Category: Decentralisation and Neutrality

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Audience as Capital Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation The Dark Forest of the Internet

Where will the Trump community congregate after the Twitter and Facebook ban?

From the viewpoint of Twitter, Facebook, Shopify and potential other social media/commerce services, banning and suspending Trump’s account makes sense. It is pretty straightforward for these services to make the case that his posts/tweets violate their terms of service [1].

I’m stuck by how quickly and totally Trump’s influence has been curtailed. His options are now
(a) White House press releases, which he has until the week after next
(b) the group chat app Parler that is popular with the fringe right, but which was also banned by Google Play and has been given notice by Apple’s App Store,
(c) various subreddits, but Reddit has already suspended most of the popular ones
(d) other potential social networks (including, say, the group messaging app Telegram)
(e) his email lists
(f) his own website

Only with his email lists and his own website is Trump fully in control. [2] Perhaps he could set up his own Twitter-like social network on his site with Mastodon. He could set up discussion forums on his site with Vanilla Forums or Discourse. All of this over and above built-in comments on his blog. It is likely that sooner or later Trump or an organisation linked closely to him will set up this sort of infrastructure.

But what he gets back in terms of control he loses in terms of distribution. Anyone who engages with Trump and his community on this website and forums is someone who has joined for that specific reason. No one other than news reporters covering Trump and his network will join.

With an account on broad-based social networks like Twitter, your ‘viral’ messages find their way into the feeds of people who have nothing to do with you. In this way, at least, Twitter works for you, distributing your message in a way that optimises for discovery of your account. You don’t need to pull people in; the platform pushes them to you.

This optimisation is one the most common criticisms of social networks – with an algorithmically picked feed, at its best, you discover new interests, make new friends, understand things better. But at its worst, your feed makes you more anxious, causes more outrage, causes you to be more polarised than you otherwise would be. This is how polemical figures like Trump gain both followers and detractors.

What’s important is that both sides are equally important to his popularity. And there’s an inherent danger in having only supporters on a platform.

On Twitter (and Reddit/Facebook), there have probably been hundreds of thousands of online fights between supporters and detractors of Trump. However ugly they may have been, they have served as an outlet for rage and hatred, a valve for emotional steam stirred up by Trump and TV channels.

For a while, I imagine these online squabbles will continue. But if and when Trump or an entity aligned with him sets up their own online infra like we discussed above, it’s going to be an echo chamber that surpasses subreddits like /r/the_donald or on the chat app Parler. Some of the frenzy may be let out on social media, but the risk is that the majority will play out in the real world.

This is the main second-order risk I see with a ban on Trump’s social media presence. I’m not sure we’ve understood this, leave alone acknowledged it.

[1] Whether it was too late, or whether they enforce these rules arbitrarily or selectively is another debate, and not this site’s focus.

[2] That is, as long as he uses his own infrastructure for them, as opposed to something like Substack for email and a wordpress.com site, which could both be turned off.

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Nareeta Martin/Unsplash)

Categories
Decentralisation and Neutrality Making Money Online The Dark Forest of the Internet

A potential new pillar of an independent internet

The messaging service Telegram intends to make money next year onwards, after being funded by its founder’s fortune. The announcement also makes its principles clear(in bold below):

All the features that are currently free will stay free.
We will add some new features for business teams or power users. Some of these features will require more resources and will be paid for by these premium users. Regular users will be able to keep enjoying Telegram – for free, forever.
All parts of Telegram devoted to messaging will remain ad-free. We think that displaying ads in private 1-to-1 chats or group chats is a bad idea. Communication between people should be free of advertising of any sort.
We will fix [monetisation with intrusive ads in the absence of alternatives] by introducing our own Ad Platform for public one-to-many channels – one that is user-friendly, respects privacy and allows us to cover the costs of servers and traffic.

The goal of monetisation seems to be to cover running costs as Telegram approaches half a billion users, not to create another Big Tech company. The post mentions sustainability and independence as explicit goals:

Telegram is here to stay for a long time… [monetisation] will allow us to keep innovating and keep growing for decades to come… we will remain independent and stay true to our values, redefining how a tech company should operate

The best-case outcome for Telegram is becoming a pillar of the independent internet like Mozilla, Wikipedia, the Tor project, Automattic, GNU, among others.

Making money from your customers, your users is how you avoid being dependent on the largesse of one person or entity. Mozilla has not yet managed to crack it; I hope Telegram does.

