Another way to encourage interoperability is to use the government to hold out a carrot in addition to the stick. Through government procurement laws, governments could require any company providing a product or service to the government to not interfere with interoperability. President Lincoln required standard tooling for bullets and rifles during the Civil War, so there’s a long history of requiring this already. If companies don’t want to play nice, they’ll lose out on some lucrative contracts, “but no one forces a tech company to do business with the federal government.”
That’s actually a very interesting idea. This benefits the govt as much as anyone else too. It reduces switching costs for govt tech.
Can confirm, I’ve worked for a company doing govt contract work and I really don’t know what it’d take for us to have walked away. They can dictate whatever terms they like and still expect to find plenty of companies happy to bid for contracts I think.
It’s because they pay big dollars for comparatively little work with little validation of the quality of said work.
That hasn’t been quite my experience. For one thing, they cap their pay and don’t (can’t) negotiate like a private client. So generally less money per given project.
Comparatively little work and little validation also wasn’t my experience but I do get the sense it used to be more common, and it did feel like the experience I had was in some sense a reaction to previous contractors taking advantage.
Did you also have a robustly enshittified consumer business?
I’m thinking of his classic users —> advertisers —> shareholders model and struggling to come up with companies that have that model but also thrive on government contracts.
Yelp is a pretty classic case of enshittification. What government contracts do they have?
Isn’t yelp a pretty easily replaceable thing?
They built a reputation by being one of the first in the space, but they’ve squandered that reputation and I’m pretty sure someone else could start up a competing “reviews” product.
I’d like to have one that actually showed the history of things like restaurants, because if the head chef leaves and the reviews have gone to shit it turns out that the reviews since the new chef are much more relevant than the 1000+ 5 star reviews of the food of the old guy, and that isn’t discoverable anywhere on yelp or anything like yelp.
I’m not sure how you’d protect against enshittification long-term. But I think one of the things that has largely poisoned the spirit of the Internet in general is that everything is always about a “sustainable business model” and “scaling” before anyone even dreams of just writing something up and seeing if they can get it to go popular.
That’s fair, and government work can feel kind of like its own parallel business ecosystem in some ways. Sort of like how most of us think of the shops and businesses that are visible to us but not the massive B2B ecosystem just under the surface.
But I think the hope is that gov can standardize and define a certain net positive thing, and use its contracts to start requiring that thing, slowly making it more widespread and therefore common. Ideally the kinks get ironed out over time, and eventually it’s in a state where you can make the leap and start to require it be in place for any application / service above a certain user count.
Bit pie in the sky, but we should be at least trying to find ways to use govt to improve our situation. Things at policy level that don’t require chronically status quo politicians to vote in our best interests.
Except the tech companies are among the politicians’ biggest “donors”.
Public cloud computing companies that want to host government IT workloads still have to be Fedramp compliant. Doesn’t matter how much their donors pay, if they aren’t Fedramp compliant they can’t bid for the work.
Yeah but donations can help make procurement tenders slightly in favour of donors. Or get inside scoop so they have time to be ready.
It’s easy to think of tech as being companies that primarily produce electronics or operate information services, but that’s not the case. Every company uses (and often creates) technology in various forms that benefit from standards and interoperation.
Connected devices benefit from standardized Wi-Fi. Cars benefit from standardized fuel- both in ICE (octane ratings, pumps) and electric (charging connectors, protocols). It even applies to companies that make simple molded plastic, because the molds can be created/used at many factories, including short-term contract manufacturing.
DoD already started this with their Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA).
And I agree, the government should use its power to force interoperable and open standards wherever possible and relevant.
I like Doctorow, and these point are valid. I just don’t see the American government doing anything to benefit the people, regardless of left or right orientation. Most Americans want abortion access and reasonable restrictions on gun sales; I can’t imagine any candidates, local or federal doing little more than making empty promises on these subjects. Even Obama care is a hugely compromised husk of reasonable healthcare for all, and you still have republicans clamoring to dismantle it.
I hate to be pessimistic, but I don’t think any American politician would take on this topic.
Don’t “both sides” this. It’s the kind of thing people use to justify voting third party. Off the top of my head the Biden admin has been working to restore net neutrality and has an antitrust case against Ticketmaster and Live Nation
I didn’t both sides this. To clarify; I meant that if republicans brought forth policies to preserve personal privacy, or the democrats decide to bust up monopolistic companies- doesn’t matter which side tried to bring up any of these ideas; they would be so neutered by the time the ink dried the impact would be negligible.
I can see how you could take my comment as both sides-ing it. I haven’t seen either party do anything that impacts the quality of daily life (in a positive way) for myself, friends or family. The examples of abortion and gun control are just examples where the overwhelming majority of citizens want one thing, in very clear terms, and the government does absolutely nothing about it despite the wishes of the people.
I’m also clearly not advocating for any third party. If you take the very common knowledge that the government no longer works for the people and twist that into throwing away your vote on Kennedy or Nader your problems are larger than limited browser selection.
And how’s that antitrust case going? Where are we on net neutrality? Student loan forgiveness for like 10% of borrowers? Expanding Medicare? I only criticize democrats because that’s the party that’s supposed to do things for us. The American republicans are Christo- fascists who’ve long abandoned any pretense of constitutional law or responsibility for their country. Either way- we have crumbling infrastructure, hungry children, women dying because religious abortion restrictions, and lead pipes. And these shit bags can just send another $25 billion to kill more brown people in the Middle East.
So forgive me if I doubt they’ll take the time to learn what http means or even consider something that doesn’t have a wealthy donor behind it.
- Lack of competition in the market via mergers and acquisitions
- Companies change things on the back end (“twiddle their knobs”) to improve their fortunes and have a united, consolidated front to prevent any lawmaking that might constrain them
- Companies then embrace tech law to prevent new entrants into the market or consumer rights (see: DMCA, etc.)
This is the criteria he has laid out for the “enshitifacation” of the Internet.
This is funny to me because this is the exact pattern of every industry and service in the United States ever. The Internet isn’t special, it’s just the latest frontier for capitalism.
The danger here is that they make “open” standards so horrendously complex and ever evolving that only the billionaire mega corporations can can realistically keep up with them.
See the web where Google now control it completely by having such an enormous amount of code that even Microsoft couldn’t be arsed to keep up, or Office Open XML, where 100% compatibility is limited to exactly one product: The one that made it. I just downloaded the documentation for the standard. It is over 5000 fucking pages long. That was part 1 of 4.
Another example here is the Matrix protocol, specifically designed from the ground up to be open and distributed. In reality, the only option for full-featured stable server software is the one maintained by the project itself, and there aren’t a lot of third party clients available.
Openness itself is a good goal, but the complexity itself can pose a barrier openness.
I think that this is the reason that the rust programming language exists: to make learning the skill too hard for a regular person.
I loved the net when you had to have a clue to be there.
Eternal September
Mine began in truth about eight years before that. BBS and tymnet nodes enabled by shit load of blue and black box phone calls. Just go look at the neat and orderly wiring in a blue box and know that mine was nothing like that. Mine looked like low rent spider web of components stuffed in a cigar box.
