DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification - Cory Doctorow
DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification - Cory Doctorow
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5431344
The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. It doesn't have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to "five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four" (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users - reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures - leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification. We don't have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking - through privacy laws and other protections - and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!
The internet will always have many niche places, but overall it can’t escape late stage capitalism.
We should get paid a portion of the revenue generated by our collective data along with the ability to opt-out completely. If they our data is a commodity to them we should be able to sell it.
they can keep my 42 cents and just stop their shit
I bet they sold your info to cambridge analytica for a bit more than that.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
If you wanna fix this, there needs to be more incentive for people to develop open source software. It doesn't have to be created by individuals either. Organizations and nonprofits can be used to make basic services for the Internet, like utilities. Or this could be a government agency. There is already talks of classifying Internet access as a utility instead of leaving it to private ISPs. This would be a step beyond that but could be done first.
Anybody got a TLDW;? Or did all of you just comment on the title and the snippet?
Reposting from PeepinGoodArgs@reddthat.com in Technology@beehaw.org
Here’s an AI outline because this was actually a good talk:
How Platforms Die The speaker introduces the concept of platform decay or “enshittification” and how it leads to the death of internet platforms. He defines platforms as firms like Uber, Amazon, and Facebook that connect users and business customers. He outlines a 3-stage process called enshittification where platforms: Are initially good to users Abuse users to benefit business customers Eventually abuse business customers to only benefit shareholders This results in the platform becoming a “pile of shit” that dies. Facebook Case Study He uses Facebook as a case study of enshittification’s 3 stages: Initially attracted users by promising privacy protections and custom feeds Then broke promises and sold user data to advertisers and flooded feeds with publisher content Finally, reduced value to users and fees for publishers to extract all value for shareholders This led to an angry user base and brittle equilibrium Causes of Enshittification Lack of Competition Weak antitrust enforcement has allowed consolidation across industries Companies can use predatory pricing to undercut competitors Mergers eliminate competition Example: Google relying on acquisitions rather than in-house innovation Unrestricted “Backend Tweaking” Tech platforms control the algorithms and systems behind their products They can arbitrarily change these to alter user experiences e.g. Facebook reducing visibility of publisher content in feeds Done without transparency, oversight or accountability Bans on Reverse Engineering Laws like DMCA 1201 and CFAA criminalize circumventing DRM and terms of service Makes it illegal to reverse engineer platforms to enable interoperability Tech companies use IP laws to prevent modding and adversarial interoperability e.g. Apple using IP laws to prevent iOS modding Solutions Strengthen Antitrust Enforcement Block anti-competitive mergers Break up existing tech giants Pass Privacy, Labor and Consumer Protection Laws Comprehensive federal privacy laws with private right of action End worker misclassification through gig economy Apply consumer protection standards to platforms Allow Adversarial Interoperability Roll back laws criminalizing modding, reverse engineering Use government procurement to incentivize open ecosystems Appoint special masters to oversee platform legal threats Keep Interoperators in Check Bind interoperators to the same privacy, fair trading and labor laws Determined through democratic process vs corporate policy Conclusion We need to prepare and spread these policy ideas to capitalize on the next crisis Efforts are underway to enable a better internet through this approachThe steps to fix this might as well say have Jesus come to life and fix it all... It's depressing, but there is zero chance of any of that happening... Nevermind all of it.
Our best bet is for consumers to fight back with their wallets, but people are on average too stupid to even understand how they are being fleeced. We're fucked.
Thanks. Here's a slightly easier to read on mobile non-monospace paste:
How Platforms Die The speaker introduces the concept of platform decay or “enshittification” and how it leads to the death of internet platforms. He defines platforms as firms like Uber, Amazon, and Facebook that connect users and business customers. He outlines a 3-stage process called enshittification where platforms: Are initially good to users Abuse users to benefit business customers Eventually abuse business customers to only benefit shareholders This results in the platform becoming a “pile of shit” that dies.
