net.wars

Watson goes to Wimbledon

The launch of the Fediverse-compatible Meta app Threads seems to have slightly overshadowed the European Court of Justice’s ruling, earlier in the week. This ruling deserves more attention: it undermines the basis of Meta’s targeted advertising. In noyb’s initial reaction, data protection legal bulldog Max Schrems suggests the judgment will make life difficult for not just Meta but other advertising companies.

As Alex Scroxton explains at Computer Weekly, the ruling rejects several different claims by Meta that all attempt to bypass the requirement enshrined in the General Data Protection Regulation that where there is no legal basis for data processing users must actively consent. Meta can’t get by with claiming that targeted advertising is a part of its service users expect, or that it’s technically necessary to provide its service.

More interesting is the fact that the original complaint was not filed by a data protection authority but by Germany’s antitrust body, which sees Meta’s our-way-or-get-lost approach to data gathering as abuse of its dominant position – and the CJEU has upheld this idea.

All this is presumably part of why Meta decided to roll out Threads in many countries but *not* the EU, In February, as a consequence of Brexit, Meta moved UK users to its US agreements. The UK’s data protection law is a clone of GDPR and will remain so until and unless the British Parliament changes it via the pending Data Protection and Digital Information bill. Still, it seems the move makes Meta ready to exploit such changes if they do occur.

Warning to people with longstanding Instagram accounts who want to try Threads: if your plan is to try and (maybe) delete, set up a new Instagram account for the purpose. Otherwise, you’ll be sad to discover that deleting your new Threads account means vaping your old Instagram account along with it. It’s the Hotel California method of Getting Big Fast.

***

Last week the Irish Council for Civil Liberties warned that a last-minute amendment to the Courts and Civil Law (Miscellaneous) bill will allow Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner to mark any of its proceedings “confidential” and thereby bar third parties from publishing information about them. Effectively, it blocks criticism. This is a muzzle not only for the ICCL and other activists and journalists but for aforesaid bulldog Schrems, who has made a career of pushing the DPC to enforce the law it was created to enforce. He keeps winning in court, too, which I’m sure must be terribly annoying.

The Irish DPC is an essential resource for everyone in Europe because Ireland is the European home of so many of American Big Tech’s subsidiaries. So this amendment – which reportedly passed the Oireachta (Ireland’s parliament) – is an alarming development.

***

Over the last few years Canadian law professor Michael Geist has had plenty of complaints about Canada’s Online News Act, aka C-18. Like the Australian legislation it emulates, C-18 requires intermediaries like Facebook and Google to negotiate and pay for licenses to link to Canadian news content. The bill became law on June 22.

Naturally, Meta and Google have warned that they will block links to Canadian news media from their services when the bill comes into force six months hence. They also intend to withdraw their ongoing programs to support the Canadian press. In response, the Canadian government has pulled its own advertising from Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram. Much hyperbolic silliness is taking place –

Pretty much everyone who is not the Canadian government thinks the bill is misconceived. Canadian publishers will lose traffic, not gain revenues, and no one will be happy. In Australia, the main beneficiary appears to be Rupert Murdoch, with whom Google signed a three-year agreement in 2021 and who is hardly the sort of independent local media some hoped would benefit. Unhappily, the state of California wants in on this game; its in-progress Journalism Preservation Act also seeks to require Big Tech to pay a “journalism usage fee”.

The result is to continue to undermine the open Internet, in which the link is fundamental to sharing information. If things aren’t being (pay)walled off, blocked for copyright/geography, or removed for corporate reasons – the latest announced casualty is the GIF hosting site Gfycat – they’re being withheld to avoid compliance requirements or withdrawn for tax reasons. None of us are better off for any of this.

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Those with long memories will recall that in 2011 IBM’s giant computer, Watson, beat the top champions at the TV game show Jeopardy. IBM predicted a great future for Watson as a medical diagnostician.

By 2019, that projected future was failing. “Overpromised and underdelivered,” ran a IEEE Spectrum headline. IBM is still trying, and is hoping for success with cancer diagnosis.

Meanwhile, Watson has a new (marketing) role: analyzing the draw and providing audio and text commentary for back-court tennis matches at Wimbledon and for highlights clips. For each match, Watson also calculates the competitors’ chances of winning and the favorability of their draw. For a veteran tennis watcher, it’s unsatisfying, though: IBM offers only a black box score, and nothing to show how that number was reached. At least human commentators tell you – albeit at great, repetitive length – the basis of their reasoning.

