Comment by nucleative | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nucleative | Hacker News Reader

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We really need an internet Bill of Rights. Google has too much power to delete your company from existence with no due process or recourse.

If any company controls some (high) percentage of a particular market, say web browsers, search, or e-commerce, or social media, the public's equal access should start to look more like a right and less like an at-will contract.

30 years ago, if a shop had a falling out with the landlord, it could move to the next building over and resume business. Now if you annoy eBay, Amazon or Walmart, you're locked out nationwide. If you're an Uber, Lyft, or Doordash (etc) gig worker and their bots decide they don't like you anymore, then sayonara sucker! Your account has been disabled, have a nice day and don't reapply.

Our regulatory structure and economies of scale encourage consolidation and scale and grant access to this market to these businesses, but we aren't protecting the now powerless individuals and small businesses who are randomly and needlessly tossed out with nobody to answer their pleas of desperation, no explanation of rules broken, and no opportunity to appeal with transparency.

It's a sorry state of affairs at the moment.

I know someone with a small business that applied for Venmo Business account (which is the main payment method in their community industry) and Venmo refused to open the account and didn't provide any reason as to why saying that they have the right to choose to refuse providing the service, which they do. But all the competitors of that business in the area do have a Venmo and take payment this way so it is basically a revenue loss for that person.

It's a bit frustrating when a company becomes a major player in an industry and can have a life and death sentence on other businesses.

There are alternative payment method but people are use to pay a certain way in that industry/area, similarly there are other browsers but people are used to Chrome.

Same thing with Paypal - I opened a business account, was able to do one transaction and was shut down for fraud. I tested a donation to myself. Under $10. Lifetime ban.

fuck paypal

That’s not unique to PayPal. Pretty much any payment processor that detects a proprietor paying themselves is going to throw up a red flag for circular cash flow fraud and close the account. Bank-operated payment processors are often slower to catch it, but they will also boot you for this.

real payment processors also you just call on the phone and they fix it. That's not a real problem. we do test orders on many go lives per year and never see this. Yes there are sandboxes, but you always gotta test real transactions by the end.

Ok - but maybe tell me that? They won't officially tell me anything or let me talk to a person. Form email every time.

At the time I didn't have a better way to test that my form worked.

Here clown world is going strong too. My bank bans me every time I pay taxes.

My bank displays me a popup warning me to check who I'm sending money to every time I make a transfer. If I've made that same transfer before, after showing that, it's also telling me that it won't ask for 2FA for this transfer, because I've made it so many times before.

High quality or even medium quality software and UX is getting harder and harder to find.

I sold some camera equipment on eBay once. PayPal flagged my account as fraudulent, asked for a receipt for the equipment which I did not have (I bought it years before), so they banned my account indefinitely.

Randomly, years later, they turned it back on. Thanks, I guess?

They want to make money off your transactions again I guess. Must get more from Ebay

Fuck PayPal.

Fwiw Venmo is run by the same thugs who run PayPal. So go figure.

Yup. Both bad companies IMO

Force interoperability. In 2009 I could run Pidgin and load messages from AIM, FB Messages, Yahoo... Where did that go?

I suspect the EU will be the first region to push the big tech companies on this.

Or enforce antitrust.

As firearm enthusiasts like to say, "Enforce the laws we already have".

We need to fix the jurisprudence around anti-trust.

> No person engaged in commerce or in any activity affecting commerce shall acquire, directly or indirectly, the whole or any part of the stock or other share capital and no person subject to the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission shall acquire the whole or any part of the assets of another person engaged also in commerce or in any activity affecting commerce, where in any line of commerce or in any activity affecting commerce in any section of the country, the effect of such acquisition may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly.

Taken at face value, that would forbid companies from buying any large competitors unless the competitor is already failing. Somehow that got watered down into almost nothing.

The issue is that current law around monopolies defines them from the wrong angle.

