Here are some examples:
- Facebook uses its data on social activity to identify trending startups. They even go further and have purchased a VPN provider to spy on traffic so they can identify startups they want to acquire or crush.
- Google uses search data to figure out what types of websites are trending and then simply creates cards that appear on top of their search results so that users never have to leave Google. A lot of websites have lost revenue or simply folded due to the loss of traffic.
- Amazon is no different. The use internal search data to figure out what products are trending and then simply creates Amazon Basic products to kill them.
The issue is they leverage user supplied data and their existing market share to create noncompetitive environments for new incumbents. It's a massive intelligence gathering operation that gives them unfair advantage by allowing them to surveil the vast marketplace and target trending startups in near realtime. Heh, the startups don't even know they are being targeted until it is too late.
They've basically become malicious actors.
As someone who enjoys Google Cards and Amazon Basic (Facebook I will give you), I would not be happy if the government deemed the product I enjoy to be illegal under the basis of protecting my available choices.
I am with you. You should have choice. That is exactly what antitrust law is written for.
Cards are one example, the best example is Google's plan to kill comparison shopping sites because it was eating into their marketshare. Washington Post put it best:
> Quoting internal Google documents and emails, the report shows that the company created a list of rival comparison shopping sites that it would artificially lower in the general search results, even though tests showed that Google users “liked the quality of the [rival] sites” and gave negative feedback on the proposed changes.
Google reworked its search algorithm at least four times, the documents show, and altered its established rating criteria before the proposed changes received “slightly positive” user feedback. Internal Google documents predicted that the proposed changes would reduce rivals’ user traffic up to 20 percent and subsequently reported producing the desired results once the changes were implemented.[2]
[1] https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/you-should-be-outrag...
The list goes on and on...
To be fair on this point, if the salient content is facts (for example, the expected weight of a healthy cocker spaniel), then the originating site didn't "own" the content anyway.
They certainly have copyright on the presentation of the facts, but that just obligates Google to run the original content through some sort of algorithm (or something) to make sure they're not violating copyright.
The "first generation" of US antitrust rules were built around emergent giant of those times. Oil and it's transportation. Shiping. Infrastructure. Big, megalithic chunks of a maturing manufacturing economy, especially bottlenecks.
New era of commerce, new "trusts." New concentrations of influence that change the rules of the game in a corrupting way.
IDK if I'd frame it exactly the same way. Personally, I don't think we did the best job on the last generation of trusts. Data is referred to a bit to vaguely for my taste. I agree with you that working with a concept (trusts) that's nt ideal in the first place. But it's not a nonsense argument.
Any attempt to claim "ownership" of data by the sole virtue of it collecting information "about you" would necessarily constitute a restriction of the rights of others. And it would fail utterly when you have data that is inherently about multiple people and not about any one of them individually. And assuming you could license data about you (because if you can't then fundamental parts of current society and its structures wouldn't function) then this would change absolutely nothing, as any interaction would come with such a license.
We should, by all means, have strong privacy protections, both technological and (in some very careful cases) legislative. However, framing that as "our data" would lead to unintended consequences. Let's find a framing that works.
You're not actually refuting his point about this being data feudalism. What you're saying is that you're the lord of this website and in exchange for letting serfs onto it you have a right to their data. It's the same thing as traditional land/labor feudalism with just a few words exchanged.
And as for the "feudalism" analogy: no, I'm most assuredly not saying that, don't put words in my mouth. If people voluntarily visit my site and send me data, the natural consequence is that I now have that data and can do whatever I want with it. Anything other than that would be an artificial restriction, and one not justified by simple possessiveness on data given that the same possessiveness applies in the other direction as well.
You're aware that the EU quite violently disagrees with this assessment and member states, starting in 2018, will have the ability to levy cripling fines on such behavior.
Plenty of serfs were voluntary as well. If your only problem with feudalism is that some serfs weren't then maybe you are a feudalist.
>the natural consequence is that I now have that data and can do whatever I want with it. Anything other than that would be an artificial restriction
No no no. Nothing here is "natural" OR "artificial." Property relations, your ownership of a website at all, the fact that you receive any data about who is visiting it, all of these things can be said to be as natural or artifical as the person speaking wishes them to be.
