactics:

Apple's App Store stranglehold raises prices and transfers money from creators to the company

Google preferences its own services in search results

Facebook buys companies for predatory reasons, to snuff out potential future competition threats

Amazon rips off its sellers and engages in predatory pricing

https://www.wired.com/story/congress-unveils-plan-curb-big-tech-power/ All obvious, but it's nice to have it in the record. Then there's the traditional AND radical remedies: blocking mergers, prohibiting the creation of vertical monopolies by entering "adjacent lines of business." And then there's "structural separation" - the rule that banned rail companies from owning freight companies that competed with their customers and banks from owning businesses that competed with the businesses that borrowed money from them. There's a shifting of the default in mergers: the DoJ should presume ALL mergers and acquisitions by large firms are anticompetitive and require the companies to prove otherwise. A kind of neutrality in platforms, requiring them not to preference their own products over others. I predict this one will be the source of endless misery because it supposes that there is a "right" way to organize search results. Weirdly, this was Google's position for a long time. If you were an early web writer and you cornered a Google exec at a party to complain about your pagerank, they'd just shrug and say, "Make the page better then." The implication being that they were measuring objective quality of your page, like they'd invented a machine for taking pictures of the forms casting shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. It was an algorithm and algorithms are math and math is objective. This excited the world's governments, who started to say, "Oh, hey, if this is MATH, then it's not censorship to order you to change the math. "If we order you to keep certain things above the fold, or to downrank or banish others, that's like specifying the equations for structural steel, not like ordering the editor of the New York Times to put certain articles on the front page." Hoist on their own petard, Google started working with eminent First Amendment scholars to advance the (correct) position that the math was in service to expression: the programmers and QA teams that wrote and tuned the algorithms were making editorial judgments. These were indirect - in the way that, say, a newspaper proprietor might say, "We need more coverage of inflation" or "Let's call Qanon a 'cult' and not a 'conspiracy theory'" - but they were acts of human expression. I mean, they HAD to be. Google doesn't have a webcam in Plato's cave. There is no objective, universal quality metric. And they're not choosing sites at random, either. So it has to be judgment, and judgment is expression. All to say: "Good luck with search neutrality, Congress." But there's more! The report calls for increased budgets for antitrust enforcement and killing forced arbitration and its bans on class action suits. And finally, the report calls for overturning 40 years' worth of antitrust case-law, the decisions that depended on the doctrine of the Nixonite criminal Robert Bork, who became a court sorcerer to Ronald Reagan. Bork's doctrine was that antitrust law needed objective standards and objective standards were impossible to come by in markets - you could never hope to objectively define when a company had too much marketshare or was abusing its power. This may sound like my argument about "search neutrality" - but there's a big difference. Bork had a counsel of despair: "Because we can't identify shenanigans, we shouldn't try to prevent them." But the pre-Borkian enforcement strategy wasn't grounded only in objective correlates of shenanigans: it was also designed to make it harder for shenanigans to occur. Pre-Bork, we fought monopolies because they were bad - they had the power to distort markets and policies. Pre-Bork, we fought monopolies because they were monopolies. Post-Bork, we only fought monopolies if we caught them in the act, and even then, we could only win if we could prove shenanigans - and monopolists got really good at making it hard to prove them. For example, they perfected the idea of the "market definition" defense. You hear this with Amazon, when Bezos tells Congress that Amazon isn't a monopoly because people buy stuff at Walmart. By including "Walmart" (or every time in which goods change hands for money) in the definition of Amazon's market, Amazon can make itself out to be a bit-player. Here's an example of a Borkean giving this line just last year: "Facebook doesn't have a monopoly because I can still make phone calls." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_Jp-GJ9LM0 Returning to a pre-Borkean vision of antitrust enforcement is profound and would have far-reaching implications for telecoms, entertainment, pharma, accounting, logistics, energy, transport, aviation, etc. But while all these industries got concentrated through the same methods - predatory acquisitions, mergers to monopoly, vertical monopolies - they aren't all the same. What kind of industry they are MATTERS. Tech has two unique characteristics: First, it is foundational. Our ability to demand better policy and to collaborate to hold policymakers to account depends on tech. We're not going to organize a global movement by wheatpasting posters on telephone poles. And second, tech means computers, and computers are "universal" in a way other industries' products are not. Computers can interoperate with each other in ways that, say, cars or can-openers or beers cannot. That interoperability has been the source of enormous dynamism and a check against concentration in the history of tech: what companies thought of as walled gardens that exploited "network effects" became feeding pens for new market entrants. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability Whether that's Static Controls - a tiny Taiwanese company that refilled IBM Lexmark's toner cartridges and got to piggyback on the vast market IBM had developed, growing so large that they ACQUIRED Lexmark or... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-business-model-lexmarks-anti-competitive-legacy Apple, which defeated Microsoft's office dominance by creating Iwork, reverse-engineering the Office file-formats so that Mac users didn't need to convince their colleagues to switch OSes, they could just share documents with them. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay The same tech companies that rose to dominance through this Competitive Compatibility are now its worst enemies, lobbying against Right to Repair, building products around DRM, and claiming their terms of service have the force of law under CFAA. Restoring the right of new market entrants to make stuff that plugs into the existing dominant products and services would go a LONG way to restoring dynamism to tech, to making companies' survival reliant on pleasing users, rather then dominating markets. And while the Congressional report doesn't give interop the centrality it deserves, it DOES mention it and discuss its importance. https://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/editorialfiles/2020/10/06/investigation_of_competition_in_digital_markets_majority_staff_report_and_recommendations.pdf

#pluralistic

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jimbuchan · 6 years ago

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With InterLedger, The Check's In The 'e' Mail

