net.wars

What’s next

“It’s like your manifesto promises,” Bernard Woolley (Derek Fowldes) tells eponymous minister Jim Hacker (Paul Eddington) in Antony Jay‘s and Jonathan Lynn’s Yes, Minister. “People *understand*.” In other words, people know your election promises aren’t real.

The current US president-elect is impulsive and chaotic, and there will be resistance. So it’s reasonable to assume that at least some of his pre-election rhetoric will remain words and not deeds. There is, however, no telling which parts. And: the chaos is the point.

At Ars Technica, Ashley Belanger considers the likely impact of the threatened 60% tariffs on Chinese goods and 20% from everywhere else: laptops could double, games consoles go up 40%, and smartphones rise 26%. Friends want to stockpile coffee, tea, and chocolate.

Also at Ars Technica, Benj Edwards predicts that the new administration will quickly reverse Joe Biden’s executive order regulating AI development.

At his BIG Substack, Matt Stoller predicts a wave of mergers following three years of restrictions. At TechDirt, Karl Bode agrees, with special emphasis on media companies and an order of enshittification on the side. At Hollywood Reporter, similarly, Alex Weprin reports that large broadcast station owners are eagerly eying up local stations, and David Zaslav, CEO of merger monster Warner Brothers Discovery, tells Georg Szalai that more consolidation would provide “real positive impact”. (As if.)

Many predict that current Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr will be promoted to FCC chair. Carr set out his agenda in his chapter of Project 2025: as the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society reports. His policies, Jon Brodkin writes at Ars Technica, include reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and dropping consumer protection initiatives. John Hendel warned in October at Politico that the new FCC chair could also channel millions of dollars to Elon Musk for his Starlink satellite Internet service, a possibility the FCC turned down in 2023.

Also on Carr’s list is punishing critical news organizations. Donald Trump’s lawyers began before the election with a series of complaints, as Lachlan Cartwright writes at Columbia Journalism Review. The targets: CBS News for 60 Minutes, the New York Times, Penguin Random House, Saturday Night Live, the Washington Post, and the Daily Beast.

Those of us outside the US will be relying on the EU to stand up to parts of this through the AI Act, Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act, and GDPR. Enforcement will be crucial. The US administration may resist this procedure. The UK will have to pick a side.

***

It’s now two years since Elon Musk was forced to honor his whim of buying Twitter, and much of what he and others said would happen…hasn’t. Many predicted system collapse or a major hack. Instead, despite mass departures for sites other, the hollowed-out site has survived technically while degrading in every other way that matters.

Other than rebranding to “X”, Musk has failed to deliver many of the things he was eagerly talking about when he took over. A helpful site chronicles these: a payments system, a content moderation council, a billion more users. X was going to be the “everything app”. Nope.

This week, the aftermath of the US election and new terms of service making user data fodder for AI training have sparked a new flood of departures. This time round there’s consensus: they’re going to Bluesky.

It’s less clear what’s happening with the advertisers who supply the platform’s revenues, which the now-private company no longer has to disclose. Since Musk’s takeover, reports have consistently said advertisers are leaving. Now, the Financial Times reports (unpaywalled, Ars Technica) they are plotting their return, seeking to curry favor given Musk’s influence within the new US administration – and perhaps escaping the lawsuit he filed against them in August. Even so, it will take a lot to rebuild. The platform’s valuation is currently estimated at $10 billion, down from the $44 billion Musk paid.

This slash-and-burn approach is the one Musk wants to take to Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, as in Dogecoin; groan). Musk’s list of desired qualities for DOGE volunteers – no pay, long hours, “super” high IQ – reminds of Dominic Cummings in January 2020, when he was Boris Johnson’s most-favored adviser and sought super-talented weirdos to remake the UK government. Cummings was gone by November.

***

It says something about the madness of the week that the sanest development appears to be that The Onion has bought Infowars, the conspiracy theory media operation Alex Jones used to promote, alongside vitamins, supplements, and many other conspiracy theories, the utterly false claim that the Sandy Hook school shootings were a hoax. The sale was part of a bankruptcy auction held to raise funds Jones owes to the families of the slaughtered Sandy Hook children after losing to them in court in a $1.4 billion defamation case. Per the New York Times, the purchase was sanctioned by the Sandy Hook families. The Onion will relaunch the site in its own style with funding from Everytown for Gun Safety. There may not be a god, but there is an onion.

Illustrations: The front page of The Onion, showing the news about its InfoWars purchase.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon.