As for natural and artificial, my point is that regardless of the nature of the relationship, it's artificial to hand someone a pile of data but then arbitrarily restrict what they can do with that data. That's true whether you're talking about copyright, DRM, or personal data.
Your ownership of a website is just as artificial as a government restricting what you can do with it. That's why I say the terms natural and artifical have no place here.
>People use websites, and draw value from them, and give data to them
Serfs use tenures and draw value from them and give loyalty to them.
The problem in your sentence is that I believe it should be rephrased like this: "People use websites, and draw value from them, and give data to their owners" which makes the feudal analogy a lot clearer and represents your own views better, for example the "I" in this sentence: "I do own my data, including my data about the people who visited my website."
>They don't swear fealty to them.
By fealty you mean what? Swearing service to a lord in exchange for a plot of land? But you expect visitors to your website to swear some of their data to you in exchange for the info on your site.
>It's an intentionally provocative term with little bearing on concrete details
You and I disagree on that then.
When you bought and paid for the server, and you're the only one who has administrative access to it, that's not at all artificial. That's a simple question of who created it and who controls it.
The natural state of affairs is for anyone who has bits to be able to process and copy those bits. Any restrictions on that, whether in the form of copyright or data-collection laws, are necessarily artificial. That doesn't make those restrictions wrong; for instance, I think it's entirely appropriate and likely uncontroversial to prohibit any public disclosure of people's physical location (e.g. home address or current GPS location), for safety reasons. I'm simply arguing that any such restrictions are artificially constructed, so we should talk about which restrictions are necessary and reasonable.
By contrast, a framing that treats data about someone as somehow "belonging" to them implies restrictions on basic things like the ability to communicate with others. (At the most basic level, you'd be talking about telling another person some personal information about you and expecting your "please don't share that information" to have some force of law; that's a restriction on that person's natural ability to communicate any knowledge they have.) Such a framing flips the polarity around from "which restrictions are necessary to protect people" to "which limited rights are granted over that data in order to accomplish things", and I think that's a fundamentally broken approach.
> Serfs use tenures and draw value from them and give loyalty to them.
Castles and towns in the middle ages got rather poor Internet service, and changing loyalties tended to be frowned upon, to say the least. Your continuous attempts to reframe things in those terms are not welcome. What changes, precisely, do you want to see? If you want to talk about regulations on the collection and use of data, let's talk about those. I'm not going to spend time trying to map that into some arbitrary and intentionally provocative analogy about "serfs", any more than I'm going to attempt to map websites to analogous models of cars or gothic architectural styles.
> But you expect visitors to your website to swear some of their data to you in exchange for the info on your site.
I'm ignoring the charged term "swear", here. I expect that they voluntarily provide data they're willing to provide in exchange for things they see value in that use that data, yes. For instance, they might provide information on what things they like or dislike, or make connections with other users, or at a lower level, their browser may make a series of requests with a given order, timing, and parameters.
Someone posted about how our current state is tech feudalism, you commented to refute that. You obviously did want to talk about this analogy.
>When you bought and paid for the server, and you're the only one who has administrative access to it, that's not at all artificial. That's a simple question of who created it and who controls it.
>The natural state of affairs is for anyone who has bits to be able to process and copy those bits. Any restrictions on that, whether in the form of copyright or data-collection laws, are necessarily artificial. That doesn't make those restrictions wrong; for instance, I think it's entirely appropriate and likely uncontroversial to prohibit any public disclosure of people's physical location (e.g. home address or current GPS location), for safety reasons. I'm simply arguing that any such restrictions are artificially constructed, so we should talk about which restrictions are necessary and reasonable.
What prevents your website from being my website? What prevents me from just walking in and taking that server? Then I could take it home, set it up and run "your" website but now it'd be mine. Well property laws prevent that and property laws are just as artificially constructed as copyright laws or data-collection laws or any other law really. That's why I'm asserting that your "ownership" of a website isn't natural and that the laws curtailing it aren't artificial. Artificial and natural never even enter into yet you keep trying to assert that.
