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Comment by akersten | Hacker News Reader

A ban? Fine, whatever, their house their rules.

A cease and desist for making a browser extension that automates a process that any user could themselves do with no special "hacking" required? Absolutely absurd, I hope there is no legal basis for this threat.

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> Fine, whatever, their house their rules

When they are the de facto form of communication for a significant percentage of the population, it starts to go from "their rules" territory to "society's rules".

Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines?

> Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines?

Yes, actually. It was illegal to connect any equipment beside Bell's equipment to the US telephone system. Not only would you be disconnected and possibly fined by your phone provider for doing so, but American law also made it illegal to sell such devices as well for use on the phone network. If you wanted to use an answering machine not sold by Bell, you had to get it custom rewired by Bell and pay a monthly rental fee for the privilege:

> AT&T, citing the Communications Act of 1934, which stated in part that the company had the right to make changes and dictate "the classifications, practices, and regulations affecting such charges," claimed the right to "forbid attachment to the telephone of any device 'not furnished by the telephone company.'"

> Initially, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled in AT&T's favor. It found that the device was a "foreign attachment" subject to AT&T control and that unrestricted use of the device could, in the commission's opinion, result in a general deterioration of the quality of telephone service.

It was challenged and the seller of the amplifier device ultimately won in federal court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S... (Even then, you couldn't actually electronically connect a device, you could only acoustically couple it. Direct connection of modems wouldn't be legal until the 1980s.)

> Even then, you couldn't actually electronically connect a device, you could only acoustically couple it. Direct connection of modems wouldn't be legal until the 1980s.

In the late 90s, I remember watching the scenes in WarGames (which came out in 1983) where Matthew Broderick's character is using a modem where you had to place the phone cradle on top of it and thinking why would you ever design a modem that way?

And of course the reason was to work around this stupidity.

https://youtu.be/zb1r_uKOew4?t=49

I didn't know this was the case. Interesting!

From [1]

> It was not until a landmark U.S. court ruling regarding the Hush-A-Phone in 1956 that the use of a phone attachment (by a third party vendor) was allowed for the first time; though AT&T's right to regulate any device connected to the telephone system was upheld by the courts, they were instructed to cease interference towards Hush-A-Phone users. A second court decision in 1968 regarding the Carterfone further allowed any device not harmful to the system to be connected directly to the AT&T network. This decision enabled the proliferation of later innovations like answering machines, fax machines, and modems.

From [2]:

> After the ruling, it was still illegal to connect some equipment to the AT&T network. For example, modems could not electronically connect to the phone system. Instead, Americans had to connect their modems mechanically by attaching a phone receiver to an acoustic coupler via suction cups.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S...

Acoustic couplers also existed because most homes were pre modular phone jacks and the phones were connected with screw taps.

It's not entirely stupidity. Acoustic modems also made sense for portability. Reporters in the 80s used to use things like TRS-80 Model 100 + an Acoustic modem to send stories back to the office over public telephones rather than have to hunt down a phone jack somewhere.

Australian here. I remember that scene, and I’ve always wondered what that was about too. I was using modems in the mid 90s and I never saw anything like that cradle device! Thankyou. That makes horrible, awful sense to me now.

Yeah, looks like acoustic couplers were mostly a seventies thing

+1 and this mentality persisted all the way through the Lucent bankruptcy, prior to which their business model was to sue everyone who had ever talked on a phone, right on up to the previous presidential administration which involved trying to place former telco execs on FCC regulatory boards to rewrite rules which aren't really rules.

But what they don't address is that HBOMax is already the worst streaming app on my TV, and therefore it doesn't matter how much money AT&T throws at politics. Their stuff sucks because they're AT&T, not because of some political misfortune.

the existing AT&T is not the previous AT&T.

edit: sources

* Current AT&T: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T

* Old AT&T: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Corporation

* History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_AT%26T

The existing AT&T is just a zombie formed from 5 of the original 8 fragments of the old AT&T. I can’t help but wonder how many former coworkers at AT&T in 1981 where reunited in 2014 without ever having left the fragments.

At least some of the fragments were doing a lot of pushing out of older employees in the 2000s, so probably not a whole lot left, but I like the concept.

No, it's the previous AT&T with some parts factored out (most notably, Verizon). It also apparently managed to remerge several parts of itself over the years, which is mind boggling (how that didn't trigger immediate court action is beyond me): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

Oh but it is. Culture doesn't tend to change, particularly with ridiculous "rebranding" exercises.

Sounds like you can imagine the law permitting something horrific & ghastly.

I too can imagine that. But the restraints the law allowed to be imposed on our freedom sound absurd, sound outlandish to me now. We were in a situation that de-legitimizes the law & the legal system, and eventually we fixed that.

> Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines?

Also, it was illegal to sell connecting equipment, sure, but AT&T didn't go nearly as far as what we see today. They didn't do anything this bad. The question posed wasn't about the legality or ability to interoperate, to make devices.

The question was about the reprecussion. Hush-A-Phone & other companies did not have their corporate phone numbers dropped, did not lose their ability to make phone calls when the started making a device AT&T didn't like. AT&T took them to court & tried to get them to stop making devices, but they didn't retaliate by kicking their corporate entity off the network. AT&T also didn't search for people using the phone system to talk about using other means of communication & kick them off the phone network (something we've seen repeatedly, recently with Mastodon, although those policies may/may not have been improved recently). Facebook is acting far more like a bully than AT&T did, in my view.

> It was illegal to connect any equipment beside Bell's equipment to the US telephone system.

Right, but IIRC Bell was considered a common carrier.

That means Bell could enforce this because they already had to give equal play on their network. Facebook is not and does not.

Facebook wants to think it is

I said 40 years for a reason ;) But yes, those laws were horrible, and stifled innovation.

>> It was illegal to connect any equipment beside Bell's equipment to the US telephone system. Not only would you be disconnected and possibly fined by your phone provider for doing so, but American law also made it illegal to sell such devices as well for use on the phone network.

Which is the exact thing which gave rise to phone phreaking and getting around the limitations on Bell Systems.

"Exploding The Phone" by Phil Lapsley is a great book that examines these early hackers:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-invisible-playground...

Right, the point wasn't whether you can literally imagine that happening. The point is that it's obviously bad.

> It was illegal

It wasn’t an arbitrary choice by a private company. That’s a big difference.

A stupid rule by a highly regulated monopoly is very different from a stupid rule by an unregulated monopoly (maybe member of oligopoly).

A fascinating bit of innovative, entrepreneureal, hacking, technological, telephonic, monopolistic, and criminal history.

Independent inventor convicted and gaoled by AT&T for "misdemeanor attachment", the crime of attaching non-AT&T equipment to AT&T's phone network.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_L._Shaw

More on this in the first bit of "The Inventor and the Thief" on Snap Judgement:

https://snapjudgment.org/episode/the-inventor-and-the-thief-...

Directly-connected modems were an obvious threat to AT&T as this would enable high-bandwidth packet-based distribution over AT&T's network, including ultimately what we know as VOIP. AT&T fought packet-switched networks from the start:

Paul Baran: The one hurdle packet switching faced was AT&T. They fought it tooth and nail at the beginning. They tried all sorts of things to stop it. They pretty much had a monopoly in all communications. And somebody from outside saying that there’s a better way to do it of course doesn’t make sense.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/07/internet200807

But they didn't ban the seller from using the phone system, they banned people from attaching a different machine to the system. That's like the Facebook trying to detect the extension and trying to block it. That's similar to some websites blocking ad blockers, while it would not go down well with Facebook users I think it's very different to what Facebook does here.

I wonder how much of the ban was from concern of poorly regulated voltage related device damage. Now at least FCC regulations alone protect against the worst because anything that cheap also tends to output significant noise on reserved spectrum(s).

Yeah, I always defend there should be a "law of scale". When you start making your own project, taking a risk, spending hours and hours working on something, it's fair for a single individual to have the right to make any calls in what they are doing. But when it expands to thousands of workers and millions of users (or even much, much less), your responsibilities and reach can not be the same anymore. Saying "I built it" is no justification. The growth and the contributions that are making something possible, users included, do not support the logic of "my house my rules" anymore.

