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Let's end Anti-Circumvention. We should own the things we buy! (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 95 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Call me optimistic, but I truly believe there's going to be such a tech boom once the market outside the US is insightful enough to look backwards and point their finger at the things that worked well and that people actually wanted and iterate off that instead of this failed path, dead end.

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  • [–] 33 points 10 months ago

    You don’t think the billionaires will just do the same thing with the non US technology? Unfortunately it’s up to regulators to decide much of this issue, and when they’re in the pocket of the billionaires it’s not good.

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago* (1 child)

    Whilst I have no evidence for it (it's not like we have an alternate timeline to compare to), I believe that the changes to Intellectual Property legislation in the last couple of decades have actually slowed down innovation, probably severely so.

    Certainly in Tech it feels like there's less of a culture of tinkering and hacking (in the original sense of the word) nowadays than back in the 80s and 90s, even though with the Internet and the easy access to information on it one would expect the very opposite.

    Instead of countless crazy ideas like in the age of the generalisation of computing, open source and the birth of the Internet, we instead have closed environments gatekept by large companies for the purposed of extracting rents from everybody, all of which made possible by bought for legislation to stop users from breaking out and competitors from breaking in.

    I mean, outside the natural process of moving everything done before from analog to digital-online (i.e. a natural over time migration to the new environments made available by the inventions of computing and the global open network from the late part of the XX Century) the greatest "innovations" in Tech of the last 30 years were making computers small enough to fit in your pocket (i.e. smartphones) - a natural consequence of the Moore Law - and a digital parrot/mediocre content generator.

    Now wonder that China, with their "we don't give a shit about IP" posture has powered through from Tech backwater to taking the lead from the West on various technologies (first solar, now EVs) even though (from what I've heard) their educational systems doesn't reward innovative thinking.

    So in my view only if Europe ditches the IP legislation pushed by the US in Trade Treaties does it have a chance to be part of any upcoming Tech revolutions rather than stagnating right alongside in the US whilst trying to extract ever diminishing rents from the tail ends of the adoption phases of last century's technologies.

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago

    I agree. The problem is complex and layered, I don't claim to fully understand it myself, but the problem is that innovation came to mean "innovation on creating capital" and not "innovation on serving the customer". If you haven't read Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shosana Zuboff, I highly recommend it. It lays a lot of the groundwork for what Cory Doctorow would go on to call enshittification.

    On top of that, or maybe underneath it, is the idea of disruption. It has long been joked as "ignoring regulations" which has very much become true. When you can't exploit the current systems you create parallel systems where you are in control of the playing field. Disruption to innovation, innovation to disruption. To the consumer it's just disruption.

    What we've ended up with as a result over the past decade and a half or so is a market that is not beholden to the consumer at all. We've long known that boycotts are fairly ineffective aside from some occasional groundswell on "culture war" issues, but it doesn't feel like we're the market anymore. Look at Nvidia's recent presentation at the CES which wasn't even about consumers at all, it was about AI and datacenters mostly. They fully dictate the market at us now and we're just along for the ride.

    BUT to my hopefulness above, there are still a few ways to break free of this, I don't believe things are so bad as that yet. There does seem to be a real choking point for the consumer, Microsoft is another good example. They continue to leverage their market position but people are rapidly exploring options away from them wherever possible. I don't think we'll ever truly see a "year of the Linux desktop" the way some people expect, but the slow erosion is real. Another article I think about a lot is the breaching the trust thermocline which theorizes that customer trust is not a linear system. Executives like to believe that once things begin to sour they can simply make a change to correct course when the course was already lost some time ago.

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