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
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.
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Except the tech companies are among the politicians’ biggest “donors”.
Public cloud computing companies that want to host government IT workloads still have to be Fedramp compliant. Doesn’t matter how much their donors pay, if they aren’t Fedramp compliant they can’t bid for the work.
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I dunno what “Fedramp compliant” means?
Its the whole point of this point in this thread. A set of standards the company has to meet to be able to do government work.
Presumably Apple and Google aren’t bidding for these contracts, which are the ones with the power to change the industry.
Google is, so is Microsoft as is Amazon which is also the point of this post. They had to meet the security and interoperability standards to get the government work. No amount of donor money allows a company to bypass Fedramp compliance for this work.
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Its the whole point of this point in this thread.
Weird that the article never even mentions it’s own subject… Or that its about a problem you claim doesn’t exist…
I don’t know how to help you if you’re not able to see the parent post which is quote in the article. It has this important line which we’re discussing in this thread.
“Through government procurement laws, governments could require any company providing a product or service to the government to not interfere with interoperability.”
I’m not going to copy/paste the entire line of posts where the conversation evolves. You’re welcome to read those to catch up to the conversation.
No amount of donor money allows a company to bypass Fedramp compliance for this work.
Oh, honey…
Cool, then it should be easy for you to cite a company that got Fedramp work without being Fedramp certified. Should I wait for you to post your evidence or will you be a bit?
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Yeah but donations can help make procurement tenders slightly in favour of donors. Or get inside scoop so they have time to be ready.
Donors would still have to meet the Fedramp compliance standards. So this supports Doctorow’s point.
Not in USA FYI, but this is why tenders use lawyers.
It’s easy to think of tech as being companies that primarily produce electronics or operate information services, but that’s not the case. Every company uses (and often creates) technology in various forms that benefit from standards and interoperation.
Connected devices benefit from standardized Wi-Fi. Cars benefit from standardized fuel- both in ICE (octane ratings, pumps) and electric (charging connectors, protocols). It even applies to companies that make simple molded plastic, because the molds can be created/used at many factories, including short-term contract manufacturing.
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My point is that every company is a tech company.
And every company is a logistics company?
At the end of the day, everything is sales.
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Is Amazon a tech company?
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.
I like Doctorow, and these point are valid. I just don’t see the American government doing anything to benefit the people, regardless of left or right orientation. Most Americans want abortion access and reasonable restrictions on gun sales; I can’t imagine any candidates, local or federal doing little more than making empty promises on these subjects. Even Obama care is a hugely compromised husk of reasonable healthcare for all, and you still have republicans clamoring to dismantle it.
I hate to be pessimistic, but I don’t think any American politician would take on this topic.
I don’t think any American politician would take on this topic.
That’s the feature
The FTC under Biden has begun to push back against tech monopolies.
The Supreme Court overturning the Chevron doctrine could stop that pretty quick
And Harris will probably replace the ftc head actually trying to enforce anti trust because of lobbying.
Fucking citizens united
Don’t “both sides” this. It’s the kind of thing people use to justify voting third party. Off the top of my head the Biden admin has been working to restore net neutrality and has an antitrust case against Ticketmaster and Live Nation
I didn’t both sides this. To clarify; I meant that if republicans brought forth policies to preserve personal privacy, or the democrats decide to bust up monopolistic companies- doesn’t matter which side tried to bring up any of these ideas; they would be so neutered by the time the ink dried the impact would be negligible.
I can see how you could take my comment as both sides-ing it. I haven’t seen either party do anything that impacts the quality of daily life (in a positive way) for myself, friends or family. The examples of abortion and gun control are just examples where the overwhelming majority of citizens want one thing, in very clear terms, and the government does absolutely nothing about it despite the wishes of the people.
I’m also clearly not advocating for any third party. If you take the very common knowledge that the government no longer works for the people and twist that into throwing away your vote on Kennedy or Nader your problems are larger than limited browser selection.