This wasn't particularly related to this specific case, and visions and missions of companies should still be respected, but society does have a very warped concept of "property" when it involves their work or ideas.

Facebook isn't a monopoly, as evidenced by their recent outage resulting in 70M new Telegram users overnight.

Even so, as others have pointed out, the telcos did have arguably reasonable restrictions placed on what one could connect to the network.

But to put glorified web sites in the same class as government-sanctioned monopolies utilities tend to necessarily be is asinine. Your telco had to run physical wires across the land, gas company physical pipes everywhere, there was no practical means of a free competitive market, it's a completely different situation.

Nah. Nobody needs to use FB to communicate, there are many dozens of available communication platforms, you can't even sign up for FB without a phone number anyway, this idea that FB is some critical communication infrastructure is totally false.

For some countries Facebook, Instagram and WhatApp are the internet. Official entities and company use them as the only form of communication with the citizens and customers.

Sure, this exists, but it's extremely rare, it's more of a talking point than an accurate representation of reality.

It maybe few countries but many users

This argument gives the platforms more credit than they're worth. It's been obvious for half a decade that social media is bad for mental health. I've cut it out of my life. I tell others to cut it out of their life. No one's under the impression that these platforms are good for anything. They're popular now, but they are not important.

Cigarettes are obviously bad for people's individual health, but we don't rely on individual responsibility to ensure children don't purchase themselves cigarettes.

I cut facebook out of my life almost 5 years ago before it was "cool" to do so. Its like junk food or cigarettes or anything else that is net bad for a person. I would say let people decide for themselves if they want to use it and you hope they make the smart choice of just saying no to facebook and all its toxicity that comes with it.

> they are not important

They are important because they contain a significant portion of many people's address books. When Facebook was offline a few days ago, I had no way of reaching about two thirds of my contacts. And I'm someone who's made a significant effort to move off of Facebook. There were people I wanted to contact that day that the only way to reach them would have been to ask mutual friends for other contact details. And there were a few people that I either don't have mutual friends with or who our mutual friends were also only reachable via Facebook. If legislation aims for some form of "interoperability" the main condition should be that, if Facebook were to disappear again, I would still have the ability to reach all of my Facebook contacts via another network.

I loathe Facebook and am hesitant to take its side on any issue. But if you cannot be bothered to ask your "contacts" for a phone number, email address, Telegram, whatever, I don't see why it is Facebook's responsibility to ensure you have access to these people 24/7.

That's a social issue, not a Facebook one. Interoperability is an insane ask that has absolutely no precedent, and I say that as one of the biggest FOSS enthusiasts this side of the Mississippi. There's simply no way that the United States government could force a private company's hand like that, and even if they did the fallout from that would be insane. Where do we stop with interoperability? Do all browsers need to share the same history storage format? Do all cloud storage providers need to use the same app? Do all of us need to use the same operating system, communication protocols and news outlets?

No, because we're different people. Some people are drawn to Facebook's firehose feed, and there's not really anything you can do to stop them in a free world. It's a disgusting, albeit perfectly legal exchange of goods and services. Microsoft and Apple fought long and hard to make sure consumer protection laws like that never saw the light of day.

>When they are the de facto form of communication for a significant percentage of the population, it starts to go from "their rules" territory to "society's rules".

Facebook is nowhere near the de facto form of communication for a significant percentage of the population, as evidenced by the fact that the world didn't crash to a halt when it went down a few days ago. It's merely popular, but being popular doesn't mean it controls society or dictates its rules.

>Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines?

That would be a valid comparison of Facebook owned the infrastructure of the internet, but they don't. It's trivially easy to communicate without Facebook.

lol, ma bell did exactly this and more.

There are multiple other ways to contact people. I haven't used facebook in almost a decade and have zero issue communicating with people

If you do not like the rules set by them, you can always build your own social network.