Illustrations: IBM’s Watson, which beat two of Jeopardy‘s greatest champions in 2011.

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. Follow on Twitter.

Strike two

Whatever happens with the Hollywood writers’ strike that began on Tuesday, the recent golden era of American TV, which arguably began with The Sopranos, is ending for viewers as well as creators.

A big reason for that golden era was that Hollywood’s loss of interest in grown-up movies pushed actors and writers who formerly looked down on TV to move across to where the more interesting work was finding a home. Another was the advent of streaming services, which competed with existing channels by offering creators greater freedom – and more money. It was never sustainable.

Streaming services’ business models are different. For nearly a decade, Netflix depended on massive debt to build a library to protect itself when the major studios ended their licensing deals. The company has so far gotten away with it because of (now ended) low interest rates and Wall Street’s focus on subscriber numbers in valuing its shares. Newer arrivals such as Amazon, Apple, and Disney can all finance loss-making startup streaming services from their existing businesses. All of these are members of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, along with broadcast networks, cable providers, and motion picture studios. For the purposes of the strike, they are the “enemy”.

This landscape could not be more different than that of the last writers’ strike, in 2007-2008, when DVD royalties were important and streaming was the not-yet future. Of the technology companies refusing to bargain today, only Netflix was a player in 2007 – and it was then sending out DVDs by mail.

Essentially, what is happening to Hollywood writers is what happened to songwriters when music streaming services took over the music biz: income shrinkage. In 2021, veteran screenwriter Ken Levine, gave the detail of his persistently shrinking residuals (declining royalties paid for reuse). When American Airlines included an episode he directed of Everyone Loves Raymond in its transcontinental in-flight package for six months, his take from the thousands of airings was $1.19. He also documented, until he ended his blog in 2022, other ways writers are being squeezed; at Disconnect, Paris Marx provides a longer list. The Writers Guild of America’s declared goals are to redress these losses and bring residuals and other pay on streaming services into line with older broadcasters.

Even an outsider can see the bigger picture: broadcast networks, traditionally the biggest payers, are watching their audiences shrink and retrenching, and cable and streaming services commission shorter seasons, which they renew at a far more leisurely pace. Also a factor is the shift in which broadcast networks reair their new shows a day or two later on their streaming service. The DVD royalties that mattered in the 2007-2008 strike are dying away, and just as in music royalties from streaming are a fraction of the amount. Overall, the WGA says that in the last decade writers’ average incomes have dropped by 4% – 23% if you include inflation. Meanwhile, industry profits have continued to rise.

The new issue on the block is AI – not because large language models are good enough to generate good scripts (as if), but because writers fear the studios will use them to generate crappy scripts and then demand that the writers rewrite them into quality for a pittance. Freelance journalists have already reported seeing publishers try this gambit.

In 2007, 2007, and again in 2017, Levine noted that the studios control the situation. They can make a deal and end the strike any time they decide it’s getting too expensive or disruptive. Eventually, he said, the AMPTP will cut a deal, writers will get some of what they need, and everyone will go back to work. Until then, the collateral damage will mount to writers and staff in adjacent industries and California’s economy. At Business Insider, Lucia Moses suggests that Netflix, Amazon, and Disney all have enough content stockpiled to see them through.

Longer-term, there will be less predictable consequences. In 2007-2008, Leigh Blickley reported in a ten-years-later lookback at the Huffington Post, these included the boom in “unscripted” reality TV and the death of pathways into the business for new writers.

Underlying all this is a simple but fundamental change. Broadcast networks cared what Americans watched because their revenues depended on attracting large audiences that advertisers would pay to reach. Until VCRs arrived to liberate us from the tyranny of schedules, the networks competed on the quality and appeal of their programming in each time slot. Streaming services compete on their whole catalogue, and care only that you subscribe; ratings don’t count.

The WGA warns that the studios’ long-term goal is to turn screenwriting into gig economy work. In 2019, at BIG, Matt Stoller warned that Netflix was predatorily killing Hollywood, first by using debt financing to corner the market, and second by vertically integrating its operation. Like the the studios that were forced to divest their movie theaters in 1948, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple own content, controls its distribution, and sells retail access. It should be no surprise if a vertically integrated industry with a handful of monopolistic players cuts costs by treating writers the way Uber treats drivers: enshittification.