... or perhaps, a better moniker would be the Value is in the email. Up until very recently, sending money from one jurisdiction to another (especially with cross-border payments) was a lengthy process. Along the way, there are multiple rascals all taking a cut of your original amount, and why? Because the technology within the internet lay dormant. However, with the proliferation of blockchains, the cat is not only out of the bag, but growing at an alarming rate. Be they institutions, remittance providers or anyone requiring a rapid means of transferring value (money), these new platforms now make sending value a seconds-only realization. One such system which is making great strides in the financial world is the InterLedger Protocol (ILP), developed by Ripple and the Interledger W3C Community Group. Pioneer Or Settler You can’t have a discussion about ILP without first dissecting where the majority of us stand on the subject of this new form of virtual transmission of currency. Even in 2018, just the mention of the word Blockchain today for some conjures up visions of black market activity and P.T. Barnum'esque snakeoilism, which suggests there is a fair amount of racetrack still to go before mass adoption is realized. The main reason for this is due to the early days of Bitcoin, when all of the talk was about drug dealers using this system as their preferred financing method, and the platform which powered the token was of course Blockchain,. This notion still permeates the masses, but through education and new use-cases being adopted on a daily basis, this image is being turned around.

youtube

The perception still present in the minds of some people when confronted with terms like Blockchain, Bitcoin or Digital Assets.

While we can and should take our hat off to the 'Satoshi gang' for making the blockchain possible, it has since progressed forth in ways not initially conceived, and especially in the sending of payments, there is simply no other entity as secure or democratic. That being said, in order for majority acceptance to be a reality, interoperability must be the focus, not only with the transfer of multiple currencies but even networks and varying blockchains themselves. This is where the ILP shines forth as a top-shelf protocol. as it is not siloed to a specific currency but accepts them all. The Trust Gateway For Transferring Money-Over-IP. Two scenarios are presented, with one clear goal... get the money from point A to point B as securely and quickly as possible.

Exhibit A (The Buggy) - In the existing system used by big banks and clearinghouses, sending currency from one country to another is a time-consuming and decades-old affair because of the monopolistic platform used by the vast majority of the institutions. Regardless if it's USD-USD or CAD-to-YEN, a wire transfer can take days at best in which to settle on the other side. Along the way, there are fees associated with the transaction, much of it arbitrary and if the initiator is not willing to pay the fees, there are little alternative options, apart from mailing the money in the form of a check, which is a whole other seminar altogether. Along with fees, the amount of information that must be completed for the wire to transfer successfully can be a 'white-knuckler' as if just one number (account or address) is out of coherence, your entire amount could be at risk... and good luck trying to get this back. Why? Because there are only a small number of folks who can see the 'ledger'. If the money is settled, it can be a lesson in crazy-patience as it can take days or more, all the while you being the one who has to wait. With all of the advancements in science and technology, this simply cannot continue to manifest as it is OUR money, and as such should be respected by the custodians. Trust and speed in this scenario lay squarely in the hands of the institution, which with today's advancements is like a broken pencil. Pointless.

Exhibit B (The Car) - A modern and much-needed answer to the problems outlined above arrives with style in the form of a trade of value using InterLedger to handle the entire works. For starters, there is no waiting for the bank to open, standing in line, followed-up[ by the 20-minute nerve-center experience of ensuring the right paperwork is completed. Nuts. Instead, the initiator (sender) simply opens an app on their phone, selects the amount to send, clicks on the terminating currency type, and in seconds the money is transferred. No middle fee-takers, no waiting and with an accessible ledger.

If this seems like a fantastic notion worthy of Dr. Spock, you’re not alone, but the fact is that this technology exists today, with many banks trialing this new protocol. Take for instance the recent transaction between Canada’s ATB Financial and Reise Bank in Germany, where a $1,000 transaction occurred using the ‘Exhibit B’ approach as opposed to the status-quo. Imagine the convenience for not only the consumer, but even the financial house itself. In this example, the Ripple Connect Platform clearly shows the settlement the second it occurs, which is a quantum leap compared to legacy ledgers. Putting yourself in their position, consider the progress that could be made when trillions of dollars are not tied-up in unnecessary antiquated processing algorithms. You can lead your own conclusions, but in pondering the possibilities of what the blockchain can provide, the existing system of financial settlement seems nothing more than a romantic ideal.

Payment networks, banks, stock exchanges or individual blockchains can all take advantage of the interoperable nature of the ILP, regardless of the currency going in, and coming out. Testing of the platform is available for anyone to try, and set-up takes only minutes (link). For more information on the ILP, visit their homebase @ interledger.org.

Title image via XRPChat | CX by Coinsquare | Interledger by Ripple, ILP W3C Group | 8 Seconds by ATB | ReiseBank

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aikungfu · 4 years ago

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WordPress is adding in-app purchases to its previously free iOS app after claiming Apple prevented it from making updates until the change was made, The Verge reported Friday.

WordPress' founding developer said in a tweet Friday that Apple cut off developers from making updates to the app unless they started letting users buy domain names within the app — a service the app doesn't currently include.

The Verge reported that WordPress agreed, meaning Apple effectively pressured a free app into monetizing itself, allowing it to take a 30% commission on future purchases.

Apple's App Store policies, particularly its requirement that app developers use Apple's payment systems and give the company a 30% cut, has frustrated developers for years — and recently, lawmakers who say it's monopolistic behavior.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Apple's battle with app developers heated up again Friday after WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg claimed that the company locked developers out from making updates until it added in-app purchases to the free iOS app, The Verge reported.

"Heads up on why @WordPress iOS updates have been absent... we were locked by App Store. To be able to ship updates and bug fixes again we had to commit to support in-app purchases for .com plans," Mullenweg tweeted Friday.

"I know why this is problematic, open to suggestions," he added.

Mullenweg's tweet referenced Apple's policy requiring app developers to utilize the company's own payment systems for any purchases made on iOS apps, of which Apple then takes a 30% commission.

The policy has drawn the ire of developers for years, but the crackdown on the WordPress app is even more controversial because the app doesn't currently offer any purchases at all, and there's not a good reason why it would.

WordPress, the hugely popular website builder that powers around a third of the internet, is open-source, meaning people don't pay to create websites using it. WordPress.com, on the other hand, is a commercial entity that helps users create sites built on that open-source software, and it makes money by selling domain names and other paid website hosting and management services.