This is like saying if you don't like the rules you can build your own multinational telephone network. There's a reason telecoms are subject to common carrier rules and I don't see why tech monopolies should be any different.

The crucial difference is lack of a right of way. The thing which creates an actual monopoly instead of the language degradation of monopoly to mean "But it is big and I don't like it!".

My understanding of common carrier rules is that they want to avoid a situation where a railroad or telephone operator who controlled the only available line could charge exorbitant rates to customers who had no alternatives. I don't really see how the same concern is true for Facebook - we have lots of options to disseminate information online.

I think you are seriously and intentionally misunderstanding the point. So far it was completely fine for Facebook to ban whoever they wanted and it was justified by them being a private company. Anybody who complained about it was told that they can build their own social network/cloud provider/payment provider.

Somehow now this is bad... Ridiculous.

It's fine if you're a small or medium size business that commands at most single digit % of the market. Facebook dominates ad spending and reach to the point that you can't just build your own, because they have a de facto monopoly/oligopoly over digital ads.

Let me ask you this: do you think Apple should be allowed to ban whoever they want from their platform justified by them being a private company? If you say no, then you should also say no to Facebook being allowed to do so. Otherwise you're just twisting the facts to support your political position.

Different people on the Internet will say different things. You can't really assign one collective motive to everything on the Internet and then say it's hypocritical.

Facebook is a utility that should be nationalized - it has grown too big.

> Facebook is a utility that should be nationalized - it has grown too big.

This can't happen to utility monopolies:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/06/telegram-says-...

If your claim were true, everyone would just be stuck suffering and beholden to Facebook's ability to fix their service for lack of options.

> Facebook is a utility

hardly.

And your own social network will fail because of network effects. If Facebook can be as terrible as they have been and retain their users, it's really because of their users that they're being propped up with a successful business. I gotta say at that point even I start thinking they owe their users more than a free market exchange would imply.

Not to mention we're talking about them sending a pretty formal legal threat. Would you philosophy in this case not be "if you don't like their browser extension, don't use it?"

> network effects

If you're building a new social network today, it makes sense to tap into an existing social graph so you can bootstrap your network with an existing ecosystem. Michelle Lim made a great case for this in her post here:

https://www.michellelim.org/writing/into-the-fediverse/

These protocols exist today. This is a W3C recommendation as of 2018-01-23:

https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-activitypub-20180123/

> And your own social network will fail because of network effects

Speak for yourself. Not everything needs to be 'planet scale', I run a few social networks and they do just fine.

And I agree with Facebook in this case, if you have someone come into your house with the sole intent of burning it down, of course you're going to kick them out. It's no different than dealing with trolls or other bad actors.

Burning down Facebook? What on Earth are you talking about? It makes it easier for users to remove their own accounts across multiple services. It's a common interface to features the social networks themselves provide. This is the opposite of a bad actor.

Fun argument, now try asking Apple why they're against Jailbreaks if they "technically provide the same services the phone could already do"?

I certainly think the same argument applies, FWIW - I don't think Apple is being reasonable if they ban people from services for fixing their own devices or other people's devices. Not sure if you were implying I would feel differently about that instance.

If you don't like the rules of English you can always invent your own language - sure you won't be able to talk to anyone but isn't that freedom enough?

If you don't like this privte outrage, just ignore it or start your own

All these large technology platforms are as ubiquitous as utilities, as powerful as governments, and as unregulated as can be. Their network effects and access to capital gives them unusually strong protection from competition, and also the ability to just copy smaller competitors with impunity. After all, what legal action could a cash-tight startup take up against a behemoth with a war chest in the tens of billions of Dollars? Given their size, scope, and the lack of healthy competition, they need to be reigned in. We need to treat social media platforms like we treat telecom services - as common carriers. And we need to treat other large tech platforms as public utilities as well.

Clarence Thomas on treating social media as common carriers: https://reclaimthenet.org/justice-clarance-thomas-big-tech-p...

Eugene Volokh on treating social media as common carriers: https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/16/conclusion-social-media...