The WGA’s 12,000 members know their skills, which underpin a trillion-dollar industry, are rare. They have a strong union and a long history of solidarity. If they can’t win against modern corporate extraction, what hope for the rest of us?

Illustrations: WGA members picketing in 2007 (by jengod at Wikimedia).

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. Follow on Mastodon or Twitter.

Gap year

What do Internet users want?

First, they want meaningful access. They want usability. They want not to be scammed, manipulated, lied to, exploited, or cheated.

It’s unlikely that any of the ongoing debates in either the US or UK will deliver any of those.

First and foremost, this week concluded two frustrating years in which the US Senate failed to confirm the appointment of Public Knowledge co-founder and EFF board member Gigi Sohn to the Federal Communications Commission. In her withdrawal statement, Sohn blamed a smear campaign by “legions of cable and media industry lobbyists, their bought-and-paid-for surrogates, and dark money political groups with bottomless pockets”.

Whether you agree or not, the result remains that for the last two years and for the foreseeable future the FCC will remain deadlocked and problems such as the US’s lack of competition and patchy broadband provision will remain unsolved.

Meanwhile, US politicians continue obsessing about whether and how to abort-retry-fail Section 230, that pesky 26-word law that relieves Internet hosts of liability for third-party content. This week it was the turn of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In its hearing, the Internet Society’s Andrew Sullivan stood out for trying to get across to lawmakers that S230 wasn’t – couldn’t have been – intended as protectionism for the technology giants because they did not exist when the law was passed. It’s fair to say that S230 helped allow the growth of *some* Internet companies – those that host user-generated content. That means all the social media sites as well as web boards and blogs and Google’s search engine and Amazon’s reviews, but neither Apple nor Netflix makes its living that way. Attacking the technology giants is a popular pasttime just now, but throwing out S230 without due attention to the unexpected collateral damage will just make them bigger.

Also on the US political mind is a proposed ban on TikTok. It’s hard to think of a move that would more quickly alienate young people. Plus, it fails to get at the root problem. If the fear is that TikTok gathers data on Americans and sends it home to China for use in designing manipulative programs…well, why single out TikTok when it lives in a forest of US companies doing the same kind of thing? As Karl Bode writes at TechDirt, if you really want to mitigate that threat, rein in the whole forest. Otherwise, if China really wants that data it can buy it on the open market.

Meanwhile, in the UK, as noted last week, opposition continues to increase to the clauses in the Online Safety bill proposing to undermine end-to-end encryption by requiring platforms to proactively scan private messages. This week, WhatsApp said it would withdraw its app from the UK rather than comply. However important the UK market is, it can’t possibly be big enough for Meta to risk fines of 4% of global revenues and criminal sanctions for executives. The really dumb thing is that everyone within the government uses WhatsApp because of its convenience and security, and we all know it. Or do they think they’ll have special access denied the rest of the population?

Also in the UK this week, the Data Protection and Digital Information bill returned to Parliament for its second reading. This is the UK’s post-Brexit attempt to “take control” by revising the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation; it was delayed during Liz Truss’s brief and destructive outing as prime minister. In its statement, the government talks about reducing the burdens on businesses without any apparent recognition that divergence from GDPR is risky for anyone trading internationally and complying with two regimes must inevitably be more expensive than complying with one.

The Open Rights Group and 25 other civil society organizations have written a letter (PDF) laying out their objections, noting that the proposed bill, in line with other recent legislation that weakens civil rights, weakens oversight and corporate accountability, lessens individuals’ rights, and weakens the independence of the Information Commissioner’s Office. “Co-designed with businesses from the start” is how the government describes the bill. But data protection law was not supposed to be designed for business – or, as Peter Geoghegan says at the London Review of Books, to aid SLAPP suits; it is supposed to protect our human rights in the face of state and corporate power. As the cryptography pioneer Whit Diffie said in 2019, “The problem isn’t privacy; it’s corporate malfeasance.”

The most depressing thing about all of these discussions is that the public interest is the loser in all of them. It makes no sense to focus on TikTok when US companies are just as aggressive in exploiting users’ data. It makes no sense to focus solely on the technology giants when the point of S230 was to protect small businesses, non-profits, and hobbyists. And it makes no sense to undermine the security afforded by end-to-end encryption when it’s essential for protecting the vulnerable people the Online Safety bill is supposed to help. In a survey, EDRi finds that compromising secure messaging is highly unpopular with young people, who clearly understand the risks to political activism and gender identity exploration.