Instead of taking a consumer-centric / competition perspective, they should be defined in terms of market share (with markets broadly defined from a consumer perspective).

>10% = some minimal interoperability and reporting requirements

>25% = serious interoperability requirements

>35% = severe and audited interoperability requirements, with a method for gaps to be proposed by competitors, with the end goal of making increasing market share past this point difficult

Close the "but it's free to consumers (because we monetize them in other ways)" loophole that every 90s+ internet business used: instead focus on ensuring competition as measured by market share.

well exactly, Verizon, Amazon, etc all LOVE more regulation. they have armies of lawyers who not only help in constructing the laws, they help pass, lobby and implement them. then the same law firms help amazon, verizon, etc execute it.

It's regulatory capture

now a small competitor wants to do something like get into the wifi game and they're look at huge fixed fees to get started.

I think 00s+ tech history has demonstrated that the free market is no longer sufficient to promote healthy competition.

Partly a consequence of the biggest tech firms getting bigger.

And partly because of newfound technical ability to achieve mass lock-in (e.g. vendor-controlled encryption, TPMs, vertical integration in platforms, first-party app stores, etc).

The 'but regulatory capture' counter argument rings hollow when the government has given the market a lighter monopoly regulatory touch... and we've ended up with a more concentrated, less competitive market than when it was more heavily regulated.

Fixed fees are nothing.

If you want to make electronics with any complexity, you'll suddenly discover that you need to pay patent fees. And those come as a fixed share of your revenue. Add enough complexity and you can easily be required to pay more than 100% of your revenue in fees.

Looks like market share is not a concern anymore: when one participant adopts a dark pattern others follow, because then consumer has nowhere to go. What Orwell called it, collectivist oligarchy?

In 2025 you can use Beeper (or run your own local Matrix server with the opensource bridges) and get the same result with WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Discord, Google Messages, etc. etc.

You'd have to break most of those platforms' TOS to do so.

That's always been the case. Jailbreaking your phone is also breaking TOS. Sideloading apps on iPhone by using the developer features is breaking TOS. Almost anything that gives a corporation less money or control over you is against that corporation's TOS. That's not the law, though, and we need to grow a collective spine.

... It's a lot easier to have a spine about risking getting banned from a service if getting banned from that service wouldn't destroy your life.

Was Pidgin TOS-compliant back in the day? I'm a young whippersnapper, so I don't have experience with it myself.

Well it did have to change its name from GAIM to Pidgin at some point because it infringed on "AIM" by AOL. And whether or not Pidgin was fully "TOS-compliant" (which it might have been depending on the service we'd be looking at) is not as relevant as whether these terms would have been actually legally enforceable or not.

That was due to a trademark violation and nothing to do with TOS.

We (Pidgin/Gaim/Finch/libpurple) have never been TOS compliant.

isn't beeper non-free? there aren't that many decent matrix bridges.

All the Beeper bridges are open source and self hostable: https://github.com/beeper

The project is still alive and we're trying to finish our next major version to be able to better support modern protocols and features.

We do monthly updates on the status of the project that we call State of the Bird and they can be found here https://discourse.imfreedom.org/tag/state-of-the-bird.

Remind me (in a millenium or two) when you can finally do XMPP MAM + message carbons. Until then: lol

> I suspect the EU will be the first region to push the big tech companies on this.

Supposedly, DMA should enforce this already.

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-announces-next-st...

Haven't heard much about it lately though.

Your Pidgin example isn't even real interoperability - you still needed real AIM, FB and Yahoo accounts for that.

> 2009 I could run Pidgin and load messages from AIM, FB Messages, Yahoo... Where did that go?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBcY3W5WgNU

But seriously; the internet is now overrun with AI Slop, Spam, and automated traffic. To try to do something about it requires curation, somebody needs to decide what is junk, which is completely antithetical to open protocols. This problem is structurally unsolvable, there is no solution, there's either a useless open internet or a useful closed one. The internet is voting with Cloudflare, Discord, Facebook, to be useful, not open. The alternative is trying to figure out how to run a decentralized dictatorship that only allows good things to happen; a delusion.

The only other solution is accountability, a presence tied to your physical identity; so that an attacker cannot just create 100,000 identities from 25,000 IP addresses and smash your small forum with them. That's an even less popular idea, even though it would make open systems actually possible. Building your own search engine or video platform would be super easy, barely an inconvenience. No need for Cloudflare if the police know who every visitor is. No need for a spam filter, if the government can enforce laws perfectly.

Take a look at email, the mother of all open protocols (older than HTTP). What happened? Radical recentralization to companies that had effective spam management, and now we on HN complain we can't break through, someone needs to do something about that centralization, so that we can go back to square one where people get spammed to death again, which will inevitably repeat the discretion required -> who has the best discretion -> flee there cycle. Go figure.

I run an email server with no specific spam filter. Sometimes I get spam. Then I add a filter on my end to delete it and move on. It's nowhere near as bad as people proclaim. Neither is deliverability, for that matter, even after I forgot to set an SPF record and some random internet server sent a bunch of spam on my behalf (which I know because I got the bounces).

You have a dirt path to your house and are therefore convinced the interstate highway system should allow direct residential driveways.

Gmail processes 376 billion emails per day. At that volume, even 0.1% spam getting through is 376 million messages. However, we're not talking about 0.1%, but 45.6% of email being spam globally. For Gmail, that's 171 billion spam messages daily. Congrats that your private server works at your scale. It's completely irrelevant, and only works because bad actors don't care about it.

Imagine though, if we even accepted spam culturally and handled it individually, as per your solution. That would mean spam can get through with brute force, which it can't right now, meaning that 45.6% would probably explode closer to 90%, 95%, or more overnight. It's only manageable at 45.6% for you because Gmail's spam filters are working overtime harming the economics.

Why should curation be centralized? We do not need a "decentralized dictatorship" (what would that even be? that's antithetical) and we certainly do not need a centralized one. It seems crazy that your solutions to AI, spam, and "automated traffic" (I don't know what that is, I assume web crawlers and such) is that the police control every single transaction.

First off, we can simply let the user, or client software, choose. Why should we let centralized servers do that by default?

At scale, DNS is somewhat centralized but authorities are disconnected from internet providers and web browsers. They're the best actors to regulate this.

For mail, couldn't we come up with a mail-DNS, that authenticates senders? There could be different limits based on whether you are an individual or a company, and whether you're sending 10'000 emails or just 100.

Regardless of whether these are good solutions -- why jump to extreme ones? "TINA" is not a helpful argument, it's a slogan.

> For mail, couldn't we come up with a mail-DNS, that authenticates senders?

So RFC 7672? https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7672

I have no knowledge of DANE but its reliance on DNSSEC makes me worried that it would be difficult for people to adopt it.

Also, I think it solves a different problem: it prevents spoofing/MITM but what about legitimate certificates? We would still need CAs that actually curate their customers and hold them accountable. And we would need email servers/clients to differentiate between strict CAs and ones that are used solely for encryption purposes.

I don't know that DNS should be applied to emails as is anyway but I find it could force spammers to operate with publicly available information which would make holding them accountable easier.

> I have no knowledge of DANE but its reliance on DNSSEC makes me worried that it would be difficult for people to adopt it.

It's not hard to set up DNSSEC as long as your DNS server software supports it and most people don't run their own authorative DNS servers anyway.

Uh huh.

https://ianix.com/pub/dnssec-outages.html

So the solution to AI slop and spam is end of anonymity and total state control of the internet? Talk about the cure being worse than the disease.

The issues with todays internet stem specifically from the centralisation of power in the hands of Google, Apple and the social networks.

Bad search results? Blame Google's monopoly incentivising them intentionally making their results worse.

Difficulty promoting or finding events? Blame Facebooks real revenue model - preventing one to many communications by default and charging for exceptions.

