> So, Facebook used interoperable tools to let ex-MySpace users eat their cake and have it too. Facebook provided those MySpace users with a “bot,” an automated program that used the user’s login and password to impersonate that user to MySpace, scraping the user’s waiting messages and putting them in their Facebook inbox.
I had completely forgotten about this!
It's unthinkable today. As the piece says, if the tech giants feel the least bit threatened by a competitor they will just buy them up without any sort of regulatory hassle.
They provided XMPP gate - it did not federated with other servers but you were able to use multi-account client (e.g. Pidgin) and have it everything in one window. I did exactly that.
This really died after Cambridge Analytica. I was working at a social media company at the time and all public access and development of public APIs was halted.
I was occasionally working on Facebook applications around 2008–2010 and even back then Facebook had clauses in their terms and conditions forbidding using a person’s social graph to build them a new social graph or mirror their data elsewhere. LinkedIn had the same. The restrictions started coming in a long time before the Cambridge Analytic scandal. They stopped it because they didn’t want the competition, not because of privacy issues.
Cambridge analytica was the "casus belli" if you will. It was an overnight shift, I worked on the public api team and all our work was deprioritized and I was eventually moved to a different project. I'm sure there were competing factions, even in in Facebook, some advocating for open apis and other advocating for locking everything down.
Speaking of Google specifically, my experience with third parties, even ones who are modestly well known is them not keeping up to date with the latest versions of Google’s software and APIs and whatnot and things breaking and becoming less stable. Nobody is as committed to long term support of Google’s technology than Google themselves.
Standards which should be interoperable in theory like Bluetooth have ambiguous specifications and the best way to ensure you don’t get bugs is to buy everything from the same company where even if they didn’t QA their own products you at least avoid the problem of Google and a third party pointing fingers at eachother.
Interoperability is a great way to add functionality to your product you would never be able to add otherwise. It’s nice for customization. Yet from the consumer perspective I’m increasingly finding I prefer with dealing with as few different companies as I can get away with. This lets me get away with a greater amount of complexity without it biting me in the rear.
From a business perspective, the focus on your own products over interoperability has an obvious appeal.
> Speaking of Google specifically, my experience with third parties, even ones who are modestly well known is them not keeping up to date with the latest versions of Google’s software and APIs and whatnot and things breaking and becoming less stable. Nobody is as committed to long term support of Google’s technology than Google themselves.
I assume that last sentence is sarcastic. API stability is pretty important in the real world (look at the system call interfaces of modern OSes for example); Google stepping their APIs (and then abandoning their products) is the opposite of commitment to long term support.
Nah I meant it straight, compared to some of the vendors in the smarthome market Google themselves are a dream when it comes to support. Same goes for Android OEMs and Qualcomm. Notice how Google only offered 7 years of support on the Pixel after they stopped using Qualcomm’s chips?
Google’s third parties are even worse than Google in terms of support and Google’s support is bad. It’s such a mess that I’m happy to pay more to avoid Google products nowadays.
I'm not sure this article proves its point. Companies certainly want to prevent interopability and create walled gardens, but that's not what's stopping competition. What is stopping them is that we live in a different world, where much more people use the internet and do so much more casually, expect everything to be of the popularity and quality only the big companies can create.
Take Reddit: there are a lot of bots on Lemmy which simply copy and re-post from Reddit. There are tools to freely export all of your Reddit posts and comments. And Reddit at least up to July has been 100% archived. If people had enough motivation, we could all migrate from Reddit to Lemmy almost instantly; Reddit wouldn't even have a legal leg to stand on because the posts and comments belong to those who posted/commented them. But most people really don't care, and much more don't care enough to actually transfer their data or refuse to stop using Reddit; as a result, Lemmy has <1/100th of Reddit's user base and isn't a threat anytime soon. The same take could probably by applied to Twitter and Mastadon as well.
> A worker can’t reverse-engineer the Uber app to compare wages with other workers and algorithmically determine when a job offer is a lowball. A consumer can’t install an ad-blocker in an app without risking felony prosecution for violating the DMCA. An entrepreneur can’t mod the Amazon app to remove all the paid results and display comparison prices from rivals. An investigative journalist can’t scrape grocers’ websites to build the case that large firms are colluding to raise prices while blaming inflation.