One of the most disturbing aspects of our politics in this century so far is the widening gap between what people want, need, and know and the things politicians obsess about. We’re seeing this reflected in Internet policy, and it’s not helpful.

Illustrations: Andrew Sullivan, president of the Internet Society, testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Disequilibrium

“Things like [the Net[ tend to be self-balancing,” (then) IBM security engineer David Chess tells Andrew Leonard at the end of his 1997 book Bots: The Origin of New Spccies. “If some behavior gets so out of control that it really impacts the community, the community responds with whatever it takes to get back to an acceptable equilibrium. Organic systems are like that.”

When Leonard was writing, Usenet was the largest social medium. Quake was the latest hot video game, and text-only multi-player games were still mainstream. CompuServe and AOL were competing to be the biggest commercial information service. In pocket computers, the Palm Pilot was a year old and selling by the million. And: everyone still used modems; broadband trials were two years away.

It was also a period of what Leonard calls “decentralized anarchy”: that is, the web was new and open (and IRC and Usenet were old and open), and it was reasonable to predict that bots would be the newest wave of personal empowerment.

Here in 2023, we’ve spent the last ten years complaining about the increasing centralization of the web, and although bots are in fact all around us, no service provides the kind of tools that would allow the technologically limited to write them and dispatch them to do our bidding. In fact, on the corporately-owned web, bots only exist if some large company agrees they may. Yesterday, Twitter decided it doesn’t agree to their existence any more, at least not for free; as of February 9 developers must pay for access to Twitter’s application programming interface, which was free until now. Pricing is yet to be announced.

APIs are gateways through which computer programs can interoperate. Twitter’s APIs allow developers to build apps that let users analyze their social graph, block abuse, manage ad campaigns, log in to other sites across the web, and, lately, help you find and connect with the people in your Twitter list who are also on Mastodon; they also enable researchers to study online behavior and make possible apps that roll threads into a correctly ordered single page and many more, as Jess Wetherbed explains at The Verge. Many of these uses are not revenue-generating and not intended to be; most will likely shut down. It will be a fascinating chance to discover what bots have actually been doing for us on the service. Their absence will expose Twitter’s bare bones.

However, as Charles Arthur writes at his Social Warming Substack, the move won’t deter the *other* kind of bots – that is, the ones people complain about: paid influencers, scammers, automated accounts, and so on, which can’t be killed at scale and aren’t using the API.

This all follows Twitter’s move two weeks ago to block third-party clients without notice. Granted, Twitter needs money: its change of ownership loaded its balance sheet with debt, its ad revenues have reportedly plummeted, and its efforts to find new revenue streams are not going well. If fears of Twitter’s demise and the return of users previously banned for bad behavior weren’t enough to send users scrambling to other services, this new move, as Mike Masnick quips at TechDirt, seems perfectly designed to send even more users and developers to Mastodon, where openness is a founding principle and therefore where years of effort can’t be undone in a second by owner decree.

The really interesting question is not so much whether Twitter can survive as a closed-garden paywalled channel, which seems to be its direction of travel, but whether its enclosure represents the kind of disruption that Chess was talking about: one that becomes an inflection point. Earlier attempts to swim against the tide of centralization represented by Facebook and the rest of Web 2.0, such as the 2010-founded Diaspora, have never really caught fire.

It’s tempting to make tennis analogies: often, when a new champion becomes dominant a contributing factor is nerves or self-destruction on the part of the top players they have to beat. And right now there’s Twitter destroying its assets to suit the whims of a despotic owner, Facebook panic-spending to try to secure itself a future with technology it hopes will restore the company’s youthful glow, the ad market that supports all these companies shrinking, and governments setting privacy and antitrust laws to stun.

It’s also true that users are different now. The teens who lied about their ages to get onto Facebook in 2010 are in their mid-20s. An increasing number of the 40-something parents of today’s teens have had broadband Internet access their entire adult lives. The users exploding into the combination of smart phones and social media in 2010 needed much more help than they do today, help that slick user design provided. But part of that promise was also keeping users safe – and there the social media companies have failed in all directions and at all scales.

If this really is the moment where the Internet reverts to decentralized anarchy and rediscovers the joys of connecting without the data collection, intrusive advertising, and manipulation, governments will seek to reimpose control. And the laws to help them – for example, Britain’s Online Safety bill – are close to passage. This will be a rough ride.

Illustrations: The Twitter bird flying upside down.

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. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard – or follow on Mastodon or Twitter.