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CM30 23 hours ago [-]
This is why both decentralisation (federation or otherwise) and a healthy market are so essential. If one company controls a vast swathe of the internet and lots of people's everyday services, the country it's based in can force changes at the drop of a hat. If dozens of companies and groups provide a service, then it becomes way more difficult for any one person, country or organisation to force their worldviews on others/censor them.
But the only way to force this is to somehow force interoperability for products. Make it so anyone has the right to create a client for a service, or connect one service to another. Make it so whenever you buy a product, that's it you can do whatever you like with it. There can't be a license or terms of service beyond maybe "don't redistribute it as your own".
dreambuffer 24 hours ago [-]
The distrust is not even ideological anymore, we just want our services to keep working without some guy deciding to nuke everything the next day for literally no reason.
skybrian 1 days ago [-]
I was going to say there's too much Cory Doctorow in this piece, but it's actually Cory Doctorow. Lots of outrage, no real ask.
1attice 5 hours ago [-]
Why would you expect every essay to come with a call to action? Noting a problem should be enough of a contribution to publish.
casey2 21 hours ago [-]
I'd argue that there is far more American infiltration of Canada's political, legal, industrial and trade base that the internet, the one thing that could be cut off from America overnight, should be a distant afterthought.
musicale 21 hours ago [-]
What continent do they think they are on?
barbazoo 11 hours ago [-]
I thought it wasn't uncommon to refer to the "United States of America" as "America". When you refer to the continent, it's North-America usually.
ktallett 1 days ago [-]
This is a very valid heading.
Arodex 1 days ago [-]
Before someone flags it because "don't want politics on HN", the problem here is not Trump. He's only revealing the problem with Americans as a whole. Most of the political apparatus, Congress and Senate and the Supreme Court, is spineless and jingoistic. Most of American tech leaders are spineless and jingoistic. Most of the electorate is complacent and relish cruelty. Most of the media - both the old MSM and the new podcasters/YouTubers/tiktokers/etc. are clowns.
The problem is America, not Trump.
iioiio 19 hours ago [-]
Well, travel a bit or familiarise yourself with what’s happening in the rest of the world. There aren’t any countries that are doing any better and lots are doing worse.
Arodex 12 hours ago [-]
>There aren’t any countries that are doing any better
Well, travel a bit or familiarise yourself with what’s happening in the rest of the world...
footy 11 hours ago [-]
I've been to 45 countries and agree with the person you're talking to.
1 days ago [-]
Recurecur 23 hours ago [-]
Yep, America is the worst country in the world…except for the rest. ;-)
tardedmeme 23 hours ago [-]
It's just the worst "developed" country in the world. Not except for all the rest. Just the worst. No tricks, it's just bad. Money is the only reason to live there. Everything else sucks.
barney54 21 hours ago [-]
Except the environment in the U.S.—better air quality than almost all of Europe. Except natural beauty in the U.S.— the U.S. has some truly beautiful places to visit and to live. The people are very friendly, especially outside of the cities. These are all good things about the U.S. that has nothing to do with the fact that the U.S. is rich (actually the U.S. being rich is one reason air quality is improving and better than Europe).
lostlogin 21 hours ago [-]
> actually the U.S. being rich is one reason air quality is improving and better than Europe
Is it that, or that that there is a lot of USA?
Dilution works very well, until it doesn’t.
Schiendelman 21 hours ago [-]
Not at all - cities are worse in Europe than in the US. European policy pushed diesel cars for a long time, and Europe burns a lot more biomass for heating than the US does. Both of those are localized - it's particulates, especially during winter, that are much worse.
tardedmeme 12 hours ago [-]
In European cities less people drive.
Schiendelman 10 hours ago [-]
And yet they have worse air quality...
holgerschurig 16 hours ago [-]
BTW, you cannot compare a country ("USA") with a whole continent ("Europe"). The countries in europe aren't all in EU or EEC and are much, MUCH more different than US' states are.
"the environment in the U.S." ... and yet you have abysmal drinking water quality in some areas. A friend of mine from Florida was astonished that you can drink tap water in all of Germany. We can all see how bad USA is with it's environment if we link hydraulic fracking to tap water quality.
Many people over here think that a good amount of US americans are so dumb because of lead poisoning.
Air quality: currently https://waqi.info/de/#/c/5.69/7.058/2.8z doesn't indicate that the USA is vastly better. Yes, there are green areas ... but these are areas devoid of people. Europa has this in Scandinavia. In areas where population and industry density is high the USA isn't that good either.
"beautiful places" I grant you that, but that has every region on earth. You also have many, many more awful places to visit. The last two times I was in the USA locals warned me about "no go" areas. That doesn't exist in Germany, for example.