This is funny because the second thing (ad-blocking) is something which possibly the majority of Internet users do and nobody absolutely gets prosecuted for. Blocking in-game ads? Pi-hole. Nowadays, people don't even get prosecuted for cheating and piracy unless they're distributing it (and though individuals could theoretically be prosecuted, the likelihood is low to the point of it being stupid to worry about).
Also, there are multiple sites which do the third thing (scraping comparison prices) though none of them are really popular and I doubt any use the Amazon app. The first thing (scraping Uber rates) I haven't seen, but I'm sure if someone really cared they could make a website for that as well. And the fourth thing (price collusion) has been alleged by many with evidence that didn't need to be collected from the apps, people just reported the prices themselves.
You are missing the point about the DMCA. Ad blocking with a pi-hole conveniently sidesteps the DMCA but modding a mobile app absolutely would violate the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules, because you'd have to defeat the DRM in order to do so.
But still you'd never be caught; and even if you were, a company would never sue an individual for this, because of bad publicity and lack of precedent.
See: piracy, which also defeats DRM. Individuals haven't been sued for that since Limewire.
And here you see that "interoperability" is not a very progressive demand, but a conservative one. At least is it not progressive in itself - then, paleoconservatives wouldn't endorse it.
Doctorow (imo) prioritizes breadth of reach over control over how and where his message gets delivered.
It's an interesting strategy in part because it means a lot of the people encountering him are probably not aware of him in other online spaces, they'll only see him when republished in sources they already read, and they might not ever work their way back to his blog.
On one hand I'd be very worried about dilution of the message, misinterpretation, etc... On the other hand, it's enabled Doctorow to get some of his concepts into much wider cultural circles than he otherwise would have access to, so it's hard for me to criticize it too much.
And I think that Doctorow also has a talent for figuring out how to frame his ideas in a way where the conclusions stay the same, but it feels like he's reaching those conclusions by arguing specifically from your individual starting position and ideological base. His essays tend to (again, imo) feel tailored in a way where regardless of the context or regardless of where the essay is published, it'll have this vibe of "I'm on your community's side and I'm saying stuff that you all are going to nod along to and agree with... and therefore X/Y/Z."
Pros and cons to that approach, but it makes him accessible in a way that many other political writers aren't. So it's not too surprising to me to see his writing show up in Conservative circles as well as Liberal ones, I think it just kind of shows his talent for subtly reframing political discussions depending on the context.
Something that seems absent these days in American political discourse is the assumption that the other party, in general, has a similar north start to your own, i.e. both conservative and liberal ideals (in the recent past) seemed well-intentioned enough to claim that they each just want what’s best for the country. Now it seems like we have four factions and the centrist left and centrist right just seem to be merging while the far left and far right are moving further away from everyone.
Feels to me like centrist left and right are getting pulled apart from one another to their respective ideological fringes.
This has pretty much just totally happened to the Republicans; Democrats have done a better job of staying centered and responsible, but I don't think that will last forever, unfortunately.
> Something that seems absent these days in American political discourse is the assumption that the other party, in general, has a similar north start to your own
Well, they don't have similar "north stars" or visions of the country or normative values. But this isn't discussed or debated directly by anyone; politician, talking head, or otherwise.
Doctorow is arguing, as usual, for stronger antitrust enforcement. "As antitrust enforcement was progressively neutered—tentatively by Carter, aggressively by Reagan, and with varying degrees of enthusiasm by each successor administration, Republican and Democrat—tech companies were able to simply buy their competitors." That's unusual for a conservative publication. At least in modern times.
I don't think the broad base of the Republican party has had strong feelings against antitrust for at least 6 or 7 years, if not longer. I grew up as a small-government don't-interfere-with-anything Conservative, so I understand the philosophy you're talking about and understand the instinct to say that Conservatives wouldn't want antitrust, but I don't think that the vaguely Libertarian wing of the Republican party is representative of what most Republicans believe nowadays.
If Doctorow is picking up on that then I think his instincts are correct; I think a lot of modern Republican voters and Republican publications are much more receptive to government involvement in the market and are much less persuaded by "pro-business" arguments. Consider that the presumptive Republican nominee for president has come out in support of recent union strikes. The base is no longer Reagan's base.
Which is of course really weird given the history of big tech, Facebook in particular, serving as a distribution channel for right-wing bullshit. The internet in general served as an incubator for all sorts of right-wing stuff that found it difficult to find purchase in broader society.
Being down-voted by people who deny the reality of fake news about Hillary Clinton even though many of us saw it with our own eyes, and who deny the existence of places like 4Chan. Deny the existence of reporting about Facebook's role in propagating content that led to genocide in Burma (their right-wingers do what ours can only dream of), etc.