Facebook Case Study He uses Facebook as a case study of enshittification’s 3 stages: Initially attracted users by promising privacy protections and custom feeds Then broke promises and sold user data to advertisers and flooded feeds with publisher content Finally, reduced value to users and fees for publishers to extract all value for shareholders This led to an angry user base and brittle equilibrium Causes of Enshittification Lack of Competition Weak antitrust enforcement has allowed consolidation across industries Companies can use predatory pricing to undercut competitors Mergers eliminate competition Example: Google relying on acquisitions rather than in-house innovation Unrestricted “Backend Tweaking” Tech platforms control the algorithms and systems behind their products They can arbitrarily change these to alter user experiences e.g. Facebook reducing visibility of publisher content in feeds Done without transparency, oversight or accountability Bans on Reverse Engineering Laws like DMCA 1201 and CFAA criminalize circumventing DRM and terms of service Makes it illegal to reverse engineer platforms to enable interoperability Tech companies use IP laws to prevent modding and adversarial interoperability e.g. Apple using IP laws to prevent iOS modding Solutions Strengthen Antitrust Enforcement Block anti-competitive mergers Break up existing tech giants Pass Privacy, Labor and Consumer Protection Laws Comprehensive federal privacy laws with private right of action End worker misclassification through gig economy Apply consumer protection standards to platforms Allow Adversarial Interoperability Roll back laws criminalizing modding, reverse engineering Use government procurement to incentivize open ecosystems Appoint special masters to oversee platform legal threats Keep Interoperators in Check Bind interoperators to the same privacy, fair trading and labor laws Determined through democratic process vs corporate policy Conclusion We need to prepare and spread these policy ideas to capitalize on the next crisis Efforts are underway to enable a better internet through this approach
Just listen to the video itself?
It's a 45-minute video. That's a big investment just to engage with a Lemmy post.
We need more than this.
We need a way to make sure that the internet can't be owned, physically.
We need some kind of easy to use and fast and robust open source alternate internet that we can all use.
Something that somehow costs nothing to run, that has enough storage and bandwidth for everyone and everything.
Something that has interoperability built in. Every platform should confirm to openid or openauth or activitypub or something like that.
And you know what? we have the technology!
We all have spare devices lying around. Old PC's, old laptops, old phones - they could all be running some kind of node in a distributed platform of some kind of open source AWS equivalent, and let anyone host anything and post anything without getting ad-raped or data stolen.
It's a pipe dream of mine, and I'm sure others... but with a will and a movement we could just take it all back, all at once.
Search for Locutus, it's very similar to what I've been imagining, only real (well, not yet, it's a project).
That was such a great video. I highly recommend everybody listen to it (there is no visual presentation so listening is enough). Great content, great delivery.
While I don't know how well it will work, nor if the implementation is even fully possible, I like the idea of Yep.
I tried to find the video on PeerTube, from the end users perspective I think we should encourage others to choose community over corporate and use platforms like PeerTube to post these videos instead of YouTube (Alphabet).
I get the idea, but I also don't want to go back to the days when BestGore and LiveLeak were around either, you know
Illegal content will still be illegal, no one is promoting criminal activities in this talk. Privacy and safety do not have to be mutually exclusive.
Hahahaha. "Go back to"?
Just because you don't know what they are called today doesn't mean those sites stopped existing. Shock and gore sites have been part of the Internet for a long time because they fill a human desire, same as porn and gambling and anything that makes your brain think you're being naughty enough to hand out that sweet dopamine reward.
Slightly before the internet we had The Coliseum for our gore fetish.
Why? If people want to see stuff, they should be able to see stuff. Who cares if some guy wants to see some random gory video?
I sure agree. Don't know how your comment managed to become so reviled.
I appreciate aggressive banning of obviously disgusting material from the communities I'm a part of. That's why I'm part of them.
What was censored at 9:50? What is he saying about pivoting? Was it a joke?