"people are friendly" no, they aren't. You have the highest crime rate in the developed world. People robbing or mugging me aren't friendly. That "no go" areas even exist is also not a sign of friendly. Your immigration officers are exceptional rude and unfriendly --- virtually the first experience a tourist travelling the USA has with their "friendlyness". And your ICE is even more rude: a swiss journalist from NZZ was e.g. detained for about 2 weeks. Instead of just denied entry and put into the next airplane heading to back Zürich. And the detainment was in one single room with about 30 other illegally-jailed inmates with zero privacy. Even the loo was visible for all. That's US friendlyness ...
Even not rutal... the last time I was in TX I heard on local radio that some whites put a colored man with chains on behind an oversized US car and drove him to dead. And if you are an outlier, e.g. you are from a minitory, or LGBTQ or whatever, then you have a hard time in the friendly rural-ness. Many people leave the ruralness towards towns to gain freedom.
18 hours ago [-]
JuniperMesos 14 hours ago [-]
The internet is less American than it ever has been. The internet was almost entirely invented in America, by Americans (or at least people living and working in America), and funded and controlled by American companies. This has been the status quo ever since the Internet was 200 hosts in a hand-maintained TXT file in the mid-80s; and is only less true now because there are now substantial internet technology companies in countries genuinely-rival to America. Say what you will about TikTok, it's not controlled by Americans and a lot of people around the world care about it anyway.
> Drip, drip. Klein in 2005. Snowden in 2013. And yet, today, we are still using the American internet—the surveillance-prone, easily interdicted internet. Because Klein and Snowden were individual leaks, we put our buckets out and hoped things wouldn’t get worse. Instead of migrating off the American internet, we tried to regulate the tech giants. We pretended that the problem with Mark Zuckerberg was that he was the wrong guy to be the unelected, permanent social media czar with total control over 4 billion people’s lives, rather than confronting the fact that no one should have that job.
I'm not a fan of how Doctorow abruptly switches between talking about secret US federal government surveillance that was publicly exposed more than a decade ago, and the fact that Facebook is a gigantic and privately-owned social media platform. The main effect of the Snowden revelations was to create meaningful pressure to add encryption to everyday technologies people use to access the internet, an effort which has largely been successful. I talk to lots of people on Signal these days, which is great. And it has nothing at all to do with the fact that billions of nontechnical people around the world use Facebook or Instagram or one of a host of other private social media platforms as their sole internet presence.
> Here in Canada, we racked up an embarrassing string of abject defeats in our attempts to rein in big tech. When we tried to get Facebook to pay for news, they just deleted the news. When we tried to get Netflix to put some CanCon in the catalogue, they refused. When we tried to get them to pay a largely symbolic 3 percent tax, Trump rattled his sabre, and Prime Minister Mark Carney folded like a cheap suit.
I don't really see trying to impose some Canada-specific taxes or local content mandates as reigning in big tech in any meaningful way. I don't really care if Canada has a law about Canadian content requirements, but I also don't care if Netflix resists this, or any other country-specific local content law for places I don't live in and probably don't speak the language of.
Anyway, most of what this essay is talking about is Doctorow's standard argumentation against centralized technology platforms that are used by huge numbers of people. I'm basically in favor of this, although I think he weakens his argument by grounding it in the idea that the problem is that centralized social media is run by American companies specifically, and that Canadian (or in general any other country's) local companies would do any better, if they built a thing people actually wanted to use. Indeed, one major benefit of many internet companies being run out of the US is that the US has better legal free speech protections than basically every other country on earth. So much speech is illegal by statute in Canada or various EU countries that is unconstitutional to make illegal in the US.
But really, the actual problem is that there's a small number of privately-owned social media platforms in the world that huge numbers of people use because of a combination of genuinely solving user problems, and the network effect of large numbers of people already using them. There are all sorts of interesting decentralized, free-software technologies that are trying to replace centralized internet services used by millions or billions of people - and all of those services have extremely small user bases and often a bad user experience for things that the average person cares about. Solving that problem is a lot more important than trying to get Canadian companies in Canada to compete with American (and Chinese, and Russian, etc.) social media platforms.
coastalredneck 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
cyanydeez 1 days ago [-]
I m3an, it's more like American has become to stupid to trust.
yesitcan 1 days ago [-]
Ironic coming from someone with poor grammer.
tardedmeme 23 hours ago [-]
The classic American trope: everyone who doesn't speak English must be stupid.
musicale 21 hours ago [-]
who said anything about speaking?
lioeters 22 hours ago [-]
> grammer
Say less fam.
cyanydeez 23 hours ago [-]
better than looking like Ai lsop init
touristtam 21 hours ago [-]
Are you trying to confuse my Agent? There is no `init` command on `lsop`. :p
But the only way to force this is to somehow force interoperability for products. Make it so anyone has the right to create a client for a service, or connect one service to another. Make it so whenever you buy a product, that's it you can do whatever you like with it. There can't be a license or terms of service beyond maybe "don't redistribute it as your own".