He's a socialist? I've always gathered that he is pro-capitalism but doesn't like the market capturing aberration that is big tech. Capitalism thrives on fair competition. Wanting to take a regulatory hammer to break up trusts isn't socialist- it's a necessary part of fair capitalism.
Right now there seems to be proto-forming an (reluctant) alliance between the saner right and the part of the liberal left that is scared/disgusted of the more fanatical illiberal ultraprogressives.
If you want freedom of speech and the freedom of computing - the conservatives are natural allies. Not that they are terribly principled, but because they are getting the shaft at online censorship they are willing to tolerate free speech a bit more, at least until they get to power.
I see it less as an alliance and more like a shift. Being pro freedom of speech and the freedom of computing you are pushed out of the left. You can say they aren't the actual left, but the fact is their anti-free speech ideas are polling over 50% so hate to say it, but they are the left. See "The shift in Democratic views on free speech — what’s going on?"
"at least until they get to power" 2016-2020 was when the left ramped up their censorship efforts, not the right. So how do you square that sentence with what actually happened?
>So how do you square that sentence with what actually happened?
One way to square that with what happened: The left continued accruing power throughout Trump's presidency. I don't think the model of power relations presented in, eg, the constitution, or a civics class, or even an econ 101 class, have existed for centuries now
>"at least until they get to power" 2016-2020 was when the left ramped up their censorship efforts, not the right. So how do you square that sentence with what actually happened?
During the Trump years the leftist controlled only the social media, most of traditional media, cultural institutions, academia, almost any big institution became "woke" and the civil service. And whomever has watched Yes minister knows who actually rules a country. And the censorship machine was well oiled for the 2020 election. We had literal pleas to pharma giants to postpone the covid vaccine after the election.
Yeah sure bro, sabotaged; totally not the case that Trump and his stooges were incompetent, just as many predicted and warned.
Imagine if Trump had just let normal Republicans run everything the way they would have done had we had a President Kasich or something; things probably would have gone fairly well and we'd most likely be in his second term right now.
Man, if I had a son and he turned out to be right-winger, I don't know what I'd dislike about the situation more: that he'd be bigoted or that he'd be a little bitch who participated in a culture of never assuming responsibility for one's own short-comings and instead blamed his failings, and those of anyone he was misguided enough to admire, on shadowy others (as well as being so unselfconsciously asinine so as to publicly assert that "Yes Minister" somehow possesses real explanatory and descriptive power).
Granted, if he were a committed left-winger that would come with its own set of problems, but at least most of his misjudgments would involve a kind of misdirection or misguidance of moral impulse and an overabundance of empathy and altruism, as opposed to the almost naked abandonment of any semblance thereof.
Conservative outlets can be less censorious towards socialists than liberal ones. Left-liberals like to pose as being progressives and socialists have a tendency to reveal that they are not.
(I take your word for it that they are a socialist since I don't who they are.)
Oh? And the web? Big Tech engines (including their pesky SDK: that c++ what a mistake, world scale mistake), are beyond grotesque and absurd, securing nearly full control for those toxic for human beings network of companies?
The only way out is interop, and interop with Small Tech, and for the web it means noscript/basic (x)html, IRC, etc. Modularity is key, but without one bazillions mandatory modules: it has to grow as layers until a good enough result is produced, and it must be frugal in module usage.
I expect the worst from Big Tech: "shadow hiring" of hacker teams to destroy Small Tech alternatives. You cannot defend yourself on economic grounds: vanguard and blackrock are tens of thousands of billions of $, and itself does manage hundred of billions in cash. There are only strategic and ethical interests left, don't expect anything, even though you may be lucky for some time, that would be anecdotal.
Yes, and by agreeing to Twitter/Facebook's EULA you are generally giving those first-parties a limited license of your IP. Those companies will often then re-encode or otherwise manipulate your data to be less open or generally available. Like how Twitter and Reddit use their user's content as the main driver to sell API access.
Moreover, I think the IP I'm referring to are the things Doctorow takes for granted in the article. These things should be interoperable, but the reductive capitalist mechanisms that stop them from doing so should be obvious. Unless you force Apple, Google and Microsoft to work together at gunpoint, all three of them are going to find unique ways to gouge customers. I think we're going to see this cemented as regulatory legislation like Europe's Digital Market Act comes into play.