WordPress.com also develops the "WordPress" iOS app (that Apple took action against on Friday), which lets users create and manage WordPress-based sites for free — whether or not they pay WordPress.com for a premium domain name.

But because the app is developed by the commercial entity, Apple decided that WordPress.com needed to offer an option to purchase those premium domain names through the app — a 30% cut of those purchases would then go to Apple.

An Apple spokesperson told Business Insider that, per App Store policies, apps — including WordPress — operating across multiple platforms can let users access a service on their iOS app that they paid for on a different platform (such as a website), but the developers then have to offer the ability to purchase that service in the app, too.

That reasoning has angered the open-source community because the app itself is associated by users with the open-source WordPress project — not the paid services offered by WordPress.com — so they see it as unfair to force the developers to monetize a free app that isn't designed to make money in the first place.

As Stratechery's Ben Thompson put it in a tweet: "I am admittedly puzzled as to why Apple is denying me updates to the open source app for my open source web site because one user of that app happens to sell domains."

I am admittedly puzzled as to why Apple is denying me updates to the open source app for my open source web site because one user of that app happens to sell domains. Also, I thought Apple wasn’t going to hold bug updates hostage anymore? https://t.co/e1lCw2VSUP

— Ben Thompson (@benthompson) August 21, 2020

Mullenweg told The Verge that WordPress has already agreed to comply with Apple's demands and within 30 days will add in-app purchase options for the paid services offered by WordPress.com. Apple's spokesperson told Business Insider the company approved WordPress' latest update while they work on bringing the app into compliance.

Apple's actions against WordPress come barely a week after Epic Games, the maker of the popular video game "Fortnite," launched lawsuits against Apple and Google over the same in-app purchase policy (Google also collects 30% on purchases). The lawsuits have rallied several major app developers behind Epic, including Facebook, Spotify, and Match Group (which owns dating apps such as Tinder, Hinge, Match, and OkCupid).

The legal challenges thrust both Apple and Google back into the antitrust spotlight just weeks after their CEOs were grilled during a congressional hearing by lawmakers who argued the companies were unfairly using their size and market power to stifle competition and asked Apple CEO Tim Cook specific questions about how Apple treats developers.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 7 secrets about Washington, DC landmarks you probably didn't know

from Tech Insider https://ift.tt/3hkdYcl via A.I .Kung Fu

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jobsearchtips02 · 4 years ago

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Apple’s App Shop policies are bad, however its interpretation and enforcement are even worse

I began this morning all riled up and prepared to write a newsletter about how Google is using its market power in one segment– Gmail– to offer itself a possibly unreasonable advantage in another section: video conferencing.

That was the strategy, but then Apple chose to use its market power in one section– the App Shop– to offer itself a potentially unjust benefit in another sector: buying digital goods.

I’m obviously going to focus on Apple.

In Apple’s case, the choice was to tell the company that makes the brand name brand-new e-mail app called Hey that it can not distribute its app on the iPhone unless it makes it possible for users to sign up by means of Apple’s own prescribed methods– which gives Apple a 30 percent cut.

The timing of all this is merely unbelievable, with a lot of happenings that I ‘d be nuts to concentrate on anything else. Not only does Apple’s WWDC designer conference kick off in less than a week, the EU actually opened up an antitrust examinations into App Shop and Apple Pay practices the really exact same day this Hey thing went down! Tom Warren:

The first investigation will penetrate whether Apple has actually broken EU competitors guidelines with its App Shop policies, following problems by Spotify and Rakuten over Apple’s 30- percent cut on memberships and sales of ebooks through its App Shop. “We require to guarantee that Apple’s guidelines do not misshape competition in markets where Apple is taking on other app developers, for instance with its music streaming service Apple Music or with Apple Books,” states Margrethe Vestager, the head of the EU’s antitrust department. “I have therefore decided to take a close look at Apple’s App Store guidelines and their compliance with EU competitors rules.”

And Apple itself was promoting a research study declaring how much its App Store has actually contributed to the economy on Monday, declaring it created $519 billion in commerce in 2015 Nick Statt:

In-app advertising, also mostly dedicated to mobile gaming, comprises another $45 billion. Of whatever else– from ride-hailing software to food delivery apps to mobile retail stores from Finest Buy and Target– comprising the remaining $413 billion, Apple takes no cut, the research study states.

We’re going to go through some of the play-by-play of Hey, digging into what Apple’s policies are and how they might or may not apply. Here’s the pertinent paragraph from Apple’s App Shop policy, 3.1.1:

If you want to open functions or functionality within your app, (by method of example: subscriptions, in-game currencies, video game levels, access to premium material, or opening a complete variation), you must use in-app purchase. Apps might not utilize their own mechanisms to open content or functionality, such as license secrets, enhanced reality markers, QR codes, and so on.

The key thing to know is that the text of this policy is not actually the policy.

It ought to not shock you to understand that Apple’s analysis of its text frequently seems capricious at finest and at worst appears like it’s encouraged by self-dealing. And the enforcement consequently typically appears unjust.

The rule mentions that if you want to offer digital products, you have to use Apple’s payment system. Other than that’s not how 3.1.1 has been analyzed to date. It has actually been translated as permitting people to gain access to services they paid for elsewhere on their iOS gadgets, but not permitting those apps to attempt to navigate the Apple payment guidelines when people register on those gadgets.

That’s complicated, however that analysis is what keeps Netflix from having an account sign-up in its app. It’s the policy that has actually infuriated Spotify and keeps you from buying Kindle books on your iPhone without jumping through a million odd Safari hoops. That was currently a very bad guideline, if you ask me. Now, with this email app, Apple is apparently changing its interpretation to be more rigorous.