The full cease and desist is posted here: https://louisbarclay.notion.site/Unfollow-Everything-cease-a...

It’s not strictly about automating API requests. He was also using Facebook’s trademarks (easy target for valid C&D requests). He was also using the plugin to collect data from users, including some very detailed data for a subset that opted in to a study. Facebook doesn’t take kindly to people making extensions that use their trademarks and collect user data, no matter how trivial.

>Facebook doesn’t take kindly to people making extensions that ... collect user data, no matter how trivial.

The hypocrisy here is absolutely hilarious.

> He was also using Facebook’s trademarks

Seems like the only potentially legally valid part of it. And even then, if he's not misrepresenting his product as made by Facebook (just "compatible with Facebook" or "use while you're on Facebook") I think it's still a stretch. Can a cottage industry survive without ever being allowed to even name the companion products for which the extension is designed?

To my understanding, the original purpose of trademarks was to protect the buyer. If I buy a bicycle listed as being from X, I can expect that it was manufactured by X, or at the very least endorsed by X (e.g. Kirkland products). If a different manufacturer Y labels their product as X, then I no longer have that certainty.

But corporations have taken that and gone way too far on it. If I describe a product as being "compatible with X" or "fits on an X", that in no way makes a claim that it is manufactured by X. Like how tv manufacturers should be able to say "Perfect for watching the Super Bowl this weekend.", but avoid doing so for fear of being sued. There's no endorsement at all there, nor any dilution of the trademark, and yet it gets treated as though the words themselves are protected.

I believe it is an implicit "you make them look shoddy" if your product doesn't work after they change something. Self-produced ones at least they can check for backward compatibility but they have no way of guaranteeing any of their changes would break any fly-by-night or obscure adaptors.

Rather overkill in practice for a legal doctrine. But I can see their concern, and why a company would dislike it over the sheer tech support call volume alone. Their first response being "stop it!" makes sense in that light.

Open standards are a good way to prevent issues while keeping both sides happy (notably it also keeps company names out of it except in deniablenways such as say listing GMail as an example of a POP3 user - it doesn't equate the two). Open standards aren't automatic or free though and there may easily be gaps because they never thought to specify a given portion for interoperability.

He was also using Facebook’s trademarks...

There's a distinct difference between using a trademarked term descriptively vs. in trade. The phrase "for Facebook" is clearly the former.

I'll note that on the Mozilla Firefox Extensions site, there are presently 1,305 results for the term "Facebook", the first of which ... is from Mozilla itself, "Facebook Container", by Mozilla Firefox.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=facebook

The Facebook Container page doesn't even include the usual trademark-infringement-bane I was going to suggest, "'Facebook' is a trademark of Facebook, Inc. Any and all other trademarks are properties of their respective owners."

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...

Google Play's store doesn't provide the helpful results counts Mozilla's does (perhaps Mozilla could provide Google assistance with online search technology), but does reveal a wealth of third-party entries referencing Facebook.

https://play.google.com/store/search?q=facebook

FB's and P&C's action here doesn't pass muster as casual enforcement of trademark claims.

(The prospect of genericising "Facebook" on the basis of this fact ... would be interesting.)

The user-data collection was truly de minimis; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28806696

> A copy of each and every version of any software code You have developed or used to interact with the Facebook websites and/or services, including any libraries, frameworks, ...

Couldn't one maliciously comply with this particular order? Especially 'used to interact with', which could be interpreted as 'used in the process of development to interact with'. I feel like if I were them, I would in this case send a whole copy of the Linux source code (seeing my PC runs it); Chromium (to 'interact' with Facebook); WebKit (or similar browser-side dependencies that your extension somehow interacts with) etc. Not forgetting to send every version of the aforementioned software!

Might be bending the rules just a bit (/s), but hey, at least I'm on the safe side by including absolutely everything!

What if they don't reply WITHIN 48 HOURS? It's a big decision to take, would a judge later down the road look at this in any way?

IANAL. You probably know this already, but C&D's are not legal documents - just scare tactics. The result from ignoring it for >48hrs would simply be Facebook escalating... if they decided to.