> Unless you force Apple, Google and Microsoft to work together at
gunpoint, all three of them are going to find unique ways to gouge
customers. I think we're going to see this cemented as regulatory
legislation like Europe's Digital Market Act comes into play.
Mandated interoperability is a horrible stick, it's a pity we come to
this, though the Digital Markets Act is only really attempting it at
the policy level, thou shalt/not, which is a high leverage point.
We'll see whether that changes anyone's values. But we must rather ask
What would be the _incentive_ (from markets or culture) that would
make everyone all happy families again? Ergo, what was the thing that
made standards and interoperability such wonderful things in the first
place that we created them?
> But we must rather ask What would be the _incentive_ (from markets or culture) that would make everyone all happy families again?
Given a timespan of about half-a-century to make it's own decisions, apparently government regulation is the only thing that can compel them. Look at the largest companies in the world and tell me I'm wrong. No matter how slow you boil the frog, successful businesses will never step up and do the right thing.
> Ergo, what was the thing that made standards and interoperability such wonderful things in the first place that we created them?
See, this is backwards thinking. Order is not native to the world; nobody invents a new CPU architecture and magically has standards get drafted into thin-air. Standardization is the alternative to chaotic iteration. When too much changes for too few reasons, an agreeable framework is standardized and used as the basis for future iterations.
The incentive to change things is the fact that the status quo sucks. That alone is enough; nobody is naive for expecting better out of the most successful businesses in the world. Leaving them to write their own playbook ends in asinine power-moves like proprietary serial connectors and user exploitation. It's not realistic or amicable; that's why the government has to step in.
I see interoperability as the oil that keeps the machine running, and
people aren't using enough lube. When the car finally grinds to a halt
a responsible adult has to go change the oil. SV has been driving
dad's Ferrari like in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, making it a displaced
symbol of acted-out irresponsibility.
> Everyone knows what happened to interoperability; it's not profitable.
It was profitable, early on, when it held commons value. But (tragedy
of the commons [0]) this is why we can't have nice things... forever.
Sorry that I keep harping on about Dana Meadows, but I do think some
of her farming allegories to generalise and summarise systems theory
(as a healing activity) ... like soil depletion... are gold to us in
the digital realm.
> Compared to the market-destroying power of Linux
This whole post is wild & short, but this in particular I find extra hilariously over the top.
"Market destroying power?" What about all the other markets that were created by having a baseline of capability they could rely on? What about all the benefit & efficiency of having a place open anyone can contribute to make the world better, all the new applications & improved operations we get?
> Everyone knows what happened to interoperability; it's not profitable.
This is almost right. It's profitable to block the interoperability we just get. It's profitable to use contract law to eliminate people's property rights (citing a Mark Lemley point that goes back two decades on this).
It might not be profitable for companies, maybe, but it creates a more flourishing open world where new things happen. And that lost value matters a lot. Society being stuck & unable to explore possibilities, being trapped in a single autocratic technocratic regime, eliminates lots of other value & amazingnwss that can happen.
Cory consistently has the right outlook & strikes to the root for the issues that keep the world so stuck in bad places & under the thumb of limited zero-sum-ny-design profiteering. Society does better by everyone when we have the possibility to find non-zero-sum modes of operation, and Linux is an example of how much more the world gets and how much more vitality we have when we can find these non-zero-sum modes.
> What about all the other markets that were created by having a baseline of capability they could rely on?
Remember what the software industry was like in the 80s and 90s? Get a good image in your head, and then compare it to the landscape of modern Linux offerings. Entire software empires died with the ascendance of Linux, and it was arguably the right move. The existence of commercial UNIX was a glorified support contract at best, and an exploitative relationship based on an imbalance of documentation at worst. It was bound to die, it just took one good blow. If it wasn't Linux, it would have been BSD - the market was fragile enough to get disrupted by any high-quality Free software.
> It might not be profitable for companies, maybe, but it creates a more flourishing open world where new things happen
I'm not against Cory's core point. I'm an Open Source idealist at heart, but I'm also not plainly ignorant of mechanisms that prevent change from happening. Realizing those problems and working with those limitations is what has driven the most powerful software movements to-date. Using Copyright to protect Free Software is unequivocally one of the most important software developments of the Internet age. Similarly, releasing a common and accessible platform like Linux entirely undermined the business of a-la-carte accessibility contracts.
