We need to treat companies that put themselves into a position like utilities as utilities. Give individuals actual transparency of why actions where taken, and an ability to appeal these decisions with transparency.
It will cost more, but that is ok. What we have now is that the actions have caused real harm and the companies are unwilling to justify them. That's an abuse that needs to be removed through law.
The hard slap they got from the government was enough to apparently permanently change the company culture around treatment of users and other businesses.
I see a lot of the excesses we see coming out of Google, Twitter, FB, to be a consequence of there being, well, zero consequences for their behavior. They're like petulant children who never learned limits and think it's ok to do whatever they want, no matter who they hurt. That's exactly how you teach children -- give them limits. Ironically, the same rule applies to adults.
In general, I think that's also a point we can draw from the cyberpunk genre, or maybe from Harry Harrison's old-school prefiguration of it in the Stainless Steel Rat series - the eponymous creature being one well suited to thrive "within the walls" of a society increasingly sclerotized with technocratic bureaucracy, but perhaps equally suited to a life of gnawing through the circumscriptions imposed by competing technofeudalist fiefdoms.
I view my digital purchases as things I am forever renting.
Movies/Music/Books can be displayed and played back on damn near anything. Games, especially modern games, exist in both a variable state (constantly revised/updated), but also with a much more limited ability to access the content.
That experience forever turned me off to relying on digital-only.
To your points, having a PSN account is necessary but I can always create a new one if need be.
Whenever possible, I prioritize non-DRM media for purchase.
I don’t think they’re really interested in that, since the accounts are almost by definition making them a bunch of money.
So, not an Amazon account ban, but you quickly learn you are not "buying" a movie, but renting it, sometimes with silly restrictions like "only from these IPs".
If you think about it, this shouldn't be all that surprising - after all, this is exactly how intuition works, and the human mind runs very much on intuition, people just don't realize it (at the object level).
It’s still a concern because of the mechanics of the thing, but it appears less applicable for amazon at the moment.
Not that that's Nintendo's fault but I think something like this will be the fate of every account that's not used, closed or deleted for a long time and owning your data and software possessions would protect against it.
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I run my own mail server but my VPS provider could be coerced to yank it from me. You’ve made me uncomfortable with revelations. Damn, we’re fucked.
[] Every person's thinking and writing is mostly just a pastiche stitched together of thoughts they heard or read from others anyway. (And this is, of course, the meme idea, which is not an original idea itself either)
I've got two comments on this.
Firstly, you're already doing much better than most people. Make frequent backups, and if it comes down to it, you can always point DNS at a new provider.
Second, don't put anything on a VPS that you aren't willing to let the VPS provider or whatever Gov. has jurisdiction access. Where email falls on that spectrum for you is of course your own decision.
But in every society a small circle of privileged people have always been the norm and despite more wider access to information today it seems like consolidation of power and wealth seems to be trending upward.
So yes, right now we've woken up in a world that is not so much cyberpunk as it is techno-feudalism: more and more do you need a presence on the Internet to do things in meatspace... And that presence is by the grace of several feudal lords (Google foremost) - woe betide you should you ever displease them. You do not really own your email adres, your phone (number) or (pretty soon) even your computer. You're merely a serf.
On the plus side, the momentum for legal measurements seems to be increasing. Let's hope they do get broken up. Power, like plutonium, is dangerous if too concentrated. Regardless of where that concentration lies.