David Pierce at Protocol spoke with the folks at Basecamp, who make Hey, about what Apple informed them was the thinking for their app updates getting declined. In other words, the original app was accepted but updates will not be because somebody inside Apple began enforcing their modified interpretation. And young boy howdy, if you desire a masterclass in the real guidelines being concealed in interpretation and enforcement instead of in the plain text, buckle up:

Due to the fact that Hey didn’t qualify as a “Reader” app, Apple stated that existing customers could log in as typical but Hey required to make all memberships available to new users as in-app purchases. Apple allows these kinds of client apps– where you can’t sign up, only indication in– for business services however not customer items.

So now the rule is you need to use Apple’s system unless you were fortunate sufficient to make a popular subscription app, in which case you could simply keep going. Now, apparently, there are unwritten special classes of apps that are enabled to let you sign up elsewhere however still access the app on the iPhone: “service services” and “Reader apps” and these terms retroactively apply to those other apps? As Pierce tweets:

One other distinction: Apple permits “Reader” apps– things like Netflix and Kindle and Dropbox, where you’re using the app to gain access to existing memberships– as long as they do not offer a method to register. Email, messaging, etc do not count as Reader apps

Now we remain in complete pretzel mode. Dropbox is a “Reader” app in some way and for that reason exempt? I cracked a joke about the No Real Scotsman rational fallacy, but more I think about it, the more it uses.

Finding Out whether your app is consisted of in Apple’s analysis of its guidelines or whether Apple will implement those guidelines upon you is a straight up guessing game. Here’s a tip, though: if you’re huge and effective and have leverage, you have a better shot. Apple is fully letting Amazon get around some of these rules right now on the Apple TELEVISION, even the 30 percent cut! Keep in mind that kerfuffle? Here’s the so-called “established program” that nobody understood about:

On certifying premium video entertainment apps such as Prime Video, Altice One and Canal , consumers have the choice to buy or lease movies and TV programs utilizing the payment approach tied to their existing video subscription

Basecamp CTO David Heinemeier Hansson has actually been popping off about Hey’s potential App Store ban on Twitter throughout the day– and appropriately so. He has also affirmed before congress about Apple’s outsized market power (Heinemeier Hansson, you might recall, also brought the Apple Card’s predispositions against offering equal credit to women to light)

To me, arguing over whether the text of Apple’s policy is being translated or imposed relatively is practically beside the point. I state “practically” because the entire guessing video game about guidelines is disturbing for designers, it lays bare that Apple holds the power to prohibit their app.

An approximate ruler applies their will more powerfully and more onerously than one who follows the guideline of law. Opaque and arbitrary interpretation and enforcement puts more power into Apple’s hands– and it already has the power the set the text of the rules in the first place.

The real problem is Apple’s power, of which this whole Kafkaesque series of changing rules is a sign. We all know the rating here: Apple requires to secure the 30 percent cut it takes, and if it enables a lot of apps to circumvent that cut then some sort of dam may break. From Apple’s perspective, it’s not a lot the cash for its services bottom line however that if everyone utilized a various payment system, the experience on the iPhone would genuinely be broken down, if not fragmented. (The money doesn’t harmed, though.)

For Apple, the line has actually to be drawn someplace. And offered how complicated the analysis and enforcement has been in this case, the thinking for those wiggles is much easier to explain by looking at Apple’s organisation imperatives than it is by looking at Apple’s policies.

Google, for what it’s worth, draws its line at video games. Other apps are complimentary to connect out to other locations where people can register and pay for their accounts. Obviously, even then there’s debate: Fortnite was denied an exemption and after that stop and lastly rejoined the Play Shop under pressure Android does not limit users from installing apps from non-Play Shop sources, however it does make doing so feel dangerous and frightening.

There’s a cognitive harshness to calling Apple a monopolist. Apple’s marketshare in the US is significantly higher than it is in the rest of the world, but it’s not that high.

Ben Thompson at Stratechery has been writing about this for years– he just recently pulled his 2018 article on this really concern out from behind the paywall

The monopoly Apple has is a monopoly over the iPhone itself, not over smart devices. Which is an extremely strange way to think of a monopoly. Should not Apple be complimentary to make whatever rules it wants on the gadgets it sells? Is it unjust for Apple to demand a cut of all digital commerce on its platforms?

Here’s how Thompson addressed that concern, and I’m not sure I can state it much better:

What ought to be limited, though, is leveraging a win in one location into supremacy in another: that indicates Apple winning in mobile phones need to not suggest it gets to own digital payments, and developing the App Store does not mean it gets 30%of all digital goods (or be permitted to diminish the user experience of its competitors).

The thing about Hey is that it was an extremely high profile app with a prominent launch and prominent executives getting attention over this issue.

P.S. I asked Google a series of concerns about its organized Meet integration into Gmail. Here’s the only one that really matters:

Do you have any talk about the issue that Google is utilizing its market power on popular apps like Gmail and Google Calendar to give its own video conferencing app an unjust competitive advantage?

And here’s Google’s action, which I discover to be disingenuous however am communicating in full:

Google Hangouts, with assistance for video conferences and direct/group messaging, has actually been in Gmail and Calendar for years (Gmail on web has actually had video requiring over a years). We are now upgrading the video calling performance that Hangouts provided with Google Meet and extending the experience to mobile. As always, we will continue to allow user choice and enable users to choose in or out of functions to their preference. In addition, as G Suite is a platform, third-party apps have access to integrate with our applications through the G Suite Add-on structure.

When It Comes To why that combination needs to be a gigantic button at the bottom of your Inbox rather of just showing up in the sidebar, Google says “A tab is easier to access […] and screening shows that users like this technique.” I think that real-world testing will show Google something extremely different.

Disclosure: My other half deals with the Oculus Store, including setting policies for that shop. I recuse myself from reporting on Oculus so I am not at all knowledgeable about what Oculus’ policies are.

More from The Edge

┏ The Lenovo Flex 5G is the world’s very first 5G laptop computer you can in fact purchase

┏ What’s left of Magic Leap? Adi Robertson looks at what follows all that hype. It’s very little!

┏ Boston Characteristics will now offer any service its own Area robot for $74,500

┏ The gadgets Late Night with Seth Meyers uses to keep the show running from home

┏ Google is bringing Microsoft Workplace and other Windows apps to Chromebooks

┏ Bose gives up on its augmented reality noise job

from Job Search Tips https://jobsearchtips.net/apples-app-shop-policies-are-bad-however-its-interpretation-and-enforcement-are-even-worse/

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neptunecreek · 4 years ago

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How Big Tech Monopolies Distort Our Public Discourse

Long before the pandemic crisis, there was widespread concern over the impact that tech was having on the quality of our discourse, from disinformation campaigns to influence campaigns to polarization.

It's true that the way we talk to each other and about the world has changed, both in form (thanks to the migration of discourse to online platforms) and in kind, whether that's the rise of nonverbal elements in our written discourse (emojis, memes, ASCII art and emoticons) or the kinds of online harassment and brigading campaigns that have grown with the Internet.

A common explanation for the change in our discourse is that the biggest tech platforms use surveillance, data-collection, and machine learning to manipulate us, either to increase "engagement" (and thus pageviews and thus advertising revenues) or to persuade us of things that aren't true, for example, to convince us to buy something we don't want or support a politician we would otherwise oppose.

There's a simple story about that relationship: by gathering a lot of data about us, and by applying self-modifying machine-learning algorithms to that data, Big Tech can target us with messages that slip past our critical faculties, changing our minds not with reason, but with a kind of technological mesmerism.

This story originates with Big Tech itself. Marketing claims for programmatic advertising and targeted marketing (including political marketing) promise prospective clients that they can buy audiences for their ideas through Big Tech, which will mix its vast data-repositories with machine learning and overwhelm our cognitive defenses to convert us into customers for products or ideas.

We should always be skeptical of marketing claims. These aren't peer-reviewed journal articles, they're commercial puffery. The fact that the claims convince marketers to give billions of dollars to Big Tech is no guarantee that the claims are true. After all, powerful decision-makers in business have a long history of believing things that turned out to be false.

It's clear that our discourse is changing. Ideas that were on the fringe for years have gained new centrality. Some of these ideas are ones that we like (gender inclusivity, racial justice, anti-monopolistic sentiment) and some are ideas we dislike (xenophobia, conspiracy theories, and denial of the science of climate change and vaccines).

Our world is also dominated by technology, so any change to our world probably involves technology. Untangling the causal relationships between technology and discourse is a thorny problem, but it's an important one.

It's possible that Big Tech has invented a high-tech form of mesmerism, but whether you believe in that or not, there are many less controversial, more obvious ways in which Big Tech is influencing (and distorting) our discourse.

Locating Precise Audiences

Obviously, Big Tech is incredibly good at targeting precise audiences, this being value proposition of the whole ad-tech industry. Do you need to reach overseas students from the Pacific Rim doing graduate studies in Physics or Chemistry in the midwest? No problem. Advertisers value this feature, but so does anyone hoping to influence our discourse.

Locating people goes beyond "buying an audience" for an ad. Activists who want to reach people who care about their issues can use this feature to mobilize them in support of their causes. Queer people who don't know anyone who is out can find online communities to help them understand and develop their own identities. People living with chronic diseases can talk about their illnesses with others who share their problems.

This precision is good for anyone who's got a view that outside of the mainstream, including people who have views we don't agree with or causes we oppose. Big Tech can help you find people to cooperate with you on racist or sexist harassment campaigns, or to foment hateful political movements.

A discourse requires participants: if you can't find anyone interesting in discussing an esoteric subject with you, you can't discuss it. Big Tech has radically altered our discourse by making it easy for people who want to talk about obscure subjects to find discussants, enabling conversations that literally never could have happened otherwise. Sometimes that's good and sometimes it's terrible, but it's absolutely different from any other time.

Secrecy

Some conversations are risky. Talking about your queer sexuality in an intolerant culture can get you ostracized or subject you to harassment and violence. Talking about your affinity for cannabis in a place where it isn't legal to consume can get you fired or even imprisoned.

The fact that many online conversations take place in private spaces means that people can say things they would otherwise keep to themselves for fear of retribution.

Not all of these things are good. Being caught producing deceptive political ads can get you in trouble with an election regulator and also send supporters to your opponents. Advertising that your business discriminates on the basis of race or gender or sexuality can get you boycotted or sued, but if you can find loopholes that allow you to target certain groups that agree with your discriminatory agenda, you can win their business.

Secrecy allows people to say both illegal and socially unacceptable things to people who agree with them, greatly reducing the consequences for such speech. This is why private speech is essential for social progress, and it’s why private speech is beneficial to people fomenting hatred and violence. We believe in private speech and have fought for it for 30 years because we believe in its benefits—but we don't deny its costs.

Combined with targeting, secrecy allows for a very persuasive form of discourse, not just because you can commit immoral acts with impunity, but also because disfavored minorities can whisper ideas that are too dangerous to speak aloud.

Lying and/or Being Wrong

The concentration of the tech industry has produced a monoculture of answers. For many people, Google is an oracle, and its answers— the top search results—are definitive.

There's a good reason for that: Google is almost always right. Type "How long is the Brooklyn Bridge" into the search box and you'll get an answer that accords with both Wikipedia, and its underlying source, the 1967 report of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Sometimes, though, Google is tricked into lying by people who want to push falsehoods onto the rest of us. By systematically exploring Google's search-ranking system (a system bathed in secrecy and subjected to constant analysis by the Search Engine Optimization industry), bad actors can and do change the top results on Google, tricking the system into returning misinformation (and sometimes, it's just a stupid mistake).

This can be a very effective means of shifting our discourse. False answers from a reliable source are naturally taken at face value, especially when the false answer is plausible (adding or removing a few yards from the Brooklyn Bridge's length), or where the questioner doesn't really have any idea what the answer should be (adding tens of thousands of miles per second to the speed of light).