And that second paragraph could very easily be reworked into something like this: "The natural state of affairs is for anyone who has serfs to be able to order and demand fealty from those serfs."
>By contrast, a framing that treats data about someone as somehow "belonging" to them implies restrictions on basic things like the ability to communicate with others. (At the most basic level, you'd be talking about telling another person some personal information about you and expecting your "please don't share that information" to have some force of law; that's a restriction on that person's natural ability to communicate any knowledge they have.)
The point of law is to restrict people's ability to do things. Does a framing that treats websites as somehow "belonging" to someone imply restrictions? Of course it does! Yet you're all for that curtailing of freedom.
>Such a framing flips the polarity around from "which restrictions are necessary to protect people" to "which limited rights are granted over that data in order to accomplish things", and I think that's a fundamentally broken approach.
Does a framing that treats websites as someone "belonging" to someone also flip this polarity?
>I'm ignoring the charged term "swear", here.
Then let's also remove the charged term "natural."
>Castles and towns in the middle ages got rather poor Internet service, and changing loyalties tended to be frowned upon, to say the least.
Okay, well on the web when I use your website but then decide I want to change loyalties how do I get you to give me and then delete my data? Going beyond you, how do I get anyone to do that? It seems that websites are determined to hold my data whether I want out or not, much like the serf in our example.
This is actually a perfect segway into what kind of change I'd like. Originally I had been a bit stumped about this but upon rereading your sentence above was really perfect. It seems that you and I agree that a good way to prevent tech feudalism is to give people the ability to change loyalties. In the case of user data that would seem to be some right to user data that allows me to collect it from you and request that you scrub it. Otherwise I'm not really able to change loyalties am I?
> Then let's also remove the charged term "natural."
We can call it the default state of affairs, if you like. Because there is a default, here.
Forget computers for a moment. If you tell me the statement "foo is bar", then the default state of affairs is that I now have heard from you that "foo is bar", and I can tell other people "foo is bar" or "X said 'foo is bar'". That's what I'm referring to as "natural" or "default".
There's an obvious extrapolation from that to facts like "X visited my site on this date" or "X follows Y".
Why don't we talk about policies and not analogies, here, since policies are both more concrete?
> Okay, well on the web when I use your website but then decide I want to change loyalties how do I get you to give me and then delete my data? Going beyond you, how do I get anyone to do that?
You ask nicely for them to provide such functionality, and then go "oh well" if they say no. And then you leave anyway, because unlike any strained analogy made in this thread, you're still free to leave, and you won't wind up killed or imprisoned for doing so. You're free to make use of any site you like, and stop using it whenever you like. And they're free to provide or not-provide any services they'd like.
> It seems that websites are determined to hold my data whether I want out or not
Try making that observation without using the phrase "my data" to describe "data about you" (or perhaps more generally "data that in some way mentions you"; it's not clear what you intend here, which is all the more reason to clarify). You might find that the resulting observation provides less support for your assertion. For instance, I could phrase an equivalent statement as "Websites are determined to maintain the integrity and completeness of their stored data regardless of unauthorized user actions." Sounds equally reasonable, and no less valid. The framing "my data" is presuming the point you have yet to prove.
> It seems that you and I agree that a good way to prevent tech feudalism
Still rejecting this framing device, and not agreeing to it as a premise.
> is to give people the ability to change loyalties.
I would say, more precisely, that people are free to use or stop using any site they like.
> In the case of user data that would seem to be some right to user data that allows me to collect it from you and request that you scrub it. Otherwise I'm not really able to change loyalties am I?
Of course you are; you can stop using the site at any time. You cannot, on the other hand, un-say what you've already said. While you may ask that someone pretend they've never heard it, I don't believe you should have the ability to demand that. You said it, someone observed and noted that you said it, and now you want their record of that observation destroyed.
(To be clear, here, I'm a huge supporter of privacy, and of services that provide such privacy. And I intentionally choose to use such services and avoid many others. I'd love to see more sites and applications designed to give users more control and agency over data they provide, and over how that data is stored and processed. I'd also love to see more distributed, federated services.)
