The final historical constraint on tech companies was their own workers. Tech has very low union-density, but that's in part because individual tech workers enjoyed so much bargaining power due to their scarcity.
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Regulatory capture cuts both ways: it's not just about powerful corporations being free to flout the law, it's also about their ability to *enlist* the law to punish competitors that might constrain their plans for exploiting their workers, customers, suppliers or other stakeholders.
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Apple owes its existence to interoperability - its ability to clone Microsoft Office's file formats for Pages, Numbers and Keynote, which saved the company in the early 2000s - and ever since, it has devoted its existence to making sure no one ever does to Apple what Apple did to Microsoft:
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When a business says it has "IP," it means that it has arranged its legal affairs to allow it to invoke the power of the state to control its customers, critics and competitors:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
An "app" is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to add an ad-blocker to it. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model" and it's everywhere.
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When companies don't have to worry about users deploying self-help measures to disenshittify their products, they are freed from the constraint that prevents them indulging the impulse to shift value from their customers to themselves.
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When a business says it has "IP," it means that it has arranged its legal affairs to allow it to invoke the power of the state to control its customers, critics and competitors:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
An "app" is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to add an ad-blocker to it. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model" and it's everywhere.
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Tech companies that contemplated enshittifying their products always had to watch over their shoulders for a rival that might offer a disenshittification tool and use that as a wedge between the company and its customers. If you make your website's ads 20% more obnoxious in anticipation of a 2% increase in gross margins, you have to consider the possibility that 40% of your users will google "how do I block ads?"
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In other words, Apple can spy on you because *it's allowed to spy on you*. America's last consumer privacy law was passed in 1988, and it bans video-store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history. Congress has taken *no* action on consumer privacy since the *Reagan* years:
https://www.eff.org/tags/video-privacy-protection-act
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40 years of antitrust neglect means that corporations were able to buy their way to dominance with predatory mergers and pricing, producing today's inbred, Habsburg capitalism. Apple and Google are a mobile duopoly, Google is a search monopoly, etc. It's not just tech! Every sector looks like this:
https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers
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But here's the kicker: right after Apple blocked all its rivals from spying on its customers, it began secretly spying on those customers! Apple has a rival surveillance ad network, and even if you opt out of commercial surveillance on your Iphone, Apple still secretly spies on you and uses the data to target you for ads:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
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Even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product - provided the company can get away with treating you as the product. Apple can *absolutely* get away with treating you as the product, because it lacks the historical constraints that prevented Apple - and other companies - from treating you as the product.
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But here's the kicker: right after Apple blocked all its rivals from spying on its customers, it began secretly spying on those customers! Apple has a rival surveillance ad network, and even if you opt out of commercial surveillance on your Iphone, Apple still secretly spies on you and uses the data to target you for ads:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
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Take Apple. The company offers Ios users a one-tap opt-out from commercial surveillance, and more than 96% of users opted out. Presumably, the other 4% were either confused or on Facebook's payroll. Apple - and its army of cultists - insist that this proves that our world's woes can be traced to cheapskate "consumers" who expected to get something for nothing by using advertising-supported products.
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I've always hated that saying, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," the reason being that it posits decent treatment as a customer reward program, like the little ramekin warm nuts first class passengers get before takeoff. Companies don't treat you well when you pay them. Companies treat you well when they fear the consequences of treating you badly.
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Another characteristically brilliant Kashmir Hill story for *The New York Times* reveals another characteristically terrible fact about modern life: your car secretly records fine-grained telemetry about your driving and sells it to data-brokers, who sell it to insurers, who use it as a pretext to gouge you on premiums:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars
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Another characteristically brilliant Kashmir Hill story for *The New York Times* reveals another characteristically terrible fact about modern life: your car secretly records fine-grained telemetry about your driving and sells it to data-brokers, who sell it to insurers, who use it as a pretext to gouge you on premiums:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html
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The NYC stop on my Bezzle tour has been finalized! I'll be at Word Brooklyn on Mar 24, in conversation with the Academy Award-winning documentarian Laura Poitras!
https://shop.wordbookstores.com/event/word-presents-cory-doctorow
"The majority of #censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power."
-@Ada_Palmer
While there are alternatives to banks - local #CreditUnions are great - a lot of us end up with a bank by default and then struggle to switch, even though the banks give us progressively worse service, collectively rip us off for billions in #JunkFees, and even defraud us. But because the banks keep our data locked up, it can be hard to shop for better alternatives.
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You can also follow these posts as a daily blog at pluralistic.net: no ads, trackers, or data-collection!
Here's today's edition: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/09/working-the-refs/
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If you're a nostr:npub1u00djvjjpk6vm09z8vrrkjpnj0s9favacchm00w8qw4ae4ptussq8upzgc subscriber, you can read these essays - as well as previews of upcoming magazine columns and early exclusives on doctorow.medium.com.
My latest Medium column is "What to do with the Democrats: They want to do it? Let's make them do it."
https://doctorow.medium.com/what-to-do-with-the-democrats-011c1dd677d6
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You can also follow these posts as a daily blog at pluralistic.net: no ads, trackers, or data-collection!
Here's today's edition: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/09/working-the-refs/
--
If you're a nostr:npub1u00djvjjpk6vm09z8vrrkjpnj0s9favacchm00w8qw4ae4ptussq8upzgc subscriber, you can read these essays - as well as previews of upcoming magazine columns and early exclusives on doctorow.medium.com.
My latest Medium column is "What to do with the Democrats: They want to do it? Let's make them do it."
https://doctorow.medium.com/what-to-do-with-the-democrats-011c1dd677d6
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