BC BUSINESS
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Republican North Dakota legislators have introduced #SB2333, a bill that prohibits large tech companies from locking their users into a single app store or payment processor.

https://t.co/PgyhgOhFAl

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 While his has implications for Android and other large tech platforms, its most immediate and far-reaching effects with be on Apple, whose Ios platform uses lock-in to monopolize both apps and payments (and another domain, not mentioned in the bill: repairs).

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Predictably, this has thrown Apple into a fury, with Apple's privacy chief @erikn telling the SD legislature that Apple uses its monopoly over the app store to protect its users' privacy and security.

https://t.co/q7laIpKMd2

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Neuenschwander makes a good, but incomplete, point. To the extent that Apple has the same interests as its users, it uses its app store monopoly to lock out bad apps (to the best of its ability).

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But when Apple's interests diverge from its users' interests, the prohibition on sideloading apps actively harms those users' privacy and security. Think of how Apple caved to Chinese state demands to remove working VPNs from the Ios app store to facilitate mass surveillance.

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This security model - surrendering your autonomy to a large company in exchange for promises of protection - is what Bruce Schneier calls "feudal security," though it should really be thought of as "manorial security."

https://t.co/zRPHpsSYzd

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In manorial security, a small elite of mercantalist warlords get all the property rights - the right to decide how the infrastructure is used - and the rest of us get tenants' rights, the right to make limited use of the warlords' property.

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The warlords promise to defend us from bandits and build high walls to keep the bandits out, but if someone suborns the warlord to acting against us, those walls lock us IN, leaving us helpless.

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Indeed, the walls aren't just a protection, they're a temptation: anyone who coerces or bribes a warlord into letting them inside the compound enjoys a smorgasbord of defenseless prey - the walled garden becomes a feedlot.

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Which is why Neuenschwander is more wrong than right: Apple keeps out the bad apps it finds, except when a powerful state makes it an offer it can't refuse.

The fact that users are held prisoner to those judgments is an invitation to states to make demands of Apple.

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Which suggests a corollary: if Apple's users COULD sideload apps that subverted harmful government orders, then those orders would be less effective - and governments would be less tempted to make them in the first place, and if they did anyway, users would have an out.

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I don't know enough about North Dakota state politics to weigh the bill's chances, but if it passes, it creates some fascinating possibilities. ND is one of America's fiber optic powerhouses, with much higher gigabit penetration than other states.

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If moving your company to ND means that you get to retain 30% more of your income - because you're no longer paying the app store tax - AND you get to save money on real-estate AND all your employees get fiber, well, that's pretty attractive.

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To get a sense of what this could mean, check out the testimony of @Basecamp CTO @DHH in support of the bill, describing how Apple shook down his company for 30% of the revenues for @heyhey, its innovative email reader.

https://t.co/VOjxbTiNuI

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"North Dakota has the opportunity to create this level playing field, such that the next generation of software companies can be started there.

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"If a team in Bismarck builds a better digital mouse trap, they won’t be hampered by abusive, extortive demands for 30% of their revenue from the existing big tech giants."

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As Heinemeier Hansson points out, the bill is very short - 17 lines, plus some recitals - and it's well-crafted...for the most part. One thing jumps out though:

> 4. This section does not apply to a proprietor of a special-purpose digital application distribution platform.

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What's a "special-purpose digital application distribution platform?"

It's "a gaming console, music player, and other special-purpose devices connected to the internet."

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That is a seriously weird carve-out. Consoles INVENTED the app store business model, and they use it aggressively today to screw games studios and gamers. Exempting them from this is like exempting printers from a ban on high-priced consumables.

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And all those other "special purpose" devices - smart speakers, medical implants, home automation systems, etc - are just as prone to being monopolized and produce just as many harms for their users through anticompetitive app store conduct as phones do.

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They're overwhelmingly made by the same companies that operate abusive app stores for phones, which means that if this carve out was created by lobbyists, it's weird that they didn't lobby for a carve out for phones, too.

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If you'd like to read or share this thread as a blog post, here's a permalink on https://t.co/iSBh8s9m7q, my surveillance-free, tracker-free, ad-free blog:

https://t.co/pZ8Z9cThrN

eof/

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

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There are lots of problems with ad-tech:

* being spied on all the time means that the people of the 21st century are less able to be their authentic selves;

* any data that is collected and retained will eventually breach, creating untold harms;

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* data-collection enables for discriminatory business practices ("digital redlining");

* the huge, tangled hairball of adtech companies siphons lots (maybe even most) of the money that should go creators and media orgs; and

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* anti-adblock demands browsers and devices that thwart their owners' wishes, a capability that can be exploited for even more nefarious purposes;

That's all terrible, but it's also IRONIC, since it appears that, in addition to everything else, ad-tech is a fraud, a bezzle.