The problem is America, not Trump.
Well, travel a bit or familiarise yourself with what’s happening in the rest of the world...
Is it that, or that that there is a lot of USA?
Dilution works very well, until it doesn’t.
"the environment in the U.S." ... and yet you have abysmal drinking water quality in some areas. A friend of mine from Florida was astonished that you can drink tap water in all of Germany. We can all see how bad USA is with it's environment if we link hydraulic fracking to tap water quality.
Many people over here think that a good amount of US americans are so dumb because of lead poisoning.
Air quality: currently https://waqi.info/de/#/c/5.69/7.058/2.8z doesn't indicate that the USA is vastly better. Yes, there are green areas ... but these are areas devoid of people. Europa has this in Scandinavia. In areas where population and industry density is high the USA isn't that good either.
"beautiful places" I grant you that, but that has every region on earth. You also have many, many more awful places to visit. The last two times I was in the USA locals warned me about "no go" areas. That doesn't exist in Germany, for example.
"people are friendly" no, they aren't. You have the highest crime rate in the developed world. People robbing or mugging me aren't friendly. That "no go" areas even exist is also not a sign of friendly. Your immigration officers are exceptional rude and unfriendly --- virtually the first experience a tourist travelling the USA has with their "friendlyness". And your ICE is even more rude: a swiss journalist from NZZ was e.g. detained for about 2 weeks. Instead of just denied entry and put into the next airplane heading to back Zürich. And the detainment was in one single room with about 30 other illegally-jailed inmates with zero privacy. Even the loo was visible for all. That's US friendlyness ...
Even not rutal... the last time I was in TX I heard on local radio that some whites put a colored man with chains on behind an oversized US car and drove him to dead. And if you are an outlier, e.g. you are from a minitory, or LGBTQ or whatever, then you have a hard time in the friendly rural-ness. Many people leave the ruralness towards towns to gain freedom.
> Drip, drip. Klein in 2005. Snowden in 2013. And yet, today, we are still using the American internet—the surveillance-prone, easily interdicted internet. Because Klein and Snowden were individual leaks, we put our buckets out and hoped things wouldn’t get worse. Instead of migrating off the American internet, we tried to regulate the tech giants. We pretended that the problem with Mark Zuckerberg was that he was the wrong guy to be the unelected, permanent social media czar with total control over 4 billion people’s lives, rather than confronting the fact that no one should have that job.
I'm not a fan of how Doctorow abruptly switches between talking about secret US federal government surveillance that was publicly exposed more than a decade ago, and the fact that Facebook is a gigantic and privately-owned social media platform. The main effect of the Snowden revelations was to create meaningful pressure to add encryption to everyday technologies people use to access the internet, an effort which has largely been successful. I talk to lots of people on Signal these days, which is great. And it has nothing at all to do with the fact that billions of nontechnical people around the world use Facebook or Instagram or one of a host of other private social media platforms as their sole internet presence.
> Here in Canada, we racked up an embarrassing string of abject defeats in our attempts to rein in big tech. When we tried to get Facebook to pay for news, they just deleted the news. When we tried to get Netflix to put some CanCon in the catalogue, they refused. When we tried to get them to pay a largely symbolic 3 percent tax, Trump rattled his sabre, and Prime Minister Mark Carney folded like a cheap suit.
I don't really see trying to impose some Canada-specific taxes or local content mandates as reigning in big tech in any meaningful way. I don't really care if Canada has a law about Canadian content requirements, but I also don't care if Netflix resists this, or any other country-specific local content law for places I don't live in and probably don't speak the language of.
Anyway, most of what this essay is talking about is Doctorow's standard argumentation against centralized technology platforms that are used by huge numbers of people. I'm basically in favor of this, although I think he weakens his argument by grounding it in the idea that the problem is that centralized social media is run by American companies specifically, and that Canadian (or in general any other country's) local companies would do any better, if they built a thing people actually wanted to use. Indeed, one major benefit of many internet companies being run out of the US is that the US has better legal free speech protections than basically every other country on earth. So much speech is illegal by statute in Canada or various EU countries that is unconstitutional to make illegal in the US.
But really, the actual problem is that there's a small number of privately-owned social media platforms in the world that huge numbers of people use because of a combination of genuinely solving user problems, and the network effect of large numbers of people already using them. There are all sorts of interesting decentralized, free-software technologies that are trying to replace centralized internet services used by millions or billions of people - and all of those services have extremely small user bases and often a bad user experience for things that the average person cares about. Solving that problem is a lot more important than trying to get Canadian companies in Canada to compete with American (and Chinese, and Russian, etc.) social media platforms.
Say less fam.