AI overrun with slop? Blame OpenAI and Facebook, both of whom are actively promoting and profiting from the creation of slop.

Automated traffic slowing down sites? It's often the AI companies indexing and reindexing hundreds of times.

Spam? Not a huge issue for anyone that I'm aware of.

The closed internet platforms are the problem. Forcing them to relinquish control over handsets, data and our interpersonal connections is the solution. It will be legislative, or it will be torches to the data centres, likely both. But it is coming.

I completely disagree.

> The issues with todays internet stem specifically from the centralisation of power in the hands of Google and the social networks.

> Bad search results? Blame Google's monopoly incentivising them intentionally making their results worse.

> Difficulty promoting or finding events? Blame Facebooks real revenue model - preventing one to many communications by default and charging for exceptions.

You're misdiagnosing what happened here. These aren't diseases. These are symptoms that the more open internet, that we had in the early 2000s, completely failed at scale. The disease was the predictable failure of an open system to self-moderate, the symptoms the centralization that followed. You're mistaking effect for cause.

People started using Google, because it was the only tool good enough at digging through manure. Facebook started charging for mass communication, because otherwise, everyone has an excuse why they need to use it. Cloudflare became popular, because the internet didn't care when 40% of traffic was bots, half of them malicious, before AI was even on the scene. And so on.

The open system failed, and was becoming unusable. Big Tech arrived offering proprietary solutions as CPR. They didn't cause the death.

> To try to do something about it requires curation, somebody needs to decide what is junk, which is completely antithetical to open protocols.

The contra-example, of course, is email. SpamAssassin figured this out 24 years (!) ago. There is zero reason you couldn't apply similar heuristics to detect AI-slop or whatever particular kind of content you don't want to accept.

> Radical recentralization to companies that had effective spam management

Only for the lazy.

A. SpamAssassin has never been tested at Gmail scale, and would likely fail in such a scenario.

B. SpamAssassin is benefiting from centralized players, like Gmail, harming spam's economics. You're a free rider from the onslaught that would occur if spamming actually worked. Spam is at 45.6% of email globally with aggressive spam filters, but could easily double, triple, quadruple in volume if filters started failing even moderately. Weaker filters, and we'll start seeing the email DDoS for the first time.

C. Heuristics on AI Content? What are you going to do, run an "AI Detector" model on a GPU for every incoming email? 376 billion of them every day to Gmail alone? This only makes the email DDoS even more likely.

D. Lazy = 99%+ of global computer users - and that's changing as soon as everyone becomes their own paramedic. If you can't convince most people to learn how to save other people's lives, and probably didn't bother yourself, despite it being disproportionately more important, you're never teaching them technical literacy.

I think you misunderstand what I'm getting at. SpamAssassin is older than Gmail. It's an old example, much newer and better spam-filtering-at-scale solutions exist (although SA is still maintained). Trying to claim that only the big boys can filter spam is an uninformed opinion.

No, you don't need an AI model to detect AI content (lmao). Heuristics already exist, and you see people mention them online all the time -- excessive use of lists, em dashes, common phrases, etc. Yes, a basic text heuristic scorer from the 1980s can pick these up without much difficulty. The magic of auto-learning heuristics (which have also existed since the 1980s, and performed fine at scale with less processing power than your smartwatch) is you can train them on whatever content you don't want to receive: marketing, political content, etc. You can absolutely apply this to whatever content suits your fancy, and it doesn't really take any more effort than moving messages you want filtered out to a Junk folder or similar.

They're too busy trying to strip encryption to do anything

It’s almost as if those companies have country like powers.

Maybe they should be subject to same limitations like First Amendment etc.

The solution is just to enforce the anti-trust act as it is written.

As long as wealth can be transduced into political power, that boat is beached as

FWIW in some jurisdictions you might be able to sue them for tortious interference, which basically means they went out of their way to hurt your business.

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