555
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] cybersandwich@lemmy.world 207 points 2 months ago

Another way to encourage interoperability is to use the government to hold out a carrot in addition to the stick. Through government procurement laws, governments could require any company providing a product or service to the government to not interfere with interoperability. President Lincoln required standard tooling for bullets and rifles during the Civil War, so there’s a long history of requiring this already. If companies don’t want to play nice, they’ll lose out on some lucrative contracts, “but no one forces a tech company to do business with the federal government.”

That's actually a very interesting idea. This benefits the govt as much as anyone else too. It reduces switching costs for govt tech.

[-] Benjaben@lemmy.world 57 points 2 months ago

Can confirm, I've worked for a company doing govt contract work and I really don't know what it'd take for us to have walked away. They can dictate whatever terms they like and still expect to find plenty of companies happy to bid for contracts I think.

[-] errer@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago

It’s because they pay big dollars for comparatively little work with little validation of the quality of said work.

[-] Benjaben@lemmy.world 12 points 2 months ago

That hasn't been quite my experience. For one thing, they cap their pay and don't (can't) negotiate like a private client. So generally less money per given project.

Comparatively little work and little validation also wasn't my experience but I do get the sense it used to be more common, and it did feel like the experience I had was in some sense a reaction to previous contractors taking advantage.

[-] scarabic@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

Did you also have a robustly enshittified consumer business?

I’m thinking of his classic users —> advertisers —> shareholders model and struggling to come up with companies that have that model but also thrive on government contracts.

Yelp is a pretty classic case of enshittification. What government contracts do they have?

[-] aesthelete@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Isn't yelp a pretty easily replaceable thing?

They built a reputation by being one of the first in the space, but they've squandered that reputation and I'm pretty sure someone else could start up a competing "reviews" product.

I'd like to have one that actually showed the history of things like restaurants, because if the head chef leaves and the reviews have gone to shit it turns out that the reviews since the new chef are much more relevant than the 1000+ 5 star reviews of the food of the old guy, and that isn't discoverable anywhere on yelp or anything like yelp.

I'm not sure how you'd protect against enshittification long-term. But I think one of the things that has largely poisoned the spirit of the Internet in general is that everything is always about a "sustainable business model" and "scaling" before anyone even dreams of just writing something up and seeing if they can get it to go popular.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (8 replies)
[-] circuscritic@lemmy.ca 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

DoD already started this with their Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA).

And I agree, the government should use its power to force interoperable and open standards wherever possible and relevant.

[-] demesisx@infosec.pub 12 points 1 month ago

Self driving vehicles are one area I’d like to see that style of standards applied.

[-] MagnumDovetails@lemmy.world 111 points 2 months ago

I like Doctorow, and these point are valid. I just don’t see the American government doing anything to benefit the people, regardless of left or right orientation. Most Americans want abortion access and reasonable restrictions on gun sales; I can’t imagine any candidates, local or federal doing little more than making empty promises on these subjects. Even Obama care is a hugely compromised husk of reasonable healthcare for all, and you still have republicans clamoring to dismantle it.

I hate to be pessimistic, but I don’t think any American politician would take on this topic.

[-] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 24 points 2 months ago

I don’t think any American politician would take on this topic.

That's the feature

[-] General_Effort@lemmy.world 15 points 2 months ago

The FTC under Biden has begun to push back against tech monopolies.

[-] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago

The Supreme Court overturning the Chevron doctrine could stop that pretty quick

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] Corgana@startrek.website 6 points 2 months ago

What you've expressed is not pessimism it's cynicism.

[-] Hikermick@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Don't "both sides" this. It's the kind of thing people use to justify voting third party. Off the top of my head the Biden admin has been working to restore net neutrality and has an antitrust case against Ticketmaster and Live Nation

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[-] buddascrayon@lemmy.world 58 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)
  1. Lack of competition in the market via mergers and acquisitions
  1. Companies change things on the back end (“twiddle their knobs”) to improve their fortunes and have a united, consolidated front to prevent any lawmaking that might constrain them
  1. Companies then embrace tech law to prevent new entrants into the market or consumer rights (see: DMCA, etc.)

This is the criteria he has laid out for the "enshitifacation" of the Internet.

This is funny to me because this is the exact pattern of every industry and service in the United States ever. The Internet isn't special, it's just the latest frontier for capitalism.

[-] demizerone@lemmy.world 12 points 2 months ago

The corporations have been doing this with housing. I live in CA and it is awful how many unhoused there are now, and the supreme Court made it illegal!I hope one day this will finally be the last straw for the uprising.

[-] Blackmist@feddit.uk 42 points 2 months ago

The danger here is that they make "open" standards so horrendously complex and ever evolving that only the billionaire mega corporations can can realistically keep up with them.

See the web where Google now control it completely by having such an enormous amount of code that even Microsoft couldn't be arsed to keep up, or Office Open XML, where 100% compatibility is limited to exactly one product: The one that made it. I just downloaded the documentation for the standard. It is over 5000 fucking pages long. That was part 1 of 4.

[-] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

And those 5000 pages were probably automatically generated from ... something.

load more comments (8 replies)
[-] MehBlah@lemmy.world 39 points 2 months ago

I loved the net when you had to have a clue to be there.

[-] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago

The Eternal September is real

[-] MehBlah@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Eternal September

Mine began in truth about eight years before that. BBS and tymnet nodes enabled by shit load of blue and black box phone calls. Just go look at the neat and orderly wiring in a blue box and know that mine was nothing like that. Mine looked like low rent spider web of components stuffed in a cigar box.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] flop_leash_973@lemmy.world 26 points 2 months ago

Interoperability is how we “seize the means of computation.”

Good luck with that. If the success of the iPhone has taught me anything it is that the average person loves them some incompatible with anything but itself vertical integration.

[-] yesman@lemmy.world 20 points 2 months ago

Through no intervention or design, the market creates perverse incentives that only benefit a few. So the solution is to fiddle with the incentives?

Ya ever notice that "market reform" schemes always seem like negotiations with an angry god? Sometimes I think that ancient civilizations would be much better understood if we stopped referring to the "priest class" and started calling them economists.

[-] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 15 points 2 months ago

My default position remains the same, kill god.

[-] Chronographs@lemmy.zip 17 points 2 months ago

This is nice and all but any solution requires a government captured by capital to work against capital feels as likely to work as thoughts and prayers.

[-] ArchRecord@lemm.ee 39 points 2 months ago

Better than completely allowing capital to do whatever it wants without even attempting to push back.

[-] DJDarren@thelemmy.club 10 points 2 months ago

But what if some change in the right direction doesn't fix everything immediately? Then what?

May as well just not bother.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 19 points 2 months ago

Yup. All of these "solutions" that sound original are known. The reason we don't apply them isn't because we don't know how to solve these issues, it's because capital has pulled the handbrake. This is the problem we have to solve. All the other problems fall downstream and will magically start getting solved if we can release the handbrake. If we're not talking about how to reduce regulatory capture, we're not taking about real solutions.

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] NutWrench@lemmy.world 13 points 2 months ago

I think the best way to make the Internet less sh*tty is to get away from Google search.

I like the SearX search engine. It gives old-school, relevant search results, not google ranked ones.

https://search.inetol.net/

It's also spread out over many separate instances, so you can pick the one that best suits your search needs:

https://searx.space/

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] WamGams@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 months ago

I like Cory Doctorow.

However, I bought the novel Rabbits solely because Doctorow had a front cover blurb praising the novel.

It was downright a bad novel. Doctorow owes me $16.

load more comments
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
555 points (97.9% liked)

Technology

59773 readers
3910 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS