The dangers of building on a platform that is unregulated.
You wouldn't build your brick and mortar store on a contract that allowed the landlord to kick you out at a whim without compensation.
You wouldn't build your brick and mortar store on a contract that allowed the landlord to kick you out at a whim without compensation.
I think almost everyone would agree that a handful of unaccountable corporations should not hold this discretionary power, but we don't have a legal framework or social contract to dictate how this should be handled.
In the digital world we have... binding arbitration clauses in terms & conditions of use.
We should declare all app stores to be the same, common carries that may not discriminate. Bottom line, end of story. No BS about "hate speech" or other terms that are made up to make censorship sound more palatable.
Why should they unless the app violates the law?
And please take into consideration the fact that we aren't talking about small / mid size businesses, but giant behemoths and we're trying to apply some rules to the biggest ones.
Protecting side-loading (legally and technically) solves both problems. And limits the ability of the government to do the same kind of moderating as they’d first have to somehow disable sideloading. (Imagine the government trying to disable ability to run arbitrary code on all laptops or PCs. Possible with enough manpower, sure, but way harder than just moderating an App Store.)
On the hosting side I think it's a bit different. For instance if AWS wants to kick an app off of their platform, there should be a legally mandated warning escalation process, and cloud providers should be required to give clients a reasonable amount of time to migrate their product to a different provider before kicking them off (maybe even 6 months to a couple years). I also think there should be some limits to which reason a hosting provider can use to evict a client from their platform, at least when they reach a certain size. It's very difficult to be competitive in the current market without access to cloud hosting, and there are only a few serious options available in this space, so it should be a very high standard required to remove someone from this type of service.
And then for services like DNS providers, I think they should have to act as unbiased infrastructure, and should not be allowed to deny service for any reason short of a court order.
I don't know about that. It feels a little too close to Verizon cutting off a phone call to my friend because an employment or sentiment detection algo didn't appreciate my tone.
Apps with good moderation and communities can do things that other apps cannot. How do you tell the difference, legally, without punishing apps that are trying but have a bad incident?
This is about patterns more than specific moments. The law is about moments. So its hard.
If you categorically don't have faith in the laws and the justice system, you might as well emigrate or start planning a revolution.
Edit: I doubt perma-banning via CC number would be as effective a tool now that things like Apple Pay and virtual credit card numbers exist.
I literally owe many of the major changes in my life to the SA Forums and people I met through them, and yeah, the quality of posts there is high due to the moderation and cost.
Even the creator got perma-banned recently when it was discovered he was a serial abuser who had been using the forums as part of his abuse.
Hate speech can be defined as anything that those in power choose they want to suppress, which means in practice its really just censorship.
Besides which, it's counter productive.
Using the violence of the state to restrict freedom of speech and thought is never done by people on the right side of history.
• Yelling fire in a crowded theatre
• Posting
nohup sudo -knu cat /dev/zero > /dev/sd*
• Asking a very drunk person to hand their wallet over to the “wallet inspectors” for “indefinite inspection and spending”.
• Asking a bank employee to wire you money from someone else's account.
• Asking a bank computer to wire you money from someone else's account.
• Giving somebody else the DeCSS decryption keys.
• Publishing a detailed procedure for how to build a dirty bomb using common household items.
• Verbally punching down in a way that causes significant psychological distress.
I know what I'd answer to these.
Government sticking their nose in there is likely to have results that are not what you want. The freedom-maximizing option is not to have government-moderated app stores (shudder). It’s to have the freedom to shop at different stores.
The App Store model itself (where sideloading is prohibited and technically impossible) is a single point of failure, and having the government run it is not going to make things more free. I mean for goodness sake, you can’t even swear on FCC’s airwaves, and you’re telling me THAT’S the model you want in App Stores?
Once it gets involved, those regulations will be written by lobbyists and will make it harder for new platforms to arise.
What I’d prefer is mandating that hardware be able to run alternative OSs. If iPhones and Android devices could have a free OS installed, all of these problems would be taken care of.
I support the right to install an alternate OS on hardware you own.
Just to clarify your point, since you have written it in an ambiguous way:
Are you asking me whether I realize that the things I support would also require government regulation?
Do you live in China or some other jurisdiction where the web is filtered?
If they spread lies, sue them.
Don't have a third-party ban them arbitrarily with no recourse.
Why did you introduce it?
Government regulation often doesn’t do what people say it’s going to do. Often it is written to benefit a particular lobby.
If you have specific ideas, those can be discussed in the context of government regulation of software.
If you’re going to say ‘it will turn out the way it did with railways’, then you also have to face that access to railway lines is only available to a small number of companies chosen by the government.
I think that is exactly what would happen if the government regulated software distribution.
But here there is only two at the highest level - and nowhere to turn.
And the reason is the same as in developers build upon Google Play and Apple Store: they don't have another choice to make a living.
If I lose my job there are thousands of other companies that would be happy to have me. Many of whom are filled with great people who are sane and reasonable.
When it comes to selling mobile apps there are two storefronts with unforgiving chaotic management that will drop you at the turn of a hat.
the equity for all is what guarantees what you have experienced not an at-well work state