Sure but if you learn a dirty secret about me then the default state of affairs is that I can kill you or steal your server. A law which prevents that murder or theft is "artificial." Your position as I understand it is that you have a legal right to that data AND legal protection from "natural" modes of recourse. Which puts our disagreement into context – one "artifical" state of affairs versus a different but also "artificial" state of affairs.
>Why don't we talk about policies and not analogies, here, since policies are both more concrete?
Because this is a thread about an analogy - how our relationship with online data mimics the relationship serfs had with the land they worked aka data feudalism.
>Still rejecting this framing device, and not agreeing to it as a premise.
Then I'm not sure what you're doing here. The discussion is explicitly about framing our relationship with our data as feudalism. Nothing you've said so far has disproved the framing. To you my labor isn't "my labor", it's "labor provided by me" and anything which restricts the feudal lord from extracting or using that labor in any way is "artificial" because the "natural" state of labor relations is feudalism. When this discussion started I was really interested in seeing what your personal problems are with feudalism. I thought maybe it'd be something about base human rights or the power relation a lord has over a serf but it seems your main problem is that serfs couldn't switch between lords, not that lords existed at all.
---------------------------
Non-feudalism discussion:
>Try making that observation without using the phrase "my data" to describe "data about you" (or perhaps more generally "data that in some way mentions you"; it's not clear what you intend here, which is all the more reason to clarify). You might find that the resulting observation provides less support for your assertion.
Well no, I do see it as my data. If I am in front of you in line at a bank and while signing a form you glimpse my credit card number is it now not "my credit card number?" Of course not. What if your coworker figures out your HN password? Is it no longer "your" HN password? (In the ownership sense, not in the sense that you'd obviously change it.)
> The framing "my data" is presuming the point you have yet to prove.
Prove it? There's nothing to prove, you and I have a philosophical disagreement about the nature of ownership and data.
>Of course you are; you can stop using the site at any time. You cannot, on the other hand, un-say what you've already said. While you may ask that someone pretend they've never heard it, I don't believe you should have the ability to demand that. You said it, someone observed and noted that you said it, and now you want their record of that observation destroyed.
Do you feel similarly about HIPAA? Should a doctor be able to take anything you've said to them and have ultimate power over what they do with that information? What about things you mention to your lawyer or psychiatrist?
Well, yeah, I don't want to unravel the fundamental foundations of civil society, and I don't think you do either. Absolutely nothing we're talking about here is anywhere close to that important, and I think it's reasonable to take those as fundamental premises. So yes, I think I have a right to not be killed and to not have my equipment stolen, and I think suggesting otherwise is ridiculously hyperbolic. That's not "putting our disagreement in context", that's you saying "we have laws about murder so why not laws about how data about people can be used", which as a comparison is ridiculous on its face.
> Because this is a thread about an analogy - how our relationship with online data mimics the relationship serfs had with the land they worked aka data feudalism.
I responded to a comment that started with the sentence "We can't let a few companies own our data.". I responded, specifically, to the framing as "our data", and offered a counterpoint for why that framing begs the question. I have no interest in trying to draw analogies to the dark ages or to any other political models, when it's far more straightforward to talk about data, websites, potential policies, potential legal restrictions, and potential outcomes.
> Then I'm not sure what you're doing here. The discussion is explicitly about framing our relationship with our data as feudalism.
No, this thread is about data and the uses and control of it. See above.
> To you my labor
Nope, I said absolutely nothing about labor. Where did you even get that from? If you're going to make up positions and then argue against them, you're just talking to yourself. And one of many problems with making up analogies is that you might then be inclined to make invalid assumptions about other unmentioned aspects of those analogies associated with any given position.
> When this discussion started I was really interested in seeing what your personal problems are with feudalism.
Off the top of my head? People regularly died of numerous causes that are almost unheard-of today, had very few rights of their own, had a drastically shorter expected lifespan, had essentially no prospects for improving their lot in life, had minimal access to basic information or even basic literacy, and a hundred other problems, quite aside from likely not being able to leave and seek whatever meager prospects might exist elsewhere. None of which have anything to do with people visiting websites, interacting with web applications, and voluntarily providing data. So no, I'm not interested in talking about the state of society in the dark ages.