Doctorow can certainly make powerful points and counterarguments to our plainly wrong way of living. Anyone who's paid for HBO probably has strong opinions vis-a-vis shitty subscription services. Nothing he has said or done really feels like a refutation on the level of Stallman or Torvalds, though. Maybe that's a high bar to hold him to, but a lot of his arguments feel plainly "said and done". I struggle to imagine an audience that doesn't know how services degrade in quality when rights-holders are given nigh-unlimited control over their property.
If I did, I'd risk turning into Doctorow myself :p
This is just about my most formal outlet discussing stuff. I do have a Mastodon account where I avoid politics and tech to post memes about video games and gay sex instead, though: https://mastodon.social/@smoldesu
He lost me when claiming entertainment is smaller than tech. That is a clearly self serving view that is laughably difficult to defend.
To be clear, the other direction would also be hard to defend.
And when was this magic period of interop? Even the cited examples are notable for how exceptional they are. This is almost literally an exception proving the rule.
Remember back when your adlib sound card couldn't play the sounds of your game? Remember when you actually did have to know the signal capabilities of your video card? Ever buy a keyboard that didn't connect to your computer? Try watching that dvd your friend brought from Japan? Get sent a 8trak? Have a record, but not a variable speed turntable?
For that matter, have a grandparent buy you sonic, but you only have a NES? Super Mario World, but again, you only have a NES?
Then have you ever actually had fun replacing a car tire, only to find no store in town has any to fit? Heaven help if you were missing transmission parts. Or you thought you'd be forward looking and buy metric tools, and now none fit any of your mechanical parts at home anymore...
Really, the list is rather impressive on how hard working together is.
From about 2002 to whenever Google and Facebook killed XMPP federation. If you were among the computer nerd crowd you had a blog with an RSS feed rather than a homepage. Your Flickr galleries had RSS feeds. Many sites we'd call "social media" today had some type of feed. If you knew someone's account name on the service you could get a read-only feed of the content they chose to make public.
You could "follow" someone by adding those public feeds to your RSS reader. They might even allow pingbacks/trackbacks that let you reply to them on your blog.
You could fire up your Jabber supporting IM app and send messages to other Jabber users as well as any Facebook or Google user.
The model was very interesting but was not workable for billions of normal people that didn't have blogs or Flickr accounts or whatever. I say these things were only available to computer nerds because to run a blog usually required you be your own sysadmin, moderator, and security. Pingbacks and trackbacks were ruined by spammers as were blog comments. WordPress was hilariously insecure and damn near every blog was hosting at least one piece of malware.
Facebook et al worked for "normal" people because Facebook took on the roles of sysadmin, moderator, and security. Most of the services offering composable feeds were either going out of business or shutting down feeds because they realized (like Facebook) that they could monetize access to their users.
That you are picking 2002 as a start kind of highlights the exceptional nature of that time. ICQ was already dead. AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, local BBSs. They were all dying in that time. Or dead.
Don't get me wrong, there have been good interops. But there are more examples of otherwise. With early 2000s standing at a strong showing of things starting to work well.
> Remember back when your adlib sound card couldn't play the sounds of your game?
No, I don't remember that. If anything, I remember most games supporting nothing but adlib and practically every other device having either a literal OPL/adlib chip or some other type of hardware/software adlib emulation.
There was no impediment whatsoever to creating an adlib-compatible card *, and in fact, many manufacturers did create clones. It perfectly illustrates Doctorow's point.
* Patents being the glaring exception, which forced "creative" solutions (e.g. later Creative cards).
I agree with your criticism overall. In defense of interoperability though, I think everything you mentioned is a great example of interoperability working as it should. Everyone started with the same serial capabilities, and tried their own solutions to various degrees of success. Eventually, the industry settles on a particularly attractive and agreeable implementation and standardizes it for everyone. This happened with sound cards, video cards, keyboards and pretty much everything else. As the Bleem! lawsuits proved, even interoperability between game consoles was a legal concept. The incentive to engineer solutions for it just didn't really exist until we standardized computer architectures.
There's a beautiful lecture given by Prof. Richard Buckland of NSW
where he talks, in a Douglas Adams kinda way, about the near infinite
improbability of the CD player ever playing the first CDs people
bought. If you ever need an account of a supernova of industry growth
built on deep, deep interoperability worked out by the cleverest
bastards all around the world, the is a jolly good one.
I had completely forgotten about this!
It's unthinkable today. As the piece says, if the tech giants feel the least bit threatened by a competitor they will just buy them up without any sort of regulatory hassle.