A lot of us haven’t thought of this because companies haven’t often exercised their right to remove content for licensing or contract violations. But the stories are getting more numerous: In 2009, Amazon remotely deleted copies of two Orwell e-books from customers’ Kindles without notice, based on its licensing terms. In 2012, an IT consultant in Norway had her Kindle e-books wiped and her Amazon account closed for nonspecified violations to Kindle’s terms of service. And, in December, a California court finally heard a class-action lawsuit brought by several Californians against Apple, claiming that Apple deleted their non-iTunes music that owners had downloaded from competing music services from 2007 to 2009. All of these actions were based on the licensing terms of the specific e-media. If these actions continue, the public will be at the mercy of the content industries and those industries’ reliance on consumer ignorance about e-media ownership.
At least in the world of music, the mass de-adoption of DRM means that when you buy something from iTunes or the Amazon MP3 store, you do own that file. For everything else, the tendrils of DRM reach deep into our libraries and we do not own anything. This should worry us—it even worries me despite being neck-deep in the Kindle ebook ecosystem.
Here’s the thing: this has nothing to do with preventing piracy, and it has everything to do with getting people to pay multiple times for the same media. And until people understand this, they’ll continue to roll over for the media companies.
(This is not to excuse piracy which does rob creators of their rightful pay, but DRM sure makes it a reasonable-seeming alternative.)
However, the “cashless society†is an idea that people have been batting around since before the ATM even and, as yet, it hasn’t happened; a number of industry analysts and academics don’t think it will (no matter how much safer it may make America, according to a March 2014 article in The Atlantic correlating decreased cash use with decreased crime). Stearns, who studies the sociological implications of payment in society, noted that cash-based interactions still have power in America, such as dropping a coin in homeless person’s cup, adding your tithe to the collection plate at church, or tipping the valet who parks your car.
Fascinating, but until I can walk into any bodega, bar, coffee shop, or dollar slice joint in New York City and pay for my stuff with a card (or Apple Pay) the ATM will be a part of my life. The number of places in this city that still deal with cash as the primary, or even only way of making a transaction is staggering. They’ll also be among the last to switch to any sort of digital payments, because there’s no transaction cost to doing business in cash. In that low-margin world, those fees add up.
The aim of net neutrality is to preserve the Internet as the crucial open sidewalk for communication that it has become. The reason that the Chinese, Russian and Cuban governments fear an open Internet more than anything else is that it allows users to gather and speak to one another. But users of a walled-garden “zero-rated†Internet can’t even click links that go outside the garden. And they certainly won’t be launching their own apps. Linking and building are the fundamental attributes of the Internet — innovation and speech without permission — that must not be compromised away.
Net Neutrality has to go both ways. Limiting who can get to the consumer, and limiting what the consumer can get to through paid tiers is dangerous, and Susan Crawford makes a great point. For someone new to the idea of the Internet, the other half of the digital divide, if they can’t get past their provider’s free, walled garden without paying, will they bother trying?
Before you answer, check how many free versus paid apps move units in mobile app stores.
The Silicon Valley tech company ethos, forged throughout decades of building hardware and software, is predicated on the notion that, equipped with better ideas and better technology than the establishment, the innovators can bypass establishment rules on their way to changing the world. The problem: “Move fast and break things†works when the “things†are software. It works slightly less — and poses a serious safety concern — when those “things†are people.
Just because you use technology to do something old in a new way doesn’t make you a technology company. Uber, and it’s “sharing economy” ilk are making old business models more efficient with technology, but also with exploiting the people who ostensibly work for them. The only innovation and disruption Uber is doing is increasing profit margins on a historically low-margin business model. If this is what passes for technology in 2015, no wonder people like Wedge and I are bummed.
But worse than the brogrammers, I think it’s the ‘entrepreneurs’ that bug me the most. The word feels so tainted now. A friend showed me a profile recently of a guy who claims to have started more than 100 successful companies during the span of a 20 year career or so. My guess is that his criteria for having ‘started’ a company is forming a cohesive vision for a product for a few minutes before lunch. And of course this individual had about as much technology under his belt as Barney Fife. So not only did he not start and run these alleged successful companies, in the couple of months he would’ve supposedly been with each of them, he wouldn’t even have been able to build the products either.
Innovation doesn’t make back investments on Venture Capital. Flipping companies does. The Silicon Valley technology industry likes to talk a big game about innovation and disruption. One look at the current darlings of the Valley—mostly “sharing economy†and “social†apps—proves that wrong. The barriers to entry are now so low to making an app or service, and the money flowing so freely, no wonder we’re seeing fresh out of college brogrammers creating silly startups in the hopes of hockey stick growth and the big buyout.
The only thing that keeps me from wanting the bottom to fall out is the amount of money invested in the whole thing by innocents at the mercy of their pension fund investment boards.