And how’s that antitrust case going? Where are we on net neutrality? Student loan forgiveness for like 10% of borrowers? Expanding Medicare? I only criticize democrats because that’s the party that’s supposed to do things for us. The American republicans are Christo- fascists who’ve long abandoned any pretense of constitutional law or responsibility for their country. Either way- we have crumbling infrastructure, hungry children, women dying because religious abortion restrictions, and lead pipes. And these shit bags can just send another $25 billion to kill more brown people in the Middle East.
So forgive me if I doubt they’ll take the time to learn what http means or even consider something that doesn’t have a wealthy donor behind it.
What you’ve expressed is not pessimism it’s cynicism.
I don’t think any American politician would take on this topic.
And if they did it would be clear they didn’t have a clue what they were talking about.
I hate to be pessimistic, but I don’t think any American politician would take on this topic.
it’s only pessimism if it’s not true and there are plenty of demonstrably true public examples to guarantee that this isn’t pessimism; it’s reality that sounds like pessimism.
- Lack of competition in the market via mergers and acquisitions
- Companies change things on the back end (“twiddle their knobs”) to improve their fortunes and have a united, consolidated front to prevent any lawmaking that might constrain them
- Companies then embrace tech law to prevent new entrants into the market or consumer rights (see: DMCA, etc.)
This is the criteria he has laid out for the “enshitifacation” of the Internet.
This is funny to me because this is the exact pattern of every industry and service in the United States ever. The Internet isn’t special, it’s just the latest frontier for capitalism.
The corporations have been doing this with housing. I live in CA and it is awful how many unhoused there are now, and the supreme Court made it illegal!I hope one day this will finally be the last straw for the uprising.
The danger here is that they make “open” standards so horrendously complex and ever evolving that only the billionaire mega corporations can can realistically keep up with them.
See the web where Google now control it completely by having such an enormous amount of code that even Microsoft couldn’t be arsed to keep up, or Office Open XML, where 100% compatibility is limited to exactly one product: The one that made it. I just downloaded the documentation for the standard. It is over 5000 fucking pages long. That was part 1 of 4.
And those 5000 pages were probably automatically generated from … something.
Another example here is the Matrix protocol, specifically designed from the ground up to be open and distributed. In reality, the only option for full-featured stable server software is the one maintained by the project itself, and there aren’t a lot of third party clients available.
Openness itself is a good goal, but the complexity itself can pose a barrier openness.
true, but at least they have been working on modularizing it for a few years, and making it so that even unsupported message types can be displayed to some level
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I loved the net when you had to have a clue to be there.
The Eternal September is real
Eternal September
Mine began in truth about eight years before that. BBS and tymnet nodes enabled by shit load of blue and black box phone calls. Just go look at the neat and orderly wiring in a blue box and know that mine was nothing like that. Mine looked like low rent spider web of components stuffed in a cigar box.
At one point, I ran my local Radio Shack out of alligator clips…
Interoperability is how we “seize the means of computation.”
Good luck with that. If the success of the iPhone has taught me anything it is that the average person loves them some incompatible with anything but itself vertical integration.
Through no intervention or design, the market creates perverse incentives that only benefit a few. So the solution is to fiddle with the incentives?
Ya ever notice that “market reform” schemes always seem like negotiations with an angry god? Sometimes I think that ancient civilizations would be much better understood if we stopped referring to the “priest class” and started calling them economists.
My default position remains the same, kill god.
This is nice and all but any solution requires a government captured by capital to work against capital feels as likely to work as thoughts and prayers.
Better than completely allowing capital to do whatever it wants without even attempting to push back.
But what if some change in the right direction doesn’t fix everything immediately? Then what?
May as well just not bother.
But then our first problem is the influence of capital, not a lack of ideas for what to do if that influence wasn’t there.