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Writing

Own your content, December reminder

and

Within 24 hours. The case for owning your own content gets stronger by the week.

Previously:

July 2020: Platform censorship and the Malpani incident

November 2020: A problem with Amazon Web Services caused several appliances to go offline 

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity

Today, presence is democratised but discovery is centralised

Demonization of Facebook is now mainstream. And because readers of this site are privacy-conscious, we have previously discussed – without judgement – both the data that Facebook collects and how to minimise that data collection. Today, I read this:

Niche products and publications… can build sustainable businesses with customers across the entire world who have nothing in common except a shared interest in the product or publication in question; or, to put it another way, customers who “lookalike”. That’s the thing about Facebook and other digital advertising companies: they are just as essential a part of growing the GDP of the Internet as are Stripe and Shopify and other companies with universal approval ratings. It is no good to be capable of serving anyone anywhere if they can’t find you.

– Privacy Labels and Lookalike Audiences, Stratechery by Ben Thompson

The post itself is in the context of Apple’s requirement of privacy labels for iOS Apps. But it makes the following point: while those who are conscious of their privacy and their attention may be careful of their use of social media and may avoid Facebook, it is perhaps the most important distribution channel that small businesses have. It is their very data collection that makes (ostensibly) precise targeting possible. If one takes that away, then the business with the biggest advertising budget wins.

The same holds true with regard to Google and discovery through search:

This post from First Round Capital makes the case that a small direct-to-consumer business only really has three ways to sustainably achieve scale: performance marketing, content marketing/SEO, and referrals/virality. While Facebook and Instagram, along with Google’s AdWords, draw the bulk of performance advertising budgets, Google dominates discovery through its search engine. And has done so for nearly twenty years now.

Just like with Facebook, it is because of the vast amounts of data that Google collects about you that a business can reach you precisely through search results on a browser or via Google Assistant or in its personalised news feed in your Google app.

Presence of all sorts – content, commerce, community – has been democratised on the Internet, but discovery of all that is today highly centralised.

Categories
Decentralisation and Neutrality Personal Finance

Investing: tech sector breaks correlations

When I evaluate companies for my US portfolio – which consists only of tech companies that I think I understand – I am forced to think of how many companies I want in my portfolio. There are quite a few good bets. But adding too many of them dilutes individual holdings without adding much by way of diversification. As things stand now I’m pushing myself to think harder about my thesis – which we have written about before – so I can split it into two portfolios. Perhaps we will write about this as and when this pans out.

In this regard, at one point I was thinking about whether the portfolios would naturally align by size of company: one with older, more established companies like Apple or Microsoft. And the other with newer ones like Twilio and Square. Of course, this is lazy. In the economy at large age, size and stability are all mostly positively correlated, lending themselves to large-cap and small-cap fund strategies.

But they are anything but in tech. Network effects are much stronger and available to a lot more companies than in other sectors. Barriers to innovation by startups are much lower and switching costs for people are low, meaning disruption is vastly more common. Also, acquisitions of such companies by large companies for IP, talent and/or customers happen often, at very high valuations. And speaking of valuations, they can soar even for public companies, making them larger than much older competitors.

This may not always hold true in the future. Over time there are platforms emerging in many areas that are controlled by older, larger tech companies. Amazon’s AWS, Google’s Cloud Engine and Microsoft’s Azure for building internet applications are well known. Apple’s device-first strategy of building a platform around health and fitness (Fitness+) is less obvious. Platforms like these raise the barrier for newcomers. But we have also seen such platforms fail or die out – Facebook’s applications platform is one such. Its decline took along with it entire public companies like Zynga.

It’s exciting watching these platforms emerge and investing in companies that dominate them – for instance Cloudflare is building a new platform for the Internet that’s a lot more small-business-friendly and privacy-conscious. And Shopify is building a platform that gives merchants an independent presence online, unlike the Amazon model which subsumes their identity.

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Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Privacy and Anonymity

Algorithms

In “fintech”, which is where my day job is, many companies create algorithms to calculate people’s ‘risk profiles’. That can mean different things in different contexts. For investment-tech companies, a person’s risk profile usually determines what set of investments to recommend the person. (those investments are then sometimes automated via another algorithm). For credit-tech or lend-tech companies, a risk profile is a measure of how likely the person is to default on their loan, and that determines yes/no decisions, documentation, collateral, lending rate among others.

