Comment by randomsearch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by randomsearch | Hacker News Reader

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I think it’s simpler. Boycotts don’t work at an individual level. I have been boycotting nestle for decades. Can’t say they’ve become less evil. That’s because the marginal effect is negligible for them and strongly negative for the individual (assuming you’re a fan of Kit Kat’s).

Network effects amplify the marginal impact on the individual, because they lead to a monopoly with no true competition. Sure, you can leave whatsapp for signal, but you can’t talk to that community group on WhatsApp from signal. From an individual’s point of view the market power is an absolute monopoly.

The only solution to these problems is organising to the level of a mass boycott, or regulatory intervention. The former is impossible because too many people don’t care about the company’s behaviour (not because they’re ignorant, they just don’t care) and the latter is slow and a very hard and unfun pursuit for campaigners.

Nothing we say to non nerds will be of sufficient magnitude on an individual level. It’d have to be collective action.

Personally I’m far more worried about Facebook undermining democracy right now. That’s sufficient reason to shut them down.

I wish the EU would force messaging systems to also support interactions with XMPP or other similar open standards.

There's nothing in their way to expect such a thing, except the lobbyists.

Why would you want your government to mandate how technology works?

Sounds like a recipe for disaster and the perfect way to stifle innovation

Is it not reasonable to demand interoperability for one of the main methods of communication in the entire world?

Forcing a specific standard is problematic, but it would be reasonable to ask any communication service to provide a fully documented and public API with features and access equal to the features and access of the official application.

Random nerds make integrations to whatever application/protocol is in vogue, business still gets to have complete freedom in where their take their API and thus their product.

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I would even go as far as to say that every web-service should be machine-consumable in that fashion, but that's beyond the point.

My problem is not demanding it, as users, it's enforcing it with laws.

If users don't want that, they should be free not to have that.

The problem is that the users who couldn't care less drive the decision.

“One System — One Policy — Universal Service”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment?wprov=sft...

"the promise of mail delivery [helped] grow the nation and economy instead of serving only existing communities."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Service_Act?wprov=sfti1

I think it's a different problem - mail delivery requires a series of entities interacting with each others (think about a network of mailmen).

Also, private mail exists and it's definitely useful.

Digital messages are usually built on top of the internet (which would have similar problems) and every service can be used across the entire network.

Really? So I can reach my cousin via Signal, even though he is on WhatsApp?

Because innovative != ethical! Hopefully it would stifle innovation that depends on tracking users and platform lock-in. I think there would certainly be space for innovation beyond that, possibly with even better conditions for competition as it would be easier for users to move between platforms.

What if as a user I'm happy to get a free service and be tracked?

Governments exist in large part to solve problems of the form "all individuals are incentivised to take actions which, when universally taken, are detrimental to the commons".

I am not sure it is a problem for most people though, if anything I believe most people would not like the alternative.

If the choice is between being tracked, which results in many things being free (as in beer) with otherwise almost no practical visible consequences for most people (different ads?), or having to pay for each and every service but no tracking, I think you would face a huge backlash if you forced the latter.

A solution could be to have free access if you accept tracking and pay otherwise, but I believe this is illegal under GDPR.

Because deployment of technology is a policy decision. And policies are what governments are about.

They probably shouldn't mandate "how technology works". I certainly wouldn't vote for that.

However, I think that public services (paid for by taxes) should be open and accessible. That is, the government should mandate certain properties ("it should be open") and not certain implementations ("it should use this specific protocol / app").

Another commenter gave the example of Brazil schools sending parents important information via WhatsApp.

Now I'm not against the schools doing that if it's one of multiple options and if the parents have an actual choice. I think the government should mandate that at least one open choice be made available, without necessarily detailing said choice.

In my view this wouldn't stifle innovation. If you come up with some new communication app that's better than anything else, if it's open and many people pick it up, there's no reason for the schools not to use it instead of the older / inferior option. This would also allow schools to choose one among several open solutions according to their particular needs.

I generally agree with this sentiment, but sometimes I think mandating cooperation between walled gardens is the only way to help consumers. Take healthcare for example: Epic, Cerner, Athena, etc all have NO incentive to build any interoperability into their products. It greatly benefits them to create walled gardens and wall-off hospitals and healthcare institutions from other institutions that use their competitors' software.

It took Congress to mandate open standards and to spell out that healthcare institutions must offer a public APIs to patients. We are only now starting to be able to download health records from hospitals as a result of this despite it being technically possible for decades. In fact there are still many patients that are required to request stacks of DVDs containing their health records, and this is their only option.

Obviously this is more a commentary on how shitty healthcare in the US can be, but also a good example IMO of how sometimes government intervention in technical standards requirements can greatly benefit consumers.

