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
