Cory Doctorow: ‘We do not have fast companies anymore’

I read Cory Doctorow's new book, and I like his ideas in the abstract. I think he overestimates the amount that the tech companies use the law to defend themselves, though.

There’s no technical reason you couldn’t use scrapers and bots, to pull in the posts from the people you follow and reply to them without really being a Twitter user. And the thing that stops us from doing that is that there are laws that allow Twitter to come after you and destroy you if you did.

There are many scrapers for services like Facebook. Most of them don't pay attention to the law. Facebook fights these by funding "site integrity" teams that intentionally break the compatibility for scraping tools.

The key difference here is between goods and services. When someone sells a physical good, like an IBM PC in the 1980's, they can't stop you from reverse engineering it. If you build something that works with it, the manufacturer doesn't have any options any more. The devices are "out in the wild".

For a service, like Facebook, the technical arms races work differently. If someone creates a popular extension that, for example, removes ads from your Facebook feed, a team of Facebook engineers will start working on breaking that extension. You can fix it again, they can break it again, this can just keep happening. As long as Facebook can spend more money to break your service than you can to fix it, your product will never really work smoothly.

This isn't to say that regulation is doomed. For example, requiring iPhones to use USB-C seems like it has clearly succeeded. The law to make phone numbers portable also seems to have succeeded. I just think that it will not work to simply "reset the law to neutral" like Doctorow imagines. If we want services like Facebook and Twitter to be open and interoperate, we need to have specific legal requirements.

For example, should an application be allowed to export your contacts' birthdays from a social media service? Their phone numbers? Should an application be allowed to export your entire social media posting history?

These aren't obvious questions to me - openness and privacy are often in conflict.

He's not wrong. Lockheed used to build U2 prototype that could fucking fly from ground up in 150 days with like 20 people? Now companies will build a 200-person team to build damn UI. Of course, I'm exaggerating, but that's the idea.

How is this guy still a thing?