With the Digital Markets Act, the EU wants to make competition between tech giants more fair. What could possibly go wrong?
In his weekly podcast, Linus Sebastian gushes about all the wonderful things it will bring: ensuring interoperability of instant messaging services (so you can more easily abandon Apple devices even if all your friends have them and use iMessage); the ability to use alternative app stores (which is what Epic games was hoping for so it could sell Fortnite VBucks to iPhone users without paying Apple); the right to uninstall pre-loaded apps (aka bloatware); no self-preferencing (e.g. putting your own products at the top of search results); more rules about combining personal data without consent; no more requiring developers to use certain services to get their apps onto app stores, making it easier to, for example, use alternative payment processors; allow app developers fair access to supplementary functionalities of smartphones (for example access to NFC for third party apps on iPhones).
“This is just such an obvious list of things that no consumer should oppose,” says Linus. And he is right. All these things would be very convenient.
But Linus does not consider the means by which these things are being attempted. One wonders what minor inconveniences he would not resort to legislation to solve. The non-aggression principle does not occur to him. Never mind the motivations of the people behind it or the time-proven tendency for all state regulation to have unintended consequences.
At 18:48 he responds to a commenter. “BFire just outed themselves as someone who doesn’t get it. ‘More government control. You’d think Canadians would have learned.’ No! This is a government body stepping in to reduce corporate control. Everything here is about loosening an iron fist. How is it not clear? This is one of those things: I just don’t get it. How can you oppose being allowed to remove crap you don’t want from your devices?”
Linus has fallen into a semantic muddle. No-one is being allowed to do anything. People are being forbidden from doing things. The answer is easy: if you want to be allowed to remove crap you do not want from your devices, simply buy devices that do not take that control away from you. The beauty of this is that it does not require any violence!
Linus must know on some level that violence is involved. His next sentence: “Companies being forced to make their products inter-operable. How can you oppose pro-consumer legislation?”
Perhaps one might oppose it because it is legislation which means that force is used. You might also oppose it because it may not lead to the utopian world its proponents imagine. Alec Muffet tweets that enforced interoperability will weaken end-to-end encryption of messages (and he goes into much more detail in a recent essay). There is a consequence that might not actually be unintended by the state actors behind this legislation and that might well harm the very consumers they claim to help.
The whole thing is also obviously unnecessary. In the video there is some discussion of Google search results becoming a bit rubbish lately since many more of the top results are just adverts. Luke Lafreniere (the chap on the right who works with Linus) talks about using Duck Duck Go to get better results, not just for privacy. So there is a free market solution to these problems that is already working.
At 29:39 Luke straight up announces that he would consider not buying Pixel phones if other phones allowed him to remove all the crapware. He seems completely unaware that the problem of crapware is already solved: simply buy devices that do not have crapware.
But for all the practical considerations, there is an easy way to counter all of this from first principles. Violence is bad, and the ends do not justify the means. You just need to have the semantic discipline to see through such constructs as “pro-consumer legislation”.
OK, here goes.
The restriction on downloading aps to iPhones only from the Apple store does have disadvantages, competition-wise.
But it also has the advantage that all the aps have had some level of filtering and decrapification, so they aren’t riddled with spyware, malware and anything else.
That’s really the Apple USP.
Or, if you wish, buy an Android phone and download your crap aps from anywhere you please. Good luck.
Your choice.
But this law makes Option 2 mandatory, and the vendor-controlled safe option illegal.
Choice is dangerous: the plebs must not be allowed to decide for themselves.
NB I am not an Apple fan, but I respect the choices of those who are.
If you begin with the axiom that “corporations are bad, mm-kay” then all this makes perfect sense.
If you pair that axiom with the axiom that government control of markets is good, then this sort of regulation becomes essentially mandatory.
You don’t have to use force.
It is almost impossible for someone to buy a functional smartphone that interoperates well.
This is because you have to have a large pile of money every 12 to 18 months to get your device certified, then get the next version certified etc. etc.
Then if it’s not stocked by the carrier they don’t support it. It may *work*, but if there’s a problem you’re off to buy another device.
Now, we could move the certification from the Government to private corporations, because someone has to validate that the device meets the standards to interoperate at layer 1, 2 and 2.5, and meets other safety and interoperability standards (like isn’t way overpowered. This prevents the device from screwing up other peoples transmissions, messing with cell towers etc.).
But why would Verizon, AT&T or T-Mobile bother to certify this really cool *utterly open* and *utterly out of their control* device unless I was going to pay them large sums of fiat currency (they certainly won’t take gold or bitcoin), which I could only do if I had some way getting that back, and since I’m not developing anything patentable, and there’s nothing to copyright means that about 4 hours after the first one rolls off the assembly line there’s going to be a nearly identical version on Wish.com that is cheaper–because they don’t have to do any R&D.
We can piss and moan all we want that the last three or four hundred years of regulation has gotten us into a bad place. Won’t really change things because the reality on the ground will always been there.
The question is how do we get from here to a better place, and then keep moving in that direction.
In this case we don’t have to create a new law to target manufacturers.
We just have to extend existing law to say that devices cannot be certified unless the manufacturer certifies that all the userland software *shipped on the phone*, or available from the manufacturer for download[1] conforms to open or published protocols and interoperates with software on devices not made by the manufacturer.
This doesn’t ring in a libertarian nirvana of withering away the state, but it doesn’t really increase the power of the state either–they already regulate all that cr*p.
Manufactures are already “free riding” on a lot of open source–hell, Apple ships a little bit of BSD with every Mac. Android IS open source. At many levels the internet–which is the main feature of smartphones–is mostly or entirely open source. All what I suggested does is say “you have to do at *this* level what you expect the bottom and top layer to do for you.”