> Non-feudalism discussion:
Thank you for this.
> Well no, I do see it as my data.
If you're walking down the street wearing a blue shirt, and someone is sitting on the street corner keeping a tally of shirt colors, is that "your data"? I don't see any reasonable basis on which you could claim that. More importantly, it's not a framing that provides a helpful basis on which to draw conclusions.
Now, on the flip side, to provide a point on the other end of the spectrum, I do think it's dangerous and unreasonable to allow people to run facial recognition on cameras pointed at street corner and post timestamped location information of everyone they recognize. I have no problem with prohibiting that (given appropriate care to define the scope of the prohibition), and despite that I still wouldn't frame that as "because it's the data of the people walking by". I'd frame it as "allowing the publication of that information would do great harm, restricting it is a relatively small imposition, and such a restriction (assuming careful scoping) doesn't stop people from doing more reasonable things in the process".
> Prove it? There's nothing to prove, you and I have a philosophical disagreement about the nature of ownership and data.
If that philosophy leads to conclusions about what actions we should take regarding the use and control of data, then those conclusions require supporting arguments based in premises we can agree on. Right now, you're pre-supposing that "data about you" is something you should have control over, which I would counter by saying that "data in my head, or recorded by me" is not generally something you should have control over. If you want to draw conclusions based on that, they'll all be conditional on that premise, which you have yet to provide any arguments to support.
> If I am in front of you in line at a bank and while signing a form you glimpse my credit card number
I think we should redesign credit cards to operate using asymmetric keys rather than passing around an "open secret" that anyone can use to issue charges. But apart from that, I don't think it's useful to argue about whether it's "your data" or "data about you"; I think it's useful to talk about what can be done with that information. For instance, if someone spots that number and proceeds to use it to attempt to make charges, I'd call that some sort of theft or fraud.
> What if your coworker figures out your HN password?
Then I have bigger problems. I'd appreciate it if they told me first, so I could fix the gap in my security that allowed them to get it. And in certain circumstances (with more high-value accounts), one could argue that publishing that information before I've had the opportunity to change it could do irreparable harm (though any potential restriction on that would need exceptional care to avoid restricting legitimate security research). On the other hand, sites like "haveibeenpwned" keep huge databases of information about people, and use that information for the legitimate purpose of helping people. And if the compromised password ends up in a database of "known/common passwords", I don't see any reason I or anyone else should have any claim over that; it's a simple fact.
Anything publicly accessible is not yours entirely.
To be much more precise: the server and the code running on it are under my control, and data is voluntarily sent to that server.
JoshTriplett owns his website by the virtue of control he has - it's up to him if and what is displayed on it. OTOH, data is just facts. JoshTriplett doesn't control the fact that his website displayed this-and-that content on 2017-10-29 11:11:00 UTC, nor do you control the fact that you had this-and-that official name, SSN, and bank account number on 2017-10-29 11:11:00 UTC. Those are just facts.
And as much as I understand the concern about privacy, I fear some proposed solutions just go straight up against the fundamental nature of reality. Facts are, you can't own them.
Quote:
According to the FCC, the goal of the law was to "let anyone enter any communications business -- to let any communications business compete in any market against any other."
It's that simple, and a shame that the law is not applied properly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
Because "The Economist" specifically wants to muddle this issue and present it as merely a matter of economic configuration or transitional structural phenomena. Some of happen to think it is more fundamentally about Human Rights, such as 'Privacy of Thought', etc.
Your point re. x5 is correct. Same thing happened to John D. R. who got richer after Standard Oil was broken up.
If it doesn't quack like a duck, and a duck gun doesn't work against it, maybe it's not a duck?
If it's an issue with data collection or privacy, why even talk about antitrust? If you break Google up into five smaller companies, you don't actually shrink the amount of information collected, you actually just grew it 5x as much!
Why not just pass laws specific about the data collection if that's actually the issue?