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Bezzle was John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." That is, a rotten log that has yet to be turned over.

4/

Bezzles unwind slowly, then all at once. We've had some important peeks under ad-tech's rotten log, and they're increasing in both intensity and velocity. If you follow @Chronotope, you've had a front-row seat to the
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
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@doctorow
One of the most Monkey's Paw things about my life is my relationship to books. When I was a teenager, I read all the way through the school and public libraries, spent everything I had on books, and still couldn't get enough and dreamt of more.

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Today, as a reviewer, I have more books than I can possibly read, huge, teetering mountains of books that I'm desperate to read, far beyond my ability to ever get through them. Periodically, I declare "book bankruptcy," sweep away the backlog and start over.

2/

Even then, my eyes are bigger than my stomach: I keep back a few books that I can't bear to part with and promise myself I'll read them someday. Usually I don't, but I just did, and boy did I ever make the right call with @TheUniverse's BROAD

I have read a LOT of histories of computing, and I had a front row seat for a lot of the events depicted in this book - people I worked with, people I worked against - and yet I was surprised over and over again with details and perspectives I'd never encountered.

4/

For example, for some reason, my ninth grade computer science course included lengthy readings on ENIAC, Univac, the Mark I and the Mark II, but none of those mentioned that they were all programmed exclusively or primarily by women.

5/
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
20 years on, #BushVGore is back in our discourse - an election stolen by mobs at the polling places, a media blitz, and a Supreme Court at its most antidemocratic and antimajoritarian.

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We remember this as an election that the plutes stole, but it's also an election that the Dems gave to them. That's why we're talk about it now. There will be an attempt to steal next month's election. Will we surrender again?

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The last surrender led to a war being fought today by the children of the soldiers who were sent into battle on day one. It led to climate inaction, monopolistic concentration, erosions to our right to vote and to our right to protest.

3/

Thanks to that surrender, voter suppression was expanded and reinforced, leading to the election of a fumbling liar who got to appoint more SCOTUS judges in 3.5 years than all Democratic presidents did in the previous quarter


You may be wondering how the Dems surrendered in 2020. For a detailed account of what surrender looks like, read @rsgexp's @jacobin memoir of her time as an @AFLCIO organizer sent to Florida during the
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
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@doctorow
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Planet Money on HP's myriad ripoffs; Strength in numbers; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/esjoT3u5Gr

#Pluralistic

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On Feb 22, I'm delivering a keynote address for the NISO Plus conference, "The day of the comet: what trustbusting means for digital manipulation."

https://t.co/Z84xicXhGg

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Planet Money on HP's myriad ripoffs: Ink-stained wretches of the world, unite!

https://t.co/k5ASdVUrC2

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Strength in numbers: The crisis in accounting.

https://t.co/DjfAfHWpNN

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#15yrsago Bad Samaritan family won’t return found expensive camera https://t.co/Rn9E5R1gtV

#10yrsago What does Libyan revolution mean for https://t.co/Jz28qHVhrV? https://t.co/dN1e4MxU4r

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FOR LATER READ
Cory Doctorow #BLM
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@doctorow
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: ADT insider threat; Billionaires think VR stops guillotines; Privacy Without Monopoly; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/nu1HbReiEX

#Pluralistic

1/


This Wednesday, I'm giving a talk called "Technology, Self-Determination, and the Future of the Future" for the Purdue University CERIAS Program:

https://t.co/po5IivZyr4

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ADT insider threat: If you build it they will spy.

https://t.co/kJrmtu8L3S

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Billionaires think VR stops guillotines: TARP with tasps.

https://t.co/MIKwvsICkr

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Privacy Without Monopoly: Podcasting a reading of the latest EFF whitepaper.

https://t.co/R2sl75y4rb

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According to the UK company filing database, Mr Pawar was appointed as board member of SGFX Financials Co on 13 December 2010 and left the company on 5 January 2011. The filing also notes Mr Pawar's occupation as Minister, Government of India.

This company was incorporated on 13 December 2010 and dissolved on 27 November 2012. Nature of business was ‘Other business activities’!


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