Digital distrust

On Tuesday, at the UK Internet Governance Forum, a questioner asked this: “Why should I trust any technology the government deploys?”

She had come armed with a personal but generalizable anecdote. Since renewing her passport in 2017, at every UK airport the electronic gates routinely send her for rechecking to the human-staffed desk, even though the same passport works perfectly well in electronic gates at airports in other countries. A New Scientist article by Adam Vaughan that I can’t locate eventually explained: the Home Office had deployed the system knowing it wouldn’t work for “people with my skin type”. That is, as you’ve probably already guessed, dark.

She directed her question to Katherine Yesilirmak, director of strategy in the Responsible Tech Adoption Unit, formerly the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, a subsidiary of the Department for Skills, Innovation, and Technology.

Yesirlimak did her best, mentioning the problem of bias in training data, the variability of end users, fairness, governmental responsibility for understanding the technology it procures (since it builds very little itself these days) and so on. She is clearly up to date, even referring to the latest study finding that AIs used by human resources consistently prefer résumés with white and male-presenting names over non-white and female-presenting names. But Yesirlimak didn’t really answer the questioner’s fundamental conundrum. Why *should* she trust government systems when they are knowingly commissioned with flaws that exclude her? Well, why?

Pause to remember that 20 years ago, Jim Wayman, a pioneer in biometric identification told me, “People never have what you think they’re going to have where you think they’re going to have it.” Biometrics systems must be built to accommodate outliers – and it’s hard. For more, see Wayman’s potted history of third-party testing of modern biometric systems in the US (PDF).

Yesirlimak, whose LinkedIn profile indicates she’s been at the unit for a little under three years, noted that the government builds very little of its own technology these days. However, her group is partnering with analogues in other countries and international bodies to build tools and standards that she believes will help.

This panel was nominally about AI governance, but the connection that needed to be made was from what the questioner was describing – technology that makes some people second-class citizens – to digital exclusion, siloed in a different panel. Most people describe the “digital divide” as a binary statistical matter: 1.7 million households are not online, and 40% of households don’t meet the digital living standard, per the Liberal Democrat peer Timothy Clement-Jones, who ruefully noted the “serious gap in knowledge in Parliament” regarding digital inclusion.

Clement-Jones, who is the co-chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence, cited the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee’s January 2024 report. Another statistic came from Helen Milner: 23% of people with long-term illness or disabilities are digitally excluded.

The report cites the annual consumer digital index Lloyds Bank releases each year; the last one found that Internet use is dropping among the over-60s, and for the first time the percentage of people offline in the previous three months had increased, to 4%. Fifteen percent of those offline are under 50, and overall about 4.7 million people can’t connect to wifi. Ofcom’s 2023 report found that 7% of households (disproportionately poor and/or elderly) have no Internet access, 20% of them because of cost.

“We should make sure the government always provides an analog alternative, especially as we move to digital IDs” Clement-Jones said. In 2010, when Martha Lane Fox was campaigning to get the last 10% online, one could push back: why should they have to be? Today, parying parking meters requires an app and, as Royal Holloway professor Lizzie Coles-Kemp noted, smartphones aren’t enough for some services.

Milner finds that a third of those offline already find it difficult to engage with the NHS, creating “two-tier public services”. Clement-Jones added another example: people in temporary housing have to reapply weekly online – but there is no Internet provision in temporary housing.

Worse, however, is thinking technology will magically fix intractable problems. In Coles-Kemp’s example, if someone can’t do their prescribed rehabilitation exercises at home because they lack space, support, or confidence, no app will fix it. In her work on inclusive security technologies, she has long pushed for systems to be less hostile to users in the name of preventing fraud: “We need to do more work on the difference between scammers and people who are desperate to get something done.”

In addition, Milner said, tackling digital exclusion has to be widely embraced – by the Department of Work and Pensions, for example – not just handed off to DSIT. Much comes down to designers who are unlike the people on whom their systems will be imposed and whose direct customers are administrators. “The emphasis needs to shift to the creators of these technologies – policy makers, programmers. How do algorithms make decisions? What is the impact on others of liking a piece of content?”

Concern about the “digital divide” has been with us since the beginning of the Internet. It seems to have been gradually forgotten as online has become mainstream. It shouldn’t be: digital exclusion makes all the other kinds of exclusion worse and adds anger and frustration to an already morbidly divided society.

Illustrations: Martha Lane Fox in 2011 (via Wikimedia.