I have worked for places that have completely ignored C&D's with no repercussions.

That being said, Facebook can use this down the road as an example of them providing ample warning and notice to the developer – which, yes, is something that a judge would consider. There just aren't, say, specific legal outcomes to ignoring this C&D's (totally arbitrary) timeframe.

> I hope there is no legal basis for this threat

Does that really matter? If a malicious company like Facebook wants to ruin your life and drown you in lawsuits, they are able to do so. By the time it is determined that the person under attack by Facebook is actually in the right, the damage will be done.

If there is a legal basis for this threat, I guess most browser extensions are at risk.

It’s probably because extension was recording usage of Facebook. They are cracking down on any type of user data collection even with user consent. Which is ironic but in some way makes sense to avoid another Cambridge Analytica.

Edit: to clarify confusion, author of the extension worked with university to collect user data to use for study: https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...

I imagine it's more so, at least according to the article as well, that this extension is automating user interactions.

As an example of automated user interactions: It's clearly not allowed to use an extension that will automatically follow on Instagram in order to increase your follower count.

Sadly, although this extension should morally be categorized differently, it falls into the same category per their rules — automatically following is treated the same as automatically unfollowing. (In fact, a common feature of automatic follower bots is to automatically unfollow afterwards).

No, the letter is here: https://louisbarclay.notion.site/Unfollow-Everything-cease-a.... It's because the extension "automates actions on Facebook". Why do you say it was recording usage?

The author of the extension admits he worked with university to collect user data for some study: https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28806696

Since you linked to the Slate article, let's quote it directly:

A few months after I published Unfollow Everything, academics at the University of Neuchâtel, in Switzerland, expressed interest in using it to study the News Feed’s impact on the amount of time spent on Facebook and the happiness of the platform’s users. We began working together. The university recruited people to join two study groups: one where participants deleted their News Feeds using Unfollow Everything and a control group where participants left their feeds intact. Participants agreed to share limited and anonymous information—specifically, the amount of time they spent on Facebook, the number of times they visited the site, and the number of friends, groups, and pages they were following and not following, both in total and broken down by category. (For regular Unfollow Everything users, the only Facebook-related data shared was the ratio of followed profiles to total profiles, a metric that helped me ensure the tool was working.)

Again: For regular Unfollow Everything users, the only Facebook-related data shared was the ratio of followed profiles to total profiles, a metric that helped me ensure the tool was working.

https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...

The "data sharing" claim, which you've repeated several times in this thread, is as bogus as any other FB have proposed.

With the disclaimer that I haven't looked too closely into it - that does make things sound a little sketchier from a user privacy perspective. I probably wouldn't use the extension myself. I'm still curious how Facebook has standing just because data is being recorded about the user's browsing which happens to include (maybe exclusively) their website. Most browser extensions are capable of exfiltrating page content - are they all in target for FB to say "nah, we don't like that" on behalf of someone who goes to facebook.com with the extension installed? I would think (hope) not.

Given the numerous other claims and demands made in P&C's C&D, why not specifically include such a claim, if merited.

It would certainly read far more charitably toward FB on HN, in US Senate and House hearings, and at the FTC, FCC, and DoJ.

But that's just me.

Facebook is an ad platform. The guy wrote a plugin that removes their ability to display ads. Now he's banned. It's pretty straightforward.

It's probably for using the Facebook name or logo.

They could even potentially argue that the names of the "unfollow" buttons and associated URL's (which are in the code of the extension) are copyright facebook. The source code has things like:

    getElementsByClassName("oi732d6d ik7dh3pa d2edcug0 qv66sw1b

Which are very much on dodgy ground...

Even a very weak legal argument is enough to win when you're fighting someone who doesn't have the budget or desire to even show up in the courtroom.

those element names have no creative attributes, and i would argue those individual element names do not constitute a copyrightable work.

The contents of the page (including the source code) is the copyrighted work.

Not so fast. What if you bought games in the Oculus store? You can't just ban someone and remove his access to paid software because of a browser extension. What about my computer, my browser my rules?

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