The article is very long; that part is fascinating and a fantastic suggestion:
> Europe and Canada have passed strong right-to-repair legislation, but those efforts ""have been hamstrung by the anti-circumvention laws"" (like the DMCA). (...) That raises the question of why these countries don't repeal their versions of the DMCA.
> The answer is tariffs, it seems. The US trade representative has long threatened countries with tariffs if they did not have such a law on their books. ""Happy 'Liberation Day' everyone"", he said with a smile, which resulted in laughter, cheering, and applause. The response of most countries when faced with the US tariffs (or threats thereof) has been to impose retaliatory tariffs, making US products more expensive for their citizens, which is a weird way to punish Americans. (...)
> What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services. (...)
> Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it. The same could be done for car and tractor diagnostic devices and more.
Europe should do this now; it would be incredibly good -- and incredibly fun.
I believe F-Droid is doing quite ok. So is the Galaxy Store. On iOS, Apple created a very complicated process which is region and even country-specific. Hopefully this will change once the EU, the US, Japan and everyone else currently suing Apple is done with them. But I do share the sentiment from the article - I wish it wasn't necessary to escalate such matters to the level of regulation
At least on iOS Apple has just been fined 500 million - as a start - because the way they implemented third-party app stores was so blatantly against the DMA. I think we simply don't yet know how users and corporations will react to it.
> That raises the question of why these countries don't repeal their versions of the DMCA.
> The answer is tariffs, it seems.
No it isn't.
Like literally, the US and it's tariff madness has literally nothing to do with it. The EU and Canada are both signatories to the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and signatories of the WTO provisions that include continued operation to it. They are international treaties with a wide degree of international support, not US inventions. Christ, Europe had a lot more to do with the wording of the anticircumvention provisions in the WIPO treaty than the US did.
People should stop taking Doctorow seriously. He has a long track record of making shit up that is what his audience wants to hear.
I agree with him that the retaliatory tariffs don't make much sense but equally basically throwing out copyright law would be crazy, as the US would likely respond in kind and it'd probably hurt Europe more in the long run.
They should stop the anti-competitive practices that prevent third-party app stores and so on though.
Anti-circumvention laws are not the same thing as copyright. Not in the least. And it's very debatable that copyright should be used for tractors, for example.
If you invent a new engine you can patent it. But if you make an engine that works like any other engine, why should society help you prevent your customers from tinkering with it?
> basically throwing out copyright law would be crazy
Slightly off topic, but aren't we in the process of "throwing out copyright law" for the purposes of LLMs a.k.a the "automated" version of enshitification anyway? We've stretched "fair use" so much already, it won't be too big of a challenge to fit reverse engineering (removing DRM) into it.
> In particular, the companies purchase financial information from a data broker before offering a nurse a shift; if the nurse is carrying a lot of credit-card debt, especially if some of that is delinquent, the amount offered is reduced. "Because, the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come into work and do that grunt work of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying."
I think this should be made illegal.
But I also think judging from how bad people are at making laws, what we will get is something that will make it worse for everyone.
It's really funny to me that with both the AI act and GDPR, you will see swathes of threads of people on HN bashing the law only to then later discover the purpose of this legislation from first principles.
The same could come to Europe (lowballing broke people), because you can just make employees give their consent by baking it into all employment contracts. Just like the working time directive opt-out (HR say "take it or leave it" to 99.9% of people).
It probably already happens where it's already acceptable to request financial checks such as the finance industry.
15 years back, I was subscribed to EU official blog which presents their side of tabloid headlines like "Overpaid French suits want to ban blue stickers on only freckled apples". Did they publish ones for AI Act and GDPR, especially as more countries elect manly commonsense billionaire sympathizers?
In communist countries, labor unions are controlled by the party and serve the interests of the state, not the workers. Strikes are illegal and any pretense of collective bargaining is a farce.
> Oh, you are worried about power asymmetry? What are you, a communist?
If you were in a communist country you are definitely worried about the power asymmetry, and rushing to go to West Germany or just out of the USSR, or to the USA from Cuba or out of pre-capitalist China if you could.
Seems to me that the illegal part would be the cartel of the 3 apps that cornered the whole market.
An app that doesn’t do this could eat their lunch.
Nurses work at hospitals, the supply of which is constrained artificially by the state, so once you sell all of the ones in a region on your app, you have a monopoly. It is a type of regulatory capture.
To clarify, what I think should be made illegal is to take advantage of people by using information about how much debt that they have to lowball them.
Cory Doctorow is one of the best contemporary authors that I know, nearly everything he writes is concise, poignant and relevant and he writes new articles nearly every day. You can find his writing here [1]. One of his most memorable articles for me is about remote attestation and the context in lives in [2], absolutely worth a read.
The thing I don't understand is how unethical stuff like this comes to be built. Take the example where nurses with debt get lower wages because they are desperate. Some manager had to come up with this idea and then get various people to agree and then get a team of engineers to implement it. Thats a lot of people agreeing to do something so clearly evil (to me at least). Are there that many people who just don't care? Whenever I read stories similar to this I always wonder how many people went along without objecting.