Is it an infringement on their freedom? No more than being restricted to certain frequencies, power output, or campaign finance laws.
I used to be pretty hard libertarain/anarcho-captalist. But I kept running up against one problem. The charismatic sociopath–the kind of guy who would charm your wife in church while he was sleeping with your daughter Jim Jones, Bill Clinton. Probably Putin when he want to be.
And see, larger corporations, especially public ones, are charismatic sociopaths. They do *anything* to increase their profit, and for many of them you literally CAN’T hurt their reputation for long, they’ll just smile and apologize, make a tiny change and keep doing it.
And yes, this is in response to evolutionary pressure, a screwed up legal ecosystem, but why are those screwed up? Because at every level there’s some twit who for some reason needs power and control, and has been since God decided to favor Able over Cain, and Cain killed him for it.
Or if you look at the behavior of large public corporations since the notion was invented, and begin with the axiom that “the larger a corporation gets–the more sociopathic the corporation* will behave”.
Funny how if you replace “corporation” in the above with “government” it almost works too.
And yeah, I realize that asking the government to regulate corporations is…like asking Daniel Warburton to hold your cocaine.
William, your approach is what I have always called “suicide for fear of death”. You are entirely correct about the way large companies act & that is indeed a serious (and probably intractable) problem. But you then want to rein them with an even more psychopathic institution, one that can also literally kick your door down & shoot you dead if you resist. The song about an old lady who swallowed a fly comes to mind, and we know how that ends.
“it’s not stocked by the carrier they don’t support it. It may *work*, but if there’s a problem you’re off to buy another device.”
I’m not convinced this is a problem in practice; that there are routinely problems with how devices not sold by carriers interact with the carrier’s network. If it did happen it’s something you could take up with the retailer or manufacturer of the device.
But I live in the UK and it doesn’t really matter where you buy your phone from here. The standards we have work well enough.
I *can* believe that there are political problems getting a device approved for sale if you are not friends with the right people.
This is presumably state regulation, though. I don’t know how much influence carriers have over it.
Yeah, that is what I acknowledged in my second post.
1990s style chaumian e-cash and Jim Bell’s “dead pool” assassination politics isn’t up and running, so I can’t crowd-source a hit on Zuckerberg or Putin. And that’s not really a healthy way out of this problem either.
We could (sort of) make common cause with the “decentraized socialism” types…and can try to unwind things back to where corporations AND governments were smaller–that’s a legitimate goal and one I fully support. But it goes against the zeitgeist. And the DSs are mostly patchouli wearing long haired types who don’t wash their clothes enough. And ultimately that just pushes the problem down to the local level.
The old lady sent the spider after the fly, which went badly for her. But we did that a long time ago and the question now is how to get the goat out. We don’t have the option of saying “Hey, it’s just a fly, it’ll be ok”.
And we now have enough experience to say “Look, sending a cow after the goat is just going to make things worse”.
To map this back to the original question the Digital Markets Act sounds like sending in a cow.
I’m suggesting that maybe we look at the stuff we’ve already sent down grandma’s gullet, and see if maybe we can get the dog to chase the goat out.
Not layering more laws down, but looking at what we already have and seeing if we can force the sociopaths in government to force the corporations to at least use a decent brand of lube.
I admit I LOL’ed
The question is how do we get from here to a better place, and then keep moving in that direction. In this case we don’t have to create a new law to target manufacturers. We just have to extend existing law to say that …
I am reminded of Lord Salisbury’s thoughts on these things: “Whatever happens will be for the worst, and therefore it is in our best interest that nothing happens.” Which is to say the laws and regs are pretty bad but if you think getting the government to change them will make it better then you are nuts.
I think we should rather try to think like libertarians. The solution is not government intervention but people coming up with innovative ideas. For example, on the arena of phone apps you can still use an unrestricted web browser on pretty much every phone, with or without a VPN. So why don’t we encourage people to migrate from apps to web apps? On Android phones you can install a different app store, and even side load apps. So let’s work together to make that a more popular option.
It follows my rule of political parties: when a democrat see a problem they create a government agency, when a republican see a problem they create a tax break, when a libertarian sees a problem he quits politics and starts a business to solve it.
Of course, my own personal liberty will be increased if government regulates – and enforces with violence – what others may do to me. Sounds good, sounds liberty-enforcing . . . for me, and for my benefit.
But it results in an overall increase in the government’s violence-backed regulation.
If a thug threatens to harm me, and government tells the thug “we will kill you if you do that”, my liberty is increased. But the thug’s liberty is degraded.
Who controls whom? Whose liberty is more important and whose is less? This really isn’t a liberty issue. It’s who we prefer to liberate.
bobby b: the non-aggression principle seems to solve this quite neatly. Your thug was being aggressive. Someone offering to sell me a product with inconvenient software is not. We prefer to liberate non-aggressive people.
This comment is only loosely related to the main topic, but there is no other recent post here which is more appropriate.
A few days ago i learned via Instapundit that the reason big corporations go woke is that big investment firms will only invest other people’s money in them if they go woke and stay woke.
The idea came to me: Here is a gap in the market! Surely, there is money to be made by starting an investment firm that will only invest in non-woke companies, with a non-woke corporate culture, hiring only non-woke people.
There is money to be made, not only because people will feel good about putting their money in such an investment firm, but also because a non-woke company is less likely to get broke.
Maybe Perry could start such an investment firm? I am willing and eager to put a substantial amount of money in it. (Substantial to me, inconsequential to the success of the firm.)