Over a decade ago, a ton of tech companies (including Google) coordinated a “blackout the Internet” day of protest against U.S. legislation that would have required them to alter DNS to fight piracy. Interesting that now that France actually does it, they say they will comply.
In the last decade Tech has become part of the establishment. They are one of the dominant controlling forces.
The blackout was _not_ about preserving free speech, or any other moral high road. It was purely about control. Tech hadn’t yet cemented their position as a dominant player and didn’t want to cede the control they had.
Now that they’ve embedded themselves in the ruling class they don’t care as much because they already have control.
Tech has always been part of the establishment, funded by capital trying to solve capital's problems. The only part of tech that really deviates from this is the free software community, which has always been hostile to capital. The blackout day emerged from people, not the industry, and people have changed.
idunno, I remember when everything cool I found on the internet was on a .edu domain, because that's almost all there was. But yeah, capitalist tech has always been part of the establishment. A lot of the good stuff comes from non-profit-related motivations, fortunately.
I remember how I used to call a BBS rather than go to the internet because there was much more than just universities and their research - took a long time until there wasn't a reason to call the BBS, around the point when all the people moved their content.
This is the right line of thinking. My interpretation is slightly different - I think the tech companies have run afoul of various norms when it comes to things like the privacy of customers, anti-trust, taxation, etc. Because they are now reliant on these unethical ways of holding onto economic power or growing their economic power, they need to not get into trouble with governments. This means playing nice with them so that they do not become subject to legislation that will rein them in.
> For better or worse, if you do business in <x> you follow <x>'s laws or GTFO.
That does rather imply that the laws are worthless. Obviously there is going to be someone who doesn't do business in France and operates a public DNS server that doesn't censor anything.
Regardless of that, I would challenge your premise. You can violate an unjust law and risk the consequences. And if you get the PR right, there may not even be any consequences:
But to your point, this is one of the reasons it's important to get these laws off the books and keep them off the books. Once you have the law, the government gets to choose the test case. You know perfectly well they'll be using it against dissidents and false positives tomorrow, but the test case is going to be some loathsome terrorists or a commercial piracy operation with no shades of grey, and then that's the case that sets the precedent.
> Obviously there is going to be someone who doesn't do business in France and operates a public DNS server that doesn't censor anything.
and so when the rights holders notice enough people pirating using dns resolvers they can't force to do anything via the french courts, they'll probably just take it up with the french ISPs and ask for IP blocks of these resolvers. And I'd guess they may already be trying to IP block various piracy sites.
Will be interesting to see them play whack-a-mole. I wonder if at some point France will just start maintaining national blocklists, that if you want to run an ISP or reply to DNS queries from France, you are legally obligated to follow (or get blocked yourself); from the article, it sounds like the current law is significantly short of that so the whack-a-mole will continue.
Italy has the system you're thinking of. It's called Piracy Shield. Upon receiving a blocking request from the government through the automated system developed for this purpose, all ISPs are required to block the domain or IP within 30 minutes or else their CEOs could be criminally charged and go to jail.
Does it work in practice? The Russian censorship machine has only reached these kinds of reaction times in the last year or so, and they had to boil the frog for a decade to achieve that.
What? The tech ( dns in this case) is as neutral as you can get, these are french courts ordering the block, and the dns technicians are controlled by american corps. Dns just executes the orders of the corp, which in turn obeys the local courts.
Tech is under corp in the chain or command, which in turn is under national law.
Chinese state employees physically manage the computers. Apple abandoned the encryption technology it used elsewhere after China would not allow it. And the digital keys that unlock information on those computers are stored in the data centers they’re meant to secure.
Google never left China, they literally just moved to a new building on the other side of the road (in Zhongguancun, Beijing). They even “left a couple of boxes there”[1].
Google in China is virtually a different company than the US - laptops and desktops issued by Google in the US will automatically erase their disks if they detect they're in one of a few countries (Iran, China, Russia, NK, etc.) and there is an entirely separate flow for workers there since GMail and the corporate intranet are inaccessible.
This is why I can never take their current alleged passion for privacy fully seriously. Sure, I do appreciate some of the features they're coming out with, but I don't trust them to not eventually drop this marketing angle and pull rugs when it's no longer profitable
Considering that it is run by a duplicitous Uncle Scrooge it is exactly what is going to happen.
If the App Store golden goose get taken over (by DMA and similar legislation) they will lose a significant share of their revenue growth and it seems that this is simply unacceptable to current Apple leadership.
The iPhone is losing its luster and competitors are coming with extremely competitive devices at much cheaper prices, even at the most premium end there is not much of an edge, the product has been perfectly commoditized. Pursuing luxury will inexorably make it a smaller and smaller share of the market every year passing.
The iPad and the Mac are pretty small share of the revenue too, by pursuing luxury Apple has put itself into the same corner, repeating previous mistake Steve Jobs warned against in an interview (while working at Next).
I don't see how they reconciliate their need for growth without fucking over their users at some point on the privacy bullshit. It's not as if they don't have a long history of doing that. There is one thing that is clear about Apple as a company: it loves money much more than its customers; in a way that makes regular companies look like boy scouts...
Yep. Net neutrality, my left foot. MAANG are all about participating in PRISM, monopolizing access, and choosing who can and can't speak because they compromise a for-profit, oligopolic, technocratic cartel.
Piracy is simply Terrible, it's chopping the dear copyright holders off at the knees, they are frequently having to go on food stamps, and it's unclear how they'll continue on.
/s
Fighting online piracy: First world, or even zeroth world problem.
It's not loke the pirates are saying "hmm, should I pay exorbitant rates for this or should I pirate it?"
The real competition is alternatives: "should I bother pirating this or just go do some other activity."
Bottom line: In most cases it's actually free marketing, and has a net positive effect for the copyright holders. The continual attempts to aggressively clamp down really says a lot about the mentality of the Big Market Forces, *iaa, *aa, and now MS and Elgoog. Even when it's good fertilizer for their perpetual evergreen money tree, they still flip out.
It's all about profit protectionism of the moats around streaming to enforce the arbitrary extraction of gotcha capitalism subscription fees from as many people as possible for as much as possible.
It was not about standing up against IP juggernauts in the interest of users, but in the interest of themselves -- it was tech companies flexing their strength to show that cooperation with tech companies was required, and that they are open to cooperation in other ways too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PI...