If you read the article, he talks about this in this fourth constraint, labor:
> The final constraint, which did hold back platform decay for quite some time, is labor. Tech workers have historically been respected and well-paid, without unions. The power of tech workers did not come from solidarity, but from scarcity, Doctorow said. The minute bosses ordered tech workers to enshittify the product they were loyally working on, perhaps missing various important social and family events to ship it on time, those workers could say no—perhaps in a much more coarse way. Tech workers could simply walk across the street ""and have a new job by the end of the day"" if the boss persisted.
> So labor held off enshittification after competition, regulation, and interoperability were all systematically undermined and did so for quite some time—until the mass tech layoffs. There have been half a million tech workers laid off since 2023, more are announced regularly, sometimes in conjunction with raises for executive salaries and bonuses. Now, workers cannot turn their bosses down because there are ten others out there just waiting to take their job.
For further listening, Cory has produced a podcast for CBC that might be a good accompaniment to this article called "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?".
For the “Uber of Nursing” example, if employers want to play games like this, the best way to combat it is with symmetrical information. Employees should share their salary offers on a website, which would empower them to get a better sense of whether they are being paid fairly.
> There once was an ""old good internet"", Doctorow said, but it was too difficult for non-technical people to connect up to; web 2.0 changed that, making it easy for everyone to get online, but that led directly into hard-to-escape walled gardens.
Maybe we should not 'democratize' some technologies and keep a bit of difficulty as a gatekeeper.
(Yes, I know this is not really a moral position to hold)
Readit News
> Europe and Canada have passed strong right-to-repair legislation, but those efforts ""have been hamstrung by the anti-circumvention laws"" (like the DMCA). (...) That raises the question of why these countries don't repeal their versions of the DMCA.
> The answer is tariffs, it seems. The US trade representative has long threatened countries with tariffs if they did not have such a law on their books. ""Happy 'Liberation Day' everyone"", he said with a smile, which resulted in laughter, cheering, and applause. The response of most countries when faced with the US tariffs (or threats thereof) has been to impose retaliatory tariffs, making US products more expensive for their citizens, which is a weird way to punish Americans. (...)
> What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services. (...)
> Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it. The same could be done for car and tractor diagnostic devices and more.
Europe should do this now; it would be incredibly good -- and incredibly fun.
No it isn't.
Like literally, the US and it's tariff madness has literally nothing to do with it. The EU and Canada are both signatories to the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and signatories of the WTO provisions that include continued operation to it. They are international treaties with a wide degree of international support, not US inventions. Christ, Europe had a lot more to do with the wording of the anticircumvention provisions in the WIPO treaty than the US did.
People should stop taking Doctorow seriously. He has a long track record of making shit up that is what his audience wants to hear.
Dead Comment
They should stop the anti-competitive practices that prevent third-party app stores and so on though.
If you invent a new engine you can patent it. But if you make an engine that works like any other engine, why should society help you prevent your customers from tinkering with it?
No laws against removing the region lock on your DVD player.
No laws against fixing your tractor with 3rd party parts.
When Amazon deletes Nineteen Eighty-Four from your Kindle, you can put it right back.
When a games company "turns off" the game you bought, turn it right back on again.
Slightly off topic, but aren't we in the process of "throwing out copyright law" for the purposes of LLMs a.k.a the "automated" version of enshitification anyway? We've stretched "fair use" so much already, it won't be too big of a challenge to fit reverse engineering (removing DRM) into it.
I think this should be made illegal.
But I also think judging from how bad people are at making laws, what we will get is something that will make it worse for everyone.
It probably already happens where it's already acceptable to request financial checks such as the finance industry.
...Oh, you are worried about power asymmetry? What are you, a communist?
Worker rights only exist in free societies.
If you were in a communist country you are definitely worried about the power asymmetry, and rushing to go to West Germany or just out of the USSR, or to the USA from Cuba or out of pre-capitalist China if you could.
Seems to me that the illegal part would be the cartel of the 3 apps that cornered the whole market.
An app that doesn’t do this could eat their lunch.
Nurses work at hospitals, the supply of which is constrained artificially by the state, so once you sell all of the ones in a region on your app, you have a monopoly. It is a type of regulatory capture.
[1] https://pluralistic.net
[2] https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/
> The final constraint, which did hold back platform decay for quite some time, is labor. Tech workers have historically been respected and well-paid, without unions. The power of tech workers did not come from solidarity, but from scarcity, Doctorow said. The minute bosses ordered tech workers to enshittify the product they were loyally working on, perhaps missing various important social and family events to ship it on time, those workers could say no—perhaps in a much more coarse way. Tech workers could simply walk across the street ""and have a new job by the end of the day"" if the boss persisted.
> So labor held off enshittification after competition, regulation, and interoperability were all systematically undermined and did so for quite some time—until the mass tech layoffs. There have been half a million tech workers laid off since 2023, more are announced regularly, sometimes in conjunction with raises for executive salaries and bonuses. Now, workers cannot turn their bosses down because there are ten others out there just waiting to take their job.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353
Deleted Comment
Because the employer has power and the employee doesn’t.
Of course they should, but they have much more influence on the law so they don’t.
Maybe we should not 'democratize' some technologies and keep a bit of difficulty as a gatekeeper.
(Yes, I know this is not really a moral position to hold)
"A ship in harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are built for"