And speaking of credit, this article by MIT Technology Review describes the creeping influence of black-box algorithms in people’s day to day lives:

“Consumer reporting agencies, including credit bureaus, tenant screening companies, or check verification services, amass this information from a wide range of sources: public records, social media, web browsing, banking activity, app usage, and more. The algorithms then assign people “worthiness” scores, which figure heavily into background checks performed by lenders, employers, landlords, even schools.”

“Their comprehensive influence means that if your score is ruined, it can be nearly impossible to recover. Worse, the algorithms are owned by private companies that don’t divulge how they come to their decisions. Victims can be sent in a downward spiral that sometimes ends in homelessness or a return to their abuser.”

Even if a private company were forced to describe their algorithm, dissecting code in a court case is remarkably different from dissecting facts. As one of the lawyers handling such cases put it, “Am I going to cross-examine an algorithm?”

The unfortunately prescient series Black Mirror aired an episode back in 2016 that described a world ruled by people’s social scores, scores that real estate firms used to screen potential customers. As it turns out, reality has managed to out-dystopia a dystopian fictional series.

(Featured image photo credit: Matt Hoffman/Unsplash)

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality The Next Computer

More “smart” device woes

A problem with Amazon Web Services caused several appliances to go offline. Some of them, like the Roomba vacuum, have physical buttons and could still be used without the app-based remote. Others, like Amazon’s own Ring ‘smart doorbells’, stopped working altogether.

Our previous coverage on smart devices rendered dumber than dumb by outages or outright corporate policy changes:

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Audience as Capital Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality

Three takeaways from the youtube-dl episode

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This episode about the takedown and reinstatement of the video-downloading tool youtube-dl (Part 1, Part 2) makes three things clear.

One, centralised platforms like Github are single points of failure. This is especially unfortunate on the Internet, which is decentralised from the ground-up. Maintainers of projects like youtube-dl must invest in building a censorship-resistant presence online.

Two, despite decentralization, we need organizations like the EFF, the Mozilla Foundation, the Tor Project, the Wikipedia Foundation, the Internet Archive. To that end, we must support them monetarily and, if possible, by volunteering. We must also hold them to extremely high standards of ethics and neutrality and keep them from being beholden to, or even the appearance of being beholden to, a government or a particular tech company. If they make bad strategic decisions, we must criticise – constructively. They may not be big, but they are too important to fail.

Three, we must recognise that every one of us needs to be an activist for an open Internet. Our actions and inaction have consequences. If no one had expressed their opinion on this issue online – even merely through blog/Medium posts or tweets – it’d be harder for the EFF’s efforts to have the impact that they did. Think back to other instances where Internet companies have been pressured into reversing decisions due to public opinion: the tussle between Apple and the email app Hey being the most recent one. Hey’s founders have a great many followers they could rally, but it was those followers that made the difference. The greater your online audience your capital, the greater your responsibility to be a good citizen of the Internet.

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Audience as Capital Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation The Dark Forest of the Internet

The reinstatement of youtube-dl

Context: we had discussed last month how GitHub had taken down the code and binaries for the youtube-dl project, a tool that can be used to download videos from YouTube and a variety of other sites, and how and why it was a travesty.

In a post written by the company’s director of platform policy, the code-hosting platform said the following:

The youtube-dl takedown notice fell into a more unusual category: anticircumvention—an allegation that the code was designed to circumvent technical measures that control access or copying of copyrighted material, in violation of Section 1201 of the DMCA.

Section 1201 dates back to the late 1990s and did not anticipate the various implications it has for software use today. As a result, Section 1201 makes it illegal to use or distribute technology (including source code) that bypasses technical measures that control access or copying of copyrighted works, even if that technology can be used in a way that would not be copyright infringement. Circumvention was the core claim in the youtube-dl takedown.

Establishing that, the post then goes on to state that in their opinion, the youtube-dl project did not circumvent technical measures:

Although we did initially take the project down, we understand that just because code can be used to access copyrighted works doesn’t mean it can’t also be used to access works in non-infringing ways.

Then, after we received new information that showed the youtube-dl project does not in fact violate the DMCA‘s anticircumvention prohibitions, we concluded that the allegations did not establish a violation of the law.

