such12

Again, a macroeconomic analysis with no explanation of how this is relevant.

> You say I should not be silly but I can believe what I like. Which is it?

They aren’t mutually exclusive.

> The government does not “own assets” on paper but it has a whole lot of influence over agency

Feel free to believe that your agency is under government control.

I agree. I have no argument against this.

Nobody is forced to use gmail as a provider. Remember it’s a free service with less commitment to you than a pay as you go mobile phone.

Anyone can buy their own domain and there are many providers who will provide email service.

I’m aware of Parler, but are there other examples?

> I'm pretty sure this is a carrier feature that hasn't been standardised.

So not actually part of what it means to be a phone then.

> Different phones have different capabilities, what's there to explain?

That your definition of ‘phone’ is meaningless. If phones can have any capability you like, then ‘phone’ doesn’t mean anything.

Once you are playing that game you may as well just declare that social networks can be regulated because they are a ‘capability some things that can also communicate with phones have’, and phones are already regulated.

Anti-spam legislation doesn’t regulate the technology. It legislates the behavior of the spammers.

This is no different from say, assault, which doesn’t regulate hammers and baseball bats, but makes it illegal to hit people with them without their permission.

Don’t be silly. The government doesn’t regulate how these services operate.

If you are going to argue that macroeconomic policy means ‘control’, then the government ‘controls’ everything in everyone’s lives at all times. You are welcome to believe this if you like.

Why? They seem to work fine as they are.

The phone system doesn’t lack regulation. Phone spam is already illegal. The reason for phone/VoIP spam is because the system is too inflexible to make it easy to prevent, and the reason the system is inflexible is that it is regulated.

We already have portability. When you sign up to a new network, you provide your phone number and email address, and your friends can find you.

This sounds like you are simply describing how advertising works. Cattle do not respond to advertising. People do.

Can you give an example of the kind of conflict you thought was pointless? Early TNG seemed like a new age cult to me, and then it became more real without losing the positivity.

That’s exactly why email has persisted, without any need for regulation.

She seems like exactly the kind of user the iPhone lockdown mode is intended for.

Looks like she was using Android.

> Wouldn't these points also apply to the internet itself? Large monopolies in infrastructure, having to teach people what domains are, diplomatic conflicts between nations over access to information/infrastructure, prolific spam and scams, etc.

Yes, many similar problems have indeed arisen, but the point is that they are being solved by many private actors, and not by regulation.

Email spam is solved by spam filtering. To the extent that spam filtering isn’t adequate, communications simply move away from email to other messaging services that have better permission models. To the extent that messaging services are not private enough, communications shift to E2E encryption. To the extent that domains are confusing, people shift to search and apps. The list goes on.

Phone spam however, continues unabated.

How do you explain why landline phones can’t send and receive SMS?

> I think the thing is that people like yourself are probably conscientiously indifferent to the attraction, influence and dependency that “Big Tech” produces.

Not at all. I just think it’s obvious that the sentiment has been waning for some time now. Who is going around saying how great big tech is?

SMS isn’t the telephone. VoIP mostly isn’t done using phone numbers, and to the extent that it is, is a way to grandfather in a legacy technology.

The iPhone is not primarily a telephone. If you are going to argue that it is, you really aren’t being reasonable.

Also, if you look at the history, you’ll discover that these innovations were all held back by regulation and the fixed nature of the phone system.

You can say the same thing about any technology that worked in the past but then failed. It doesn’t mean we should go back to it.

> that could possibly be applied to social media companies as well.

No, it can’t because social media isn’t based on phone numbers, and social networks aren’t telephone networks, and each one works differently.

I just text or FaceTime my relatives who are on Facebook. It works just fine. My mother, who doesn’t even have a cellphone, I call via skype to her landline phone. No problem.

How is this relevant?

It doesn’t work well. Telephones haven’t changed for decades and are now practically a dead technology. The wires are used for data, and phone service is grandfathered in. You can reasonably say this is the result of a lack of innovation caused by government regulation.

Edit: I say this as someone who loved the dial telephone era. I really want one of these: https://skysedge.com/unsmartphones/RUSP/index.html

I would have bought one, but then I realized that the phone is useless now.

The phone system is a great counterexample.

The government effectively established monopolies in phone service. Telephone numbering was not even close to seamless and painless. When dialing was introduced there was pushback and plenty of need for education of consumers, not to mention concerns about the loss of jobs for telephone operators. Establishing international numbering and the ITU has been a costly and slow diplomatic process.

The result is a system which is now almost useless because of the lack of spam prevention that facilitates elder abuse at a large scale.

If it wasn’t a legacy technology, I certainly wouldn’t recommend the telephone to my mother as a product.

The reason we have alternatives now is that there was no regulation preventing us from developing VoIP and other communications services via the internet.

Frankly it’s weird that we would even consider the telephone as a model for current regulation. It’s an antiquated legacy stepping stone from the time before computers.

> API cannot transfer blocks of data?

This seems like a deliberate and silly misunderstand on your part.

If you don’t realize that most API’s generally do more than simply transfer arbitrary blocks of data, then you have lied about your experience as a developer.

HTTP is just a transfer protocol. It’s in the name.

It seems like it shouldn’t be more than 25,000. Why is it 100x more than that?

This is a piece that argues in favor of government regulation of internet communications platforms.

I think he’s got a lot of good points about how bad current social media is as controlled by billionaires.

I think he’s completely misguided about how great government control would be.

I think he’s equally misguided about the staying power of something like Facebook. It’s decaying and we don’t need to do anything about it.

He’s also just plain wrong about not being able to maintain connections with people who are left behind.

Younger people don’t bother to sign up, and pretty much everyone I know is steadily moving to signal or telegram for communications. People have multiple apps.

I still have Facebook messenger installed for ‘legacy’ contacts, but I barely use it anymore.

I frankly think he’s out of date in his thinking. He’s spent years on this political action, but technology is just moving faster than that.

> You don't need to know what kind of web server is running when you send a request and the WEB server don't need to know what kind of client is sending the request to answer.

Exactly. It’s not an API - it’s a way to transfer arbitrary blocks of data. Applications that use http have to build an API on top.

That’s why it’s not even close to a valid comparison, and yet it has still become extremely complex over time.

> Flawed is still better than no solution.

This not the case. In many cases flawed solutions simply fail.

It seems odd that Microsoft hasn’t added whatever this feature is.