Let's rewrite this to illustrate a point:

Why would you want a small, self-interested, unaccountable group of private investors to mandate how technology works?

Sounds like a recipe for disaster and the perfect way to stifle innovation

Depending on the particulars of your government, perhaps it looks more appealing now.

Who do you think that allocates frequency spectrum? Imagine if every mobile phone company wanted to lock its users by operating on a specific frequency.

Imagine if Hollywood or TV studios had any saying over Digital TV standards. Streaming would never exist and we would be used to a "pay-per-view" model forever, with mandatory and built-in DRM.

This is not about enforcing how technology works. It just ensuring that no monopoly can occur. Common standards don't stifle innovation, closed ones do.

We would have been much worse off if governments, or governmental bodies like the UN, allocated IP addresses rather than a private anarcho-like entity.

How does allocation of IP addresses related to pushing for interoperability of communication protocols?

If your analogy was something about governmental bodies was worse than private entities when pushing for a standard network standard, then you would have a point. But unless I am deeply wrong, TCP/IP, GSM, LTE, DVB, even FM radio and PAL were standards that only became dominant after governmental bodies sanctioned as standards and no one misses AppleTalk or Novell's IDP because of "government meddling".

Even still, the argument is not for killing private protocols or stopping private companies to innovate and develop new technologies. It's "just" that these innovations should be made on top of open standards instead of displacing them. Don't forget that Google Talk and even Facebook's messenger started on top of XMPP. They closed purely for business reasons, not technical ones. Had the FCC told them "do whatever you want with your network and your client, but anyone speaking XMPP should be able to communicate with your users", we wouldn't be in this mess.

Forcing interoperability means the apps need to actually compete with each other by being better - rather than just by being the biggest incumbent. Restrictions and requirements can boost innovation.

Market competition doesn't work for natural monopolies, and network effects mean messaging is one of those. Governments should regulate as necessary to ensure free markets for competition, which means aggressive antitrust enforcement and giving natural monopolies the choice between opening up enough to allow competition, or nationalisation.

Interoperability enforcement may become part of the EU Digital Markets Act.

If the GDPR is any indication, WhatsApp could just choose to stop offering its services in the EU.

Which would be great IMO

That would seriously break the network effect and eventually kill them off. Skype, Yahoo Messenger, etc got popular because they where free and easy to use. However, the market is really fickle and network effects can kill stuff off really quickly.

WhatsApp is already DOA in my circle of friends, it might come back but the odds aren’t great.

The WhatsApp network effect is strongly tied to borders though. Almost no one uses it in New Zealand for example, but a lot of people use Facebook Messenger but it isn't completely dominant like WhatsApp is in some places. I wonder if it ties back to countries that have good value cell phone plans? Even the very cheapest plans here come with unlimited SMS and it's been that way since smartphones were first taking off.

I think you're understating the strength of weak connections. If I have even one friend who's not on Whatsapp that I want to stay in touch with then I'm going to download another app. If there's a group chat with this person then everyone in that group is downloading a second app. And then second degree and third degree connections get affected too.

Getting out of the EU would be a massive blow to any established social media company that depends on network effects. It doesn't matter as much for smaller companies that are still growing (eg. early Facebook still managed to grow by only offering services to college students).

That’s the point.

problem solved

too good to be true.

Also if XMPP would be possible, the data privacy problems would persist. For many people it's a problem that FB reads all their messages.

The EU cannot force anything. It would be enough for the company that provides WhatsApp to not have any business in the EU (today that's FB, it could be a spinoff tomorrow).

The only, weak, solution would be to force the EU ISPs, on an European level, to block FB. Blocking on itself will not be easy (technically speaking) and good luck to have a consensus on that among our countries.

I completely fail to understand why many US companies, operating on US grounds care about GDPR at all. I would not and, please, sue me. Even the ones that block access from EU are overreacting.

What do you think the differences between modern boycotts and Rosa Parks bus boycott are? Why are modern ones so ineffective in comparison?

Rosa Parks was a militant activist and part of a large activist network that was consistently staging public acts in defiance of Jim Crow segregation. This is misleadingly left out of most folks’ intro to her most successful action.

My school system was always big on emphasizing that there were pre-cursors to Rosa Parks (like Claudette Colvin), but they didn't have the connections that she did to make it happen.

As sibling said, organisation was there, but also I think most people would feel very strongly about that issue, where here we are a minority.

Another factor is that the black people that were mainly affected by the segregation were the primary funders of the bus system. Their boycott was incredibly significant to the bottom line.

When employees want to have more say over their working conditions, they organize. If users want to have more say over the product conditions, is there an opportunity to organize as wel?

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