Try and succeed are different things. The larger the use case set, the tighter the integration with everything else, the stronger the reliance on it, the harder it will be to outlaw it. Often the laws drift ever-so-slightly to accommodate the new reality.
I mean there is of course a way to fight and win that battle and it is regulation, write things like interoperability and data portability into law and enforce it. I was more thinking of things that can be done without enforcement in the initial comment.
Although they are doing an end-run around the law, I'm not sure they are trying that hard. I suspect the law will become largely ignored (or massively paid lip service just to avoid being the tiniest rare case that is punished), and hope that alternative tech overcomes the entrenched.
It's very easy to make people stop doing this by making it illegal. It might sound obvious but I find that this aspect is often overlooked when tech people talk about these issues. You cannot work around the law. At least not in the long run. This is and must be a political battle.
Interesting point, but how does implementing a technology prevents others from doing the same? I would think if it needs to be regulated then new laws need to be written.
The solution is more like making sure Technology X is ubiquitous before they can do anything. That makes it significantly harder to outlaw without undesirable political and economic side effects.
Over a long enough time frame, you can’t fight economics and human desire. You might win for a long time, perhaps centuries, but eventually the black market desire for what the state has outlawed wins out.
What I’m getting at is, regardless of how you feel about software and communications ruining society, it doesn’t matter if enough people like it. It is un-outlawable. See the state’s inability to really accomplish banning anything that humans desire - from the drug war to immigration restrictions. Even maximum security prisons are full of contraband. The state can’t do anything if the popular will overwhelmingly disagrees.
Extremely, believe it or not, most people aren't willing to break the law to use new technology. If the government says something is illegal, that'll kill most usage of it.
I think a big theme in tech in the last decade has been there's a lot of extra margin to be made if you can find a way to circumvent regulations designed to protect the general public.
Nah, the government can change the law. The obstacle to overcome would be the software quality. Today your driver is a hairball stuck with chewing gum to a point release of everything. In the case of a smallest change of anything it goes up in flames. That’s something harder to overcome by decree. Needs incentives in place.
Honestly, I have a lot of hope that heavy-handed regulation is on its way out. I was at Code for America for a while, where I got to see how leading governments are starting to adopt a lot of the user-focused, iterative techniques that are common in the tech world.
It will take a while, and it should. Governments can't go bankrupt, and they can't just serve the easy customers. That means they can't take as many risks. But part of the reason that user-focused, iterative approaches are now so dominant in the tech world is that it's a great risk-reduction approach. Computers and digital communications make it possible to have much more nuanced regulation, and to be more experimental. Even for governments.
But the problem is that in practice I still don’t see those laws being enforced in any meaningful manner. Case in point, Microsoft is doing this - they’re not stupid, they’ve reviewed the legal implications that and rightfully decided that they’ll benefit more than the penalty from enforcement if it ever happens. Same with Google, Facebook, etc.
You can't regulate technology out of existence; the harder you try the greater the potential rewards for using it asymmetrically. I can think of legal objections, but I can also think of equally good arguments that circumvent those objections. Rather than wishing a new technology away, which has never ever worked, it's better to assume it will be the norm and then try to imagine what countermeasures would be deployed in response.
In general I disagree (but would agree with you in certain cases, like something that was doable but gatekept due to cost).
Alot of X's aren't a problem until they can scale. It's not pragmatic to outlaw everything that might be a problem at scale but might never be able to achieve that scale.
We're in an era where we are discovering alot of abuses that could only be classified as an issue due to scale and efficiency.
Laws and regulation are only local maxima on the capabilities of technology and how they will be applied.
Consumer protection from this stuff is a joke in the age where GDPR skinner boxes give people feelings of warm fuzzies when continuing to download crApps on to their platforms to suck up everything passively and with users active engagement, to backends that are ever more becoming open to the public for consumption (due to the lack of corporate accountability on such downsides). Combine that with increasingly cheaper storage costs, and more people becoming knowledgeable of the tools… yeah if one is banking on MSFT and its current behemoth brethren forever maintaining an advantage…
Kings of years past wanted to regulate the use of the printing press, and were modestly successful at first, though only in time most people realized that such diktats were futile.
There either needs to be user demands or laws to push it I think. Given that the average user doesn't really care in most cases though I think they are a long way from succeeding with it. Good to see them at least offering up something though.
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