Any discussion of monopolization of the web is bound to include the term "network effects," and its constant companion, "natural monopolies." This econojargon is certainly relevant to the discussion, but really needs the oft-MIA idea of "switching costs."
A technology has "network effects" when its value grows as its users increase, attracting more users, making it more valuable, attracting more users.
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A technology has "network effects" when its value grows as its users increase, attracting more users, making it more valuable, attracting more users.
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Cory Doctorow
•Social media and messaging obviously benefit significantly from network effects: if all your friends are on Facebook (or if it's where your kid's Little League games are organized, or how your work colleagues plan fun activities), you'll feel enormous pressure to join.
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Cory Doctorow
•It's a form of mutual hostage-taking.
That hostage situation illustrates (yet) another economic idea: "collective action problems."
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Cory Doctorow
•This combination of network effects and collective action problems leads some apologists for tech concentration to call the whole thing a "natural monopoly" - a system that tends to be dominated by a single company, no matter how hard we try.
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Cory Doctorow
•Other examples of natural monopolies include cable and telephone systems, water and gas systems, sewer systems, public roads, and electric grids.
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Cory Doctorow
•But the internet isn't a railroad. Digital is different, because computers are *universal* in a way that railroads aren't - *all* computers can run *all* programs that can be expressed in symbolic logic, and that means we can almost always connect new systems to existing ones.
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Cory Doctorow
•It's easier to implement support for a standard, documented format, but even proprietary formats pose only a small challenge relative to the challenge presented by, say, railroads.
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
•During Australia's colonization, every state had its own governance and its own would-be rail-barons.
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Cory Doctorow
•Hundreds of designs for interoperable rolling stock have been tried, but it's proven impossible to make a reliable car that retracts one set of wheels and drops a different one.
The solution to the middle-gauge muddle? Tear up and re-lay thousands of kilometers of track.
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
•These switching costs aren't naturally occurring: they are deliberately introduced by dominant firms that want to keep their users locked in.
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Cory Doctorow
•By reverse-engineering and reimplementing Word support, Apple obliterated those switching costs - and with them, the collective action problem that created Word's natural monopoly.
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Cory Doctorow
•Once you get an email-to-fax program, you can discard your fax machine without convincing everyone else to do the same.
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Cory Doctorow
•Adversarial interoperability (or "competitive compatibility," AKA "comcom") is part of the origin story of every dominant tech company today. But those same companies have gone to extraordinary lengths to extinguish it.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability
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Cory Doctorow
•But every pirate wants to be an admiral. Once companies attain dominance, they start adding proprietary extensions to the standard and fighting comcom-based interoperability, decrying it as "hacking" or "theft of intellectual property."
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Cory Doctorow
•This has all but extinguished comcom as a commercial practice.
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Cory Doctorow
•The obliteration of comcom is why network effects produce such sturdy monopolies in tech - and there's nothing "natural" about those monopolies.
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Cory Doctorow
•In other words, the collective action problem that the prisoners of tech monopolies struggle with is the result of a deliberate strategy of imposing high technical and legal burdens to comcom, in order to impose insurmountable switching costs.
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Cory Doctorow
•https://www.wired.co.uk/article/social-media-competitive-compatibility
Today, there's a group of tech monopoly hostages who are stuck behind their own digital iron curtain, thanks to Facebook's deliberate lock-in tactics: the users of Whatsapp, a messaging company that FB bought in 2014.
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
•Downloads of Whatsapp alternatives like Signal and Telegram surged, and Facebook announced it would hold off on implementing the change for three months.
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Cory Doctorow
•Why not? After all, despite all of the downloads of those rival apps, Whatsapp usage did not appreciably fall. Convincing all your friends to quit Whatsapp and switch to Signal is a lot of work.
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Cory Doctorow
•What if there was a way to lower those collective action costs?
It turns out there is. Watomatic is a free/open source "autoresponder" utility for Whatsapp and Facebook that automatically replies to messages with instructions for reaching you on a rival service.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.parishod.watomatic
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Cory Doctorow
•The project's sourcecode is live on Github, so you can satisfy yourself that there isn't any sneaky spying going on here:
https://github.com/adeekshith/watomatic
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Cory Doctorow
•https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/african-whatsapp-modders-are-masters-worldwide-adversarial-interoperability
These apps are often targeted for legal retaliation by Facebook, so it's hard to find them in official app stores where they might be vetted for malicious code.
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Cory Doctorow
•Legal threats are Facebook's default response to comcom. That's how they responded to NYU's Ad Observer, a plugin that lets users scrape and repost the political ads they're served.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/553000000-reasons-not-let-facebook-make-decisions-about-your-privacy
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Cory Doctorow
•Whatsapp lured users in by promising privacy. It held onto them post-acquisition by promising them their data would be siloed from Facebook's main databases.
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Cory Doctorow
•This "agreement" is a prime example of "consent theater," the laughable pretense that Facebook is "making an offer" and the public is "accepting the offer."
https://onezero.medium.com/consent-theater-a32b98cd8d96
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Cory Doctorow
•Consent theater lays bare the fiction of agreement. Real agreement is based on negotiation, and markets are based on price-signals in which buyers and sellers make counteroffers.
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Cory Doctorow
•Comcom is a mechanism for making these counteroffers. Take ad-blockers, which Doc Searls calls "the largest consumer boycott in history." More than a quarter of internet users have installed an ad-block, fed up with commercial surveillance.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ad-block lets you say "Nah."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah
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Cory Doctorow
•Rather, there is price-*setting*.
Not coincidentally, "the ability to set prices" is the textbook definition of an illegal monopoly.
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MiKlo:~/citizen4.eu$💙💛
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕ lubi to.
Cory Doctorowudostępnił to.
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
•https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Rules
About vendor lock-in as a strategy, and strategies (for both vendors and buyers) at strengthening or weakening the lock-in dynamic (respectively).
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
•More to the point, a network with either a central node or a least-cost path which is controllec by a specific entity.
Physical networks are transport (ground, rail, canals, sea, air), commerce, distribution (water, sewerage grid power, gas and oil pipelines, flight networks, shipping routes). Real estate (literally, control over nodes in a landscape). Extractive natural resources (control over high-yield nodes).
Virtual ones are relational, but also follow the same general structure: nodes, links, flows (or relations), and control points. Wholesale and retail distribution networks. Business contracts. Communications networks. Knowledge itself, which can be conceived of as a web. Education systems (access to and certification in knowledge or skill). Business conglomerates or chaebol are relational networks of control and distribution. Labour unions or guilds create a gateway around labour or skills resources. Patents and copyrights are government-instituted gateways, which through networks of owned properties and/or ownership give monopoly power.
Network structures create monopolies, monopolies are networks.
(I'm still looking for exceptions, I've not found any yet.)
Public ownership or control of the controlling node or least-cost path seems to be one of the few countermeasures.
#networks #monopoly #MonopoliesAreNetworks
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
•And softwar. Programs are networks of functions and/or methods interacting with data (streams, structures, inputs, outputs).
lertsenem
•Cory Doctorow
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