Even when Google isn't deliberately tricked into giving wrong answers, it can still give wrong answers. For example, when a quote is widely misattributed and later corrected, Google can take months or even years to stop serving up the misattribution in its top results. Indeed, sometimes Google never gets it right in cases like this, because the people who get the wrong answer from Google repeat it on their own posts, increasing the number of sources where Google finds the wrong answer.

This isn't limited to just Google, either. The narrow search verticals that Google doesn't control—dating sites, professional networking sites, some online marketplaces—generally dominate their fields, and are likewise relied upon by searchers who treat them as infallible, even though they might acknowledge that it's always wise to do so.

The upshot is that what we talk about, and how we talk about it, is heavily dependent on what Google tells us when we ask it questions. But this doesn't rely on Google changing our existing beliefs: if you know exactly what the speed of light is, or how long the Brooklyn Bridge is, a bad Google search result won't change your mind. Rather, this is about Google filling a void in our knowledge.

There's a secondary, related problem of "distinctive, disjunct idioms." Searching for "climate hoax" yields different results from searching for "climate crisis" and different results still from "climate change." Though all three refer to the same underlying phenomenon, they reflect very different beliefs about it. The term you use to initiate your search will lead you into a different collection of resources.

This is a longstanding problem in discourse, but it is exacerbated by the digital world.

"Sort by Controversial"

Ad-supported websites make their money from pageviews. The more pages they serve to you, the more ads they can show you and the more likely it is that they will show you an ad that you will click on. Ads aren't very effective, even when they're highly targeted, and the more ads you see, the more inured you become to their pitches, so it takes a lot of pageviews to generate a sustaining volume of clicks, and the number of pageviews needed to maintain steady revenue tends to go up over time.

Increasing the number of pageviews is hard: people have fixed time-budgets. Platforms can increase your "engagement" by giving you suggestions for things that will please you, but this is hard (think of Netflix's recommendation engine).

But platforms can also increase engagement by making you angry, anxious, or outraged, and these emotions are much easier to engender with automated processes. Injecting enervating comments, shocking images, or outlandish claims into your online sessions may turn you off in the long term, but in the short term, these are a reliable source of excess clicks.

This has an obvious impact on our discourse, magnifying the natural human tendency to want to weigh in on controversies about subjects that matter to you. It promotes angry, unproductive discussions. It's not mind control—people can choose to ignore these "recommendations" or step away from controversy—but platforms that deploy this tactic often take on a discordant, angry character.

Deliberate Censorship

Content moderation is very hard. Anyone who's ever attempted to create rules for what can and can't be posted quickly discovers that these rules can never be complete—for example, if you class certain conduct as "harassment," then you may discover that conduct that is just a little less severe than you've specified is also experienced as harassment by people on its receiving end.

As hard as this is, it gets much harder at scale, particularly when services cross-cultural and linguistic lines: as hard as it is to decide whether someone crosses the line when that person is from the same culture as you and is speaking your native language, it's much harder to interpret contributions from people of differing backgrounds, and language barriers add another layer of incredible complexity.

The rise of monolithic platforms with hundreds of millions (or even billions) of users means that a substantial portion of our public discourse is conducted under the shadow of moderation policies that are not—and cannot— be complete or well-administered.

Even if these policies have extremely low error rates—even if only one in a thousand deleted comments or posts is the victim of overzealous enforcement— systems with billions of users generate hundreds of billions of posts per day, and that adds up to many millions of acts of censorship every day.

Of course, not all moderation policies are good, and sometimes, moderation policies are worsened by bad legal regimes. For example, SESTA/FOSTA, a bill notionally aimed at ending human sexual trafficking, was overbroad and vague to begin with, and the moderation policies it has spawned have all but ended certain kinds of discussions of human sexuality in public forums, including some that achieved SESTA/FOSTA's nominal aim of improving safety for sex workers (for example, forums where sex workers kept lists of dangerous potential clients). These subjects were always subject to arbitrary moderation standards, but SESTA/FOSTA made the already difficult job of talking about sexuality virtually impossible.

Likewise, the Communications Decency Act's requirement for blacklists of adult materials on federally subsidized Internet connections (such as those in public schools and libraries) has foreclosed on access to a wealth of legitimate materials, including websites that offer information on sexual health and wellbeing, and on dealing with sexual harassment and assault.

Accidental Censorship

In addition to badly considered moderation policies, platforms are also prone to badly executed enforcement errors, in other words. Famously, Tumblr installed an automatic filter intended to block all "adult content" and this filter blocked innumerable innocuous images, from images of suggestive root vegetables to Tumblr's own examples of images that contained nudity but did not constitute adult content and would thus be ignored by its filters. Errors are made by both human and automated content moderators.

Sometimes, errors are random and weird, but some topics are more likely to give rise to accidental censorship than others: human sexuality, discussions by survivors of abuse and violence (especially sexual violence), and even people whose names or homes sound or look like words that have been banned by filters (Vietnamese people named Phuc were plagued by AOL's chat-filters, as were Britons who lived in Scunthorpe).

The systematic nature of this accidental censorship means that whole fields of discourse are hard or even impossible to undertake on digital platforms. These topics are the victims of a kind of machine superstition, a computer gone haywire that has banned them without the approval or intent of its human programmers, whose oversights, frailties and shortsightedness caused them to program in a bad rule, after which they simply disappeared from the scene, leaving the machine behind to repeat their error at scale.

Third-Party Censorship

Since the earliest days of digital networks, world governments have struggled with when and whether online services should be liable for what their users do. Depending on which country an online provider serves, they may be expected to block, or pre-emptively remove, copyright infringement, nudity, sexually explicit material, material that insults the royal family, libel, hate speech, harassment, incitements to terrorism or sectarian violence, plans to commit crimes, blasphemy, heresy, and a host of other difficult to define forms of communication.

These policies are hard for moderation teams to enforce consistently and correctly, but that job is made much, much harder by deliberate attempts by third parties to harass or silence others by making false claims about them.

In the simplest case, would-be censors merely submit false reports to platforms in hopes of slipping past a lazy or tired or confused moderator in order to get someone barred or speech removed.