This new information came through a letter sent by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s attorney [PDF] to GitHub. This is the highlight of the whole story for how well it explains what youtube-dl does and does not do. Quoting from the letter, not necessarily in the order in which they appear in the letter:

when a user requests certain YouTube videos, YouTube’s servers send a small JavaScript program to the user’s browser, embedded in the YouTube player page. That program calculates a number referred to as “sig.” That number then forms part of the Uniform Resource Locator that the user’s browser sends back to YouTube to request the actual video stream. This mechanism is completely visible to the user simply by viewing the source code of the player page. The video stream is not encrypted, and no secret knowledge is required to access the video stream… Importantly, youtube-dl does not decrypt video streams that are encrypted with commercial DRM technologies, such as Widevine, that are used by subscription video sites, such as Netflix

We presume that this “signature” code is what RIAA refers to as a “rolling cipher,” although YouTube’s JavaScript code does not contain this phrase. Regardless of what this mechanism is called, youtube-dl does not “circumvent” it as that term is defined in Section 1201(a) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, because YouTube provides the means of accessing these video streams to anyone who requests them.

To borrow an analogy from literature, travelers come upon a door that has writing in a foreign language. When translated, the writing says “say ‘friend’ and enter.” The travelers say “friend” and the door opens. As with the writing on that door, YouTube presents instructions on accessing video streams to everyone who comes asking for it.

youtube-dl does not violate Section 1201 of the DMCA because it does not “circumvent” any technical protection measures on YouTube videos.

This is wonderfully explained, and the analogy is spot-on.

I do not expect Github’s lawyers to have understood this mechanism when they first received the takedown request from the RIAA, but one would expect them to have discussed this with someone technical at GitHub, who either knew or could have asked the project about this mechanism, and this technical person and the lawyers could have determined that it did not circumvent technical measures. My guess is that in an effort to project neutrality, they did not initially take a stance one way or another. Indeed, the blog post has a short section at the beginning titled “Why did Github process this takedown in the first place?” which doesn’t really address why they went all the way to removing the youtube-dl project if they understood the issue:

As a platform, we must comply with laws—even ones that we don’t think are fair for developers. As we’ve seen, this can lead to situations where GitHub is required to remove code—even if it has a multitude of non-infringing uses—if it is in fact designed to circumvent a TPM. But this is exceedingly rare. 

I think it’s the EFF’s advocacy, finally in the form of a legal document, that gave GitHub the confidence – or cover – it needed to do the right thing. That combined with the public outcry against this.

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Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Products and Design The Next Computer

Tesla remotely disabling functionality in cars

From Vice:

a person… bought a used Tesla from a dealer—who in turn bought it at auction directly from Tesla under California’s lemon law buyback program—advertised as having Autopilot, the company’s Advanced Driver Assistance System. The entire Autopilot package, which the car had when the dealer bought it, costs an extra $8,000. Then, Tesla remotely removed the software because “Full-Self Driving was not a feature that you had paid for.” Tesla said if the customer wanted Autopilot back, he’d have to fork over the $8,000.

To be clear, this is not a subscription service. This is a one-time package that was paid for by the original buyer, upgrading the car’s capabilities over software. Tesla’s policy here is that the purchase belongs to the owner, not to the car. There still appears to be confusion about whether enhancements can be transferred to the new owner. I couldn’t find anything on Tesla’s site, but found these two contrasting threads. One, on Tesla Motors Club titled “Why is FSD not transferable to your next Tesla?” FSD is full self-driving. The second is on the Only Used Teslas site, “Does Autopilot/Full Self-Driving Transfer to Subsequent Owners?” which states that it in fact does:

Q: What about owners who added Autopilot and/or Full Self-Driving Capability after delivery? A: Those features will also be active for the life of the car, and will transfer from the current owner’s Tesla account to the next owner’s account.

The tech news site The Next Web also did an article on this, stating

TNW spoke with a number of new and used Tesla sales departments in the UK who all confirmed that if a second-hand Tesla is specified with additional options like Autopilot and FSD, that is what the customer will receive.

In the case of the individual mentioned in the Vice article, Tesla did restore the functionality the original owner had bought, but only after the car enthusiast website Jalopnik ran an article about it – and Vice and The Next Web.

We have seen before (here and here and here) about “smart” devices that you do not own despite having paid full price for. A Tesla seems to be among the most expensive one in that list.

I’m not advocating for or against buying a Tesla – or for that matter any smart device [1]. I do think we should be more conscious, more circumspect when we buy new devices, since an increasing number of them have electronics, a connection to the Internet, and a link to the manufacturer throughout their lifetimes.

Advertising is sexy. Skepticism never is.

[1] I had in fact paid the deposit for two Model 3 units when they were announced in 2016 (and had it refunded when it was clear Tesla would not be launching in India any time soon).

(Featured image photo credits: Bram Van Oost/Unsplash)