Yup. All of these “solutions” that sound original are known. The reason we don’t apply them isn’t because we don’t know how to solve these issues, it’s because capital has pulled the handbrake. This is the problem we have to solve. All the other problems fall downstream and will magically start getting solved if we can release the handbrake. If we’re not talking about how to reduce regulatory capture, we’re not taking about real solutions.
It’s not that we had enough power to guarantee we would make an impact. It’s that we had enough power that we should have tried.
I’m inclined to agree. I think the best path through would be to focus on laws that benefit multiple minor players that have a seat at the table.
Antitrust laws in general are a good example. These function at the direct expense of big monopolies, but are exactly what companies need if they want in on what was monopolized. And in the case of breaking a monopoly down, the resulting “baby” companies given more power, growth opportunity, hiring opportunities (job growth) and money making potential than the parent. This can also spur economic growth for all the fat cats out there by creating many new investment and hiring potentials. Overall, if you can get past the monopoly itself (read: take the ball away from your billionaire of choice), everyone else involved stands to benefit.
There may be other strategies, but I can’t think of any right now. I think the key is to tip the scale in favor of more favorable outcomes, then repeat that a few more times, achieving incremental progress along the way. Doctorow outlines the ideal end state for all this, but it’s up to everyone else to figure out how to get there.
While I don’t like the idea of embracing capital to improve things, the whole system is currently run this way. Standing with other monied interests that are aligned with the same goal might be the only way to go.
I think the best way to make the Internet less sh*tty is to get away from Google search.
I like the SearX search engine. It gives old-school, relevant search results, not google ranked ones.
It’s also spread out over many separate instances, so you can pick the one that best suits your search needs:
I like Kagi a lot. It has a Small Web feature that is results from smaller sites like the good old days. Also has a Fediverse filter.
Kagi, though, is also a private company and that means it’s just a wait for the enshitification to start
I like Cory Doctorow.
However, I bought the novel Rabbits solely because Doctorow had a front cover blurb praising the novel.
It was downright a bad novel. Doctorow owes me $16.
Am I the only one that really detests the word “enshittification”? It feels like someone couldn’t be bothered to look up the correct term and lots of other lazy people ran with it.
Mind you, that feels like modern language in a nutshell.
It was a term coined to describe the step-by-step process modern tech platforms go through:
- be good, get customers, grow
- get large enough to corner market, concentrate on profits
- get large enough to move to politicise their approach, drive out competition through aggressive tactics, and lock in consumers
- drive more profit through dark patterns and ensure nobody wins but the stakeholders
It’s specifically that, and there wasn’t a word that described that process previously, as it’s only something that’s possible in a modern, “web scale” worldwide platform.
Maybe I’m just thinking the crudeness of the term is downplaying the seriousness somewhat.
I’ll award virtual internet points that you can redeem for absolutely nothing to anyone who can come up with a better term.
Too late. it is a widely used term with a very specific meaning now. that’s language for you. not just modern language. all of language.
Yeah, you’re right. If I’d have spoken up earlier then people would have listened!
I feel your pain. I am not a native english speaker but I see lots of comparable words come up in my language. I believe they are wrong but I know many “wrong” examples that were wrong a century ago but they are part of the daily language now.
Maybe you could call it recoupment but it doesn’t have quite the same ring. It’s not quite the same thing, either.
You could also talk about coercive monopolies but that doesn’t mean exactly the same thing.
I mean its a bombasticatic term for “capital accumulation” in the tech sector. Or, more accurately, the effects of capital accumulation and monopoly in the tech sector.
I can’t be bothered to look up the correct word, what is it?
I was wrong, I could be bothered. None of the alternatives were really great or obviously a better word. Closest I came up with was “quality erosion”, but it doesn’t convey the same feeling of anger and sadness.
Don’t ask me, my English is abysmal.
Worsening, decline?
Maybe there isn’t a single word.
It seems superfluous to complain about a word’s use when you don’t have a better alternative. Language is ever growing and evolving, especially slang. An English speaking time traveler would not be able to communicate very well with English speakers from 500 years ago. Let people have their things.
Ruination.