However, as platforms institute ever-finer-grained rules about what is, and is not, grounds for removal or deletion, trolls gain a new weapon: an encyclopedic knowledge of these rules.

People who want to use platforms for good-faith discussions are at a disadvantage relative to "rules lawyers" who want to disrupt this discourse. The former have interests and jobs about which they want to communicate. The latter's interest and job is disrupting the discourse.

The more complex the rules become, the easier it is for bad-faith actors to find in them a reason to report their opponents, and the harder it is for good-faith actors to avoid crossing one of the ruleset's myriad lines.

Conclusion

The idea that Big Tech can mold discourse through bypassing our critical faculties by spying on and analyzing us is both self-serving (inasmuch as it helps Big Tech sell ads and influence services) and implausible, and should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

But you don't have to accept extraordinary claims to find ways in which Big Tech is distorting and degrading our public discourse. The scale of Big Tech makes it opaque and error-prone, even as it makes the job of maintaining a civil and productive space for discussion and debate impossible.

Big Tech's monopolies—with their attendant lock-in mechanisms that hold users' data and social relations hostage—remove any accountability that might come from the fear that unhappy users might switch to competitors.

The emphasis on curbing Big Tech's manipulation tactics through regulatory measures has the paradoxical effect of making it more expensive and difficult to enter the market with a Big Tech competitor. A regulation designed to curb Big Tech will come with costs that little tech can't possibly afford, and becomes a license to dominate the digital world disguised as a regulatory punishment for lax standards.

The scale—and dominance— of tech firms results in unequivocal, obvious, toxic public discourse. The good news is that we have tools to deal with this: breakups, merger scrutiny, limits on vertical integration. Perhaps after Big Tech has been cut down to size, we'll still find that there's some kind of machine-learning mesmerism that we'll have to address, but if that's the case, our job will be infinitely easier when Big Tech has been stripped of the monopoly rents it uses to defend itself from attempts to alter its conduct through policy and law.

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velmaemyers88 · 5 years ago

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Is Web 3.0 the next lifestyle brand?

I am starting to wonder if choosing a blockchain or a Web 3.0 approach is as much a lifestyle choice as a technological choice.

Leaving aside the naming challenge (are we calling this blockchain, crypto, or Web 3.0?), I think it represents a movement of people who want to live with intention, self-discipline, and personal agency.

If THAT message can get refined and promoted, and not the one about all the virtues and downsides of the tech, maybe more groups of people would be open to hearing the larger story and engaging?

Web 2.0 has led to an epidemic of ‘digital diabetes’

We have all seen where Web 2.0 got us.

The current platforms are manufactured for maximum engagement, creating a dopamine stream of addiction. This addiction leads to poor choices of time, stunted intellectual development, and ever more fantastic claims designed as “click bait.”

Back in 2010, Nicolas Carr wrote a book entitled The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. You can gather its hypothesis immediately. At the time, it was widely derided within tech circles for its supposed sensationalism. I should know, I was one of its critics.

Now, 10 years later, in a “post-truth” era with teenagers addicted to their phones, I am not so sure he was wrong.

I see it in my own house and all across society. We are just beginning to understand the implications, and anyone who has paid attention to global politics recently knows there are many.

Societies with an abundance of physical resources have a growing physical obesity problem.

Societies with an abundance of digital resources have a growing information obesity problem.

The short story of high fructose corn syrup

The information obesity problem makes me think of high fructose corn syrup.

High fructose corn syrup was commercialized in the early 1970s as a response to growing geo-political change.

To oversimplify: Political upheaval in sugar-producing nations created a supply crunch in the US, driving the need for a technology-driven alternative to provide Americans with something sweet that wasn’t expensive.

What started off as a solution to one problem ended up becoming the cause of another, even bigger, problem.

Today, with the Internet effectively controlled by a few massive corporations that do not have the best welfare of every individual as a core value, billions of people are in the process of abdicating their rights to personal choice and freedoms.

I could go on for pages about the power of Alexa and Google to manipulate you through the answers they give to your questions, Facebook to affect what you think and buy given the newsfeed, and Apple to limit your consumption choices by preventing certain apps from running on its phones.

Combine all of this with big data/AI, etc. and it’s not difficult to imagine how our lives will be controlled by algorithms that are privately owned by a few companies.

An alternative digital lifestyle

Any trend has many causes, but over the past few years, we have seen an explosion in the number of people doing yoga and meditation and choosing a vegetarian/vegan diet in an attempt to build a healthier lifestyle.

Given the recent IPO of Beyond Meat (even if it did get a bit irrational), it’s clear that investors think this trend is here to stay.

I suspect this is how many people are reacting to their own growing awareness of the unhealthy elements of the “mainstream” lifestyle, which has led to so many health problems, both physical and mental.

And I suspect this is where Web 3.0 has a chance to really shine.

One of the more interesting marketing moves I have seen recently is from Blockstack, which put up an ad outside of Google’s headquarters. It was a “poke the beast” type of move that I am not 100% sure is worth the money now, but I could be wrong (after all, I’m writing about it now).

Can’t be evil.

This message is now displayed outside Google HQ in Mountain View. pic.twitter.com/BVK5SPaNet

— Muneeb Ali (@muneeb) June 19, 2019

However, what I think IS brilliant about the billboard is that it builds on the theme of Web 3.0 as lifestyle brand.

As in, you either want to be part of a movement that claims “don’t be evil” but is constantly pulled in the direction of evil in the name of revenue, OR you want to be part of a movement that literally cannot be evil.

If you choose the latter, you are making a lifestyle choice. You are choosing to take control of your personal, digital destiny.

You are also choosing to ensure and protect the digital freedoms of others from unknown, unseen, monopolistic powers that don’t care about you; they care about your wallet.

Self-discipline and self-control is a choice

I have been reading a lot of Stoic philosophy recently in preparation for a trip to Greece later this summer to study the roots of democracy.

The most well-known of all of the Stoics is probably Marcus Aurelius, the last of the “good emperors” and the author of “Meditations.”

He wrote,

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

Given all that we have seen over the past few years (e.g. Cambridge Analytica, etc.), I suspect there is a growing awareness and frustration with the high-sugar diet of Web 2.0 that is creating digital addiction and digital diabetes.

What most people don’t yet realize is that there’s a healthier alternative.

Thirty years ago, there were no vegan products on the shelves in supermarkets. No one was doing yoga in Times Square.

Today there are and they do.

Those people have made a lifestyle choice for their bodies. Web 3.0/blockchain/crypto is the lifestyle choice for their minds. A life full of digital intention.

Today, like the vegan/vegetarian options of 10 or 20 years ago, it may be a bit challenging to get started, but it is possible. And just as vegan/vegetarian options have increased daily, Web 3.0 options will as well.

If you want to begin to explore the Web 3.0 lifestyle, here are a few things you can do today.

Take control of your assets and get a wallet

One of the key tenets of the Web 3.0 lifestyle is, “Not your keys, not your Bitcoin.”

This extends to every crypto-asset (currency, utility token, collectible). You need a way to safely maintain control of your assets, and you do this through a wallet.

The easiest ways to set up a Web 3.0 wallet for the Ethereum network is to download the MetaMask extension for Chrome, which is the most popular and most widely used. Two other excellent options are Dapper and Gnosis Safe, which have a bit more security due to their backup features.

There are hundreds of other wallets out there. If, for example, you have already bought Bitcoin or other assets at Coinbase.com, ShapeShift or Gemini, then that exchange holds your keys, which puts you at some degree of risk. You can easily move those assets to excellent wallets like Exodus and Edge. For even more security, you get a Trezor, a Ledger, or a ColdCard. Another security option is Casa.

Respect yourself; opt-out of the surveillance economy with privacy tech

So much of the Web 2.0 economy is predicated on tracking every aspect of your personal life in order to “monetize” you. Every day, you generate a lot of value in return for “free” access to online software and services.

The Web 3.0 lifestyle is about respecting the value of the work you do and asking for a fairer trade and equal distribution of value.

You can download the Brave Browser and immediately see not only a huge increase in the load time of the pages you surf, due to its native ad blocker, but also increased safeguards against trackers.

Plus, with Brave Rewards, you are paid to view ads. Yep, you earn Basic Attention Token (BAT) just for looking at ads. And yes, you can turn BAT into “real” money.

Brave has been my default browser across multiple devices for at least a year, I think.

Another thing you can do for additional protection is to use a Virtual Private Network, or VPN. You’ve probably heard of companies like Norton and HotSpot that offer VPN services.

They do a very nice job of protecting your identity from websites, but they still have your data themselves. A Web 3.0 alternative is Mysterium, a decentralized VPN service. Unlike Hotspot or Norton, not even the nodes in the network know where you are. Your location is totally masked.

(While in beta, the service is free. Though, at some point, I would expect there will be a charge. I do still expect it to be significantly cheaper than the centralized alternatives. Even better, during the pilot phase, you can get paid to run a Mysterium node in your house.)

I’ve been testing Mysterium for a few months now, and it’s fairly reliable. There are a few glitches, which are to be expected in an alpha/beta product, but so far so good.

Turn your Google searches into money

You know you are a big deal as a company when your name is a verb. Xerox did this once upon a time. Today, Google.

If any of us thinks “web search,” we think “Google.” It’s an automatic habit.

That’s what makes this next suggestion challenging. Breaking habits is difficult, but like breaking the habit of eating meat for people trying vegetarian/vegan lifestyles, a Web 3.0 intentional choice for search would be Presearch. There, you get the same Google result you would expect, but your valuable search data is kept private from Google.

Plus, you get compensated in PRE tokens every time you conduct a search if you set up an account — which will require an email address, so not perfect. (Yes, you can turn those into “real” money, but with greater difficult than the tokens from other Web 3.0 offerings I’ve mentioned above).

Options are growing every day

These are just a few of the increasing number of Web 3.0 options.

If you are in IT or a website admin, you can use Gladius to reduce the cost and risk of DDoS (think crypto-Cloudflare) or Storj to dramatically lower the cost of storage/backup versus AWS.

If you are a social activist, you can go to Bounties.Network and figure out how to incentivize crowds to engage in activities. For example, I was paid 10 DAI (which is worth $10 exactly and easy to convert to “real” money if you want) to clean up trash and plastic from a local forest area.

And if you are interested in human collaboration at global scale to solve global problems, you can join the Genesis DAO. A DAO is a “decentralized autonomous organization” — a collaborative of people earning money, volunteering, learning, sharing, and inventing a future of work that gives more people the opportunity to get paid to do what they love, made possible by blockchain technology.

I could go on… LBRY to keep your videos safe from YouTube censors, OpenBazaar to earn cryptocurrency selling items instead of using eBay (with no fees), HyperSpace to compensate you for writing high quality content (that Medium monetizes), Decentraland if you want to create monetizable VR experiences, and Dharma to earn 10% (at the time of writing) on your USD deposits, via the USDC stablecoin.

There are many Web 3.0 offerings out there, and we’ll see more emerging every day.

Be careful and be patient

All that said, this is still new technology.

Many of the current offerings are in alpha or beta. Over time, they will get much better. For now, however, a few guidelines:

Expect technical frustration as you get things set up

Be extra thoughtful about protecting your private keys

Do not put more money at risk than you are comfortable losing

Remember that a blockchain is a publicly searchable database and your anonymity cannot be guaranteed, particularly if you don’t use common sense.

With those caveats, however, you are on your way. Good luck in your exploration. It’s time to discover if the Web 3.0 lifestyle is for you or not.

Jeremy Epstein is the Founder of Never Stop Marketing and author of The CMO Primer for the Blockchain World and The Decentralized Marketing Organization. He is an advisor to DAOstack.

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reneeacaseyfl · 5 years ago