The master switch

In his 2010 book, The Master Switch, Columbia law professor Tim Wu quotes the television news pioneer Fred W. Friendly, who said in a 1970 article for Saturday Review that before any question of the First Amendment and free speech, is “who has exclusive control of the master switch. In his 1967 memoir, Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control, Friendly tells numerous stories that illustrate the point, beginning with his resignation of the presidency of CBS News after the network insisted on showing a rerun of I Love Lucy rather than carry live the first Senate hearings on the US involvement in Vietnam.

This is the switch that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos flipped this week when he blocked the editorial board of the Washington Post, which he owns, from endorsing Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the US presidential election. At that point, every fear people had in 2013, when Bezos paid $250 million to save the struggling 76-time Pulitzer prize-paper famed for breaking Watergate, came true. Bezos, like William Randolph Hearst, Rupert Murdoch, and others before him, exerted his ownership control. (See also the late, great film critic Roger Ebert on the day Rupert Murdoch took over the Chicago Sun-Times.)

If you think of the Washington Post as just a business, as opposed to a public service institution, you can see why Bezos preferred to hedge his bets. But, as former Post journalist Dan Froomkin called it in February 2023, ten years post-sale, the newspaper had reverted to its immediately pre-Bezos state, laying off staff and losing money. Then, Froomkin warned that Bezos’ newly-installed “lickspittle” publisher, editor, and editorial editor lacked vision and suggested Bezos turn it into a non-profit, give it an endowment, and leave it alone.

By October 2023, Froomkin was arguing that the Post had blown it by failing to cover the decade’s most important story, the threat to the US’s democratic system posed by “the increasingly demented and authoritarian Republican Party”. As of yesterday, more than 250,000 subscribers had canceled, literally decimating its subscriber base, though barely, as Jason Koebler writes at 404 Media, a rounding error in Bezos’ wealth.

Almost simultaneously, a similar story was playing out 3,000 miles across the country at the LA Times. There, owner Patrick Soon-Shiong overrode the paper’s editorial board’s intention to endorse Harris/Walz. Several board members have since resigned, along with editorials editor Mariel Garza.

At Columbia Journalism Review, Jeff Jarvis uses Timothy Snyder’s term, “anticipatory obedience” to describe these situations.

On his Mea Culpa podcast, former Trump legal fixer Michael Cohen has frequently issued a hard-to-believe warning that if Trump is elected he will assemble the country’s billionaires and take full control of their assets, Putin-style. As unAmerican as that sounds, Cohen has been improbably right before; in 2019 Congressional testimony he famously predicted that Trump would never allow a peaceful transition of power. If Trump wins and proves Cohen correct, anticipatory obedience won’t save Bezos or any other billionaire.

The Internet was supposed to provide an escape from this sort of control (in the 1990s, pundits feared The Drudge Report!). Into this context, several bits of social media news also dropped. Bluesky announced $15 million in venture capital funding and a user base of 13 million. Reddit announced its first-ever profit, apparently solely due to the deals the 19-year-old service signed to give Google and OpenAI to access user postings and use AI to translate users’ posts into multiple languages. Finally, the owner of the Mastodon server botsin.space, which allows users to run bots on Mastodon, is shutting down, ending new account signups and shifting to read-only by December. The owner blames unsustainably increasing costs as the user base and postings continue to grow.

Even though Bluesky is incorporated as a public benefit LLC, the acceptance of venture capital gives pause: venture capital always looks for a lucrative exit rather than value for users. Reddit served tens of millions of users for 19 years without ever making any money; it’s only profitable now because AI developers want its data.

Bluesky’s board includes the notable free speech advocate Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, who this week blasted the Washington Post’s decision in scathing terms. Masnick’s paper proposing promoting free speech by developing protocols rather than platforms serves as a sort of founding document. Platforms centralize user data and share it back out again; protocols are standards anyone can use to write compliant software to enable new connections. Think proprietary (Apple) versus open source (Linux, email, the web).

The point is this: platforms either start with or create billionaire owners; protocols allow participation by both large and small owners. That still leaves the long-term problem of how to make such services sustainable. Koebler writes of the hard work of going independent, but notes that the combination of new technology and the elimination of layers of management and corporate executives makes it vastly cheaper than before. Bluesky so far has no advertising, but plans to offer higher-level features by subscription, still implying a centralized structure. Mastodon instances survive on user donations and volunteer administrators. Its developers should target making it much easier and more efficient to run their instances: democratize the master switch.

Illustrations: Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) in his newsroom in the 1941 film Citizen Kane, (via Wikimedia).