[Cory Doctorow] With An Audacious Plan To Halt The Internet’s Enshittification And Throw It Into Reverse
[Cory Doctorow] With An Audacious Plan To Halt The Internet’s Enshittification And Throw It Into Reverse
Those of us old enough to remember BBS servers or even rainbow banners often go down the nostalgia hole about how the internet was better “back in the day” than it is now as a handful o…
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Another way to encourage interoperability is to use the government to hold out a carrot in addition to the stick. Through government procurement laws, governments could require any company providing a product or service to the government to not interfere with interoperability. President Lincoln required standard tooling for bullets and rifles during the Civil War, so there’s a long history of requiring this already. If companies don’t want to play nice, they’ll lose out on some lucrative contracts, “but no one forces a tech company to do business with the federal government.”
That's actually a very interesting idea. This benefits the govt as much as anyone else too. It reduces switching costs for govt tech.
Can confirm, I've worked for a company doing govt contract work and I really don't know what it'd take for us to have walked away. They can dictate whatever terms they like and still expect to find plenty of companies happy to bid for contracts I think.
It’s because they pay big dollars for comparatively little work with little validation of the quality of said work.
That hasn't been quite my experience. For one thing, they cap their pay and don't (can't) negotiate like a private client. So generally less money per given project.
Comparatively little work and little validation also wasn't my experience but I do get the sense it used to be more common, and it did feel like the experience I had was in some sense a reaction to previous contractors taking advantage.
Did you also have a robustly enshittified consumer business?
I’m thinking of his classic users —> advertisers —> shareholders model and struggling to come up with companies that have that model but also thrive on government contracts.
Yelp is a pretty classic case of enshittification. What government contracts do they have?
Isn't yelp a pretty easily replaceable thing?
They built a reputation by being one of the first in the space, but they've squandered that reputation and I'm pretty sure someone else could start up a competing "reviews" product.
I'd like to have one that actually showed the history of things like restaurants, because if the head chef leaves and the reviews have gone to shit it turns out that the reviews since the new chef are much more relevant than the 1000+ 5 star reviews of the food of the old guy, and that isn't discoverable anywhere on yelp or anything like yelp.
I'm not sure how you'd protect against enshittification long-term. But I think one of the things that has largely poisoned the spirit of the Internet in general is that everything is always about a "sustainable business model" and "scaling" before anyone even dreams of just writing something up and seeing if they can get it to go popular.
Isn’t yelp a pretty easily replaceable thing?
Yelp is at this stage a completely worthless thing. The only thing they were originally was an aggregator of semi-literate reviews, and a shakedown racket against businesses that pissed off some Karen
Google maps is already good enough as a replacement. In fact in some countries it's the best review aggregator
TripAdvisor has better content. Too many Google reviews give a business 1 star because the review author was too stupid to check working hours, or has some incredibly rare digestive condition that they didn't bother to communicate to the eatery before ordering. Or they expect their Basque waiter to speak fluent Latvian, or to accommodate a walk-in party of 20.
That's fair, and government work can feel kind of like its own parallel business ecosystem in some ways. Sort of like how most of us think of the shops and businesses that are visible to us but not the massive B2B ecosystem just under the surface.
But I think the hope is that gov can standardize and define a certain net positive thing, and use its contracts to start requiring that thing, slowly making it more widespread and therefore common. Ideally the kinks get ironed out over time, and eventually it's in a state where you can make the leap and start to require it be in place for any application / service above a certain user count.
Bit pie in the sky, but we should be at least trying to find ways to use govt to improve our situation. Things at policy level that don't require chronically status quo politicians to vote in our best interests.
You make great points. The problem is, our demagogues work directly for those corporations. So, the demands of corporations will always favor corporations until corporations aren’t considered constituents (which has been true since Citizens United in the US).
I’ve had to implement wave after wave of compliance with European laws in the last several years. We tend to just comply with something like GDPR everywhere because that’s simpler and it’s a best practice. But without the teeth of legislation we’d never bother. There’s always too much to do. I would have a hard time doing something that’s better for consumers but takes a lot of effort or might even undermine our ability to monetize as aggressively as we choose to. Not without those teeth. Not a chance. Even with teeth, tech companies often find some shitty way to meet the minimum bar but really do nothing. We must offer an API? Okay. It has almost nothing in it, but enough to say we did something. We’d never stand up an API that competitors or scammers could benefit from.
Oof, well, point taken and sorry for your loss lol. I hear where you're coming from. And I'm sure we'd get a worst of both worlds situation here in the US where we spent a ton of time and money developing whatever standards and definitions, and then we make it an optional guideline like you're saying and it never goes anywhere.
Dunno. The fundamental problem is tech is always able to move faster and smarter than legislation.
If I’m saying anything, it’s that legislation is the one thing tech can’t get around. Europe has put out a lot of legislation that tech hates, some good, some bad. But tech complies. The government contracts thing won’t hurt - it could possibly help legislation come about in one way: if government contracts force a handful of companies to do something, at least that shows the thing can be done. That’s kind of important because tech loves to complain that what this legislation calls for will be impossible!
I think we're on the same page :)
I'm mostly describing an idea where the contracts approach takes care of the necessary iteration to get a given tech policy sorted, and then legislation comes in to require it.
My country can't even get some basic stuff done, though, so realistically I may as well be writing fan-fic, lol
contracts approach takes care of the necessary iteration to get a given tech policy sorted
Yeah that could be of use.
Interoperability is a big job, but the extent to which it matters varies widely according to the use case. There are layers of standards atop other standards, some new, some near deprecation. There are some extremely large and complex datasets that need a shit-ton of metadata to decipher or even extract. Some more modern dataset standards have that metadata baked into the file, but even then there are corner cases. And the standards for zero-trust security enclaves, discoverability, non-repudiation, attribution, multidimensional queries, notification and alerting, pub/sub are all relatively new, so we occasionally encounter operational situations that the standards authors didn't anticipate.
DoD already started this with their Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA).
And I agree, the government should use its power to force interoperable and open standards wherever possible and relevant.
Self driving vehicles are one area I’d like to see that style of standards applied.