net.wars

Playing monopoly

If you were going to carve up today’s technology giants to create a more competitive landscape, how would you do it? This time the game’s for real. In August, US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that, “Google is a monopolist and has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” A few weeks ago, the Department of Justice filed preliminary proposals (PDF) for remedies. These may change before the parties reassemble in court next April.

Antitrust law traditionally aimed to ensure competition in order to create both a healthy business ecosystem and better serve consumers. “Free” – that is, pay-with-data – online services have been resistant to antitrust analysis through decades of focusing on lowered prices to judge success.

It’s always tempting to think of breaking monopolists up into business units. For example, a key moment in Meta’s march to huge was its purchase of WhatsApp (2014) and Instagram (2012), turning baby competitors into giant subsidiaries. In the EU, that permission was based on a promise, which Meta later broke, not to merge the three companies’ databases. Separating them back out again to create three giant privacy-invading behemoths in place of one is more like the sorceror’s apprentice than a win.

In the late 1990s case against Microsoft, which ended in settlement, many speculated about breaking it up into Baby Bills. The key question: create clones or divide up the Windows and office software?

In 2013, at ComputerWorld Gregg Keizer asked experts to imagine the post-Microsoft-breakup world. Maybe the office software company ported its products onto the iPad. Maybe the clones eventually diverged and one would have dominated search. Keizer’s experts generally agree, though, that the antitrust suit itself had its effects, slowing the company’s forward progress by making it fear provoking further suits, like IBM before it.

In Google’s case, the key turning point was likely the 2007-2008 acquisition of online advertising pioneer DoubleClick. Google was then ten years old and had been a public company for almost four years. At its IPO Wall Street pundits were dismissive, saying it had no customer lock-in and no business model.

Reading Google’s 2008 annual report is an exercise in nostalgia. Amid an explanation of contextual advertising, Google says it has never spent much on marketing because the quality of its products generated word of mouth momentum worldwide. This was all true – then.

At the time, privacy advocates opposed the DoubleClick merger. Both FTC and EU regulators raised concerns, but let it go ahead to become the heart of the advertising business Susan Wojcicki and Sheryl Sandberg built for Google. Despite growing revenues from its cloud services business, most of Google’s revenues still come from advertising.

Since then, Mehta ruled, Google cemented its dominance by paying companies like Apple, Samsung, and Verizon to make its search engine the default on the devices they make and/or sell. Further, Google’s dominance – 90% of search – allows it to charge premium rates for search ads, which in turn enhances its financial advantage. OK, one of those complaining competitors is Microsoft, but others are relative minnows like 15-year-old DuckDuckGo, which competes on privacy, buys TV ads, and hasn’t cracked 1% of the search market. Even Microsoft’s Bing, at number two, has less than 4%. Google can insist that it’s just that good, but complaints that its search results are degrading are everywhere.

Three aspects of the DoJ’s proposals seized the most attention: forcing Google to divest itself of the Chrome browser; second, if that’s not enough, to divest the Android mobile operating system; and third a block on paying other companies to make Google search the default. The latter risks crippling Mozilla and Firefox, and would dent Apple’s revenues, but not really harm Google. Saving $26.3 billion (2021 number) can’t be *all* bad.

At The Verge, Lauren Feiner summarizes the DoJ’s proposals. At the Guardian, Dan Milmo notes that the DoJ also wants Google to be barred from buying or investing in search rivals, query-based AI, or adtech – no more DoubleClicks.

At Google’s blog, chief legal officer Kent Walker calls the proposals “a radical interventionist agenda”. He adds that it would chill Google’s investment in AI like this is a bad thing, when – hello! – a goal is ensuring a competitive market in future technologies. (It could even be a good thing generally.)

Finally, Walker claims divesting Chrome and/or Android would endanger users’ security and privacy and frets that it would expose Americans’ personal search queries to “unknown foreign and domestic companies”. Adapting a line from the 1980 movie Hopscotch, “You mean, Google’s methods of tracking are more humane than the others?” While relaying DuckDuckGo’s senior vice-president’s similar reaction, Ars Technica’s Ashley Belanger dubs the proposals “Google’s nightmare”.

At Techdirt, Mike Masnick favors DuckDuckGo’s idea of forcing Google to provide access to its search results via an API so competitors can build services on top, as his company does with Bing. Masnick wants users to become custodians and exploiters of their own search histories. Finally, at Pluralistic, Cory Doctorow likes spinning out – not selling – Chrome. End adtech surveillance, he writes, don’t democratize it.

It’s too early to know what the DoJ will finally recommend. If nothing is done, however, Google will be too rich to fear future lawsuits.

Illustration: Mickey Mouse as the sorceror’s apprentice in (1940).

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 or Bluesky.

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).

The brittle state

We’re now almost a year on from Rishi Sunak’s AI Summit, which failed to accomplish any of its most likely goals: cement his position as the UK’s prime minister; establish the UK as a world leader in AI fearmongering; or get him the new life in Silicon Valley some commentators seemed to think he wanted.

Arguably, however, it has raised belief that computer systems are “intelligent” – that is, that they understand what they’re calculating. The chatbots based on large language models make that worse, because, as James Boyle cleverly wrote, for the first time in human history, “sentences do not imply sentience”. Mix in paranoia over the state of the world and you get some truly terrifying systems being put into situations where they can catastrophically damage people’s lives. We should know better by now.

The Open Rights Group (I’m still on its advisory council) is campaigning against the Home Office’s planned eVisa scheme. In the previouslies: between 1948 and 1971, people from Caribbean countries, many of whom had fought for Britain in World War II, were encouraged to help the UK rebuild the economy post-war. They are known as the “Windrush generation” after the first ship that brought them. As Commonwealth citizens, they didn’t need visas or documentation; they and their children had the automatic right to live and work here.

Until 1973, when the law changed; later arrivals needed visas. The snag was that earlier arrivals had no idea they had any reason to worry….until the day they discovered, when challenged, that they had no way to prove they were living here legally. That day came in 2017, when then-prime minister, Theresa May (who this week joined the House of Lords) introduced the hostile environment. Intended to push illegal immigrants to go home, this law moves the “border” deep into British life by requiring landlords, banks, and others to conduct status checks. The result was that some of the Windrush group – again, legal residents – were refused medical care, denied housing, or deported.

When Brexit became real, millions of Europeans resident in the UK were shoved into the same position: arrived legally, needing no documentation, but in future required to prove their status. This time, the UK issued them documents confirming their status as permanently settled.

Until December 31, 2024, when all those documents with no expiration date will abruptly expire because the Home Office has a new system that is entirely online. As ORG and the3million explain it, come January 1, 2025, about 4 million people will need online accounts to access the new system, which generates a code to give the bank or landlord temporary access to their status. The new system will apparently hit a variety of databases in real time to perform live checks.

Now, I get that the UK government doesn’t want anyone to be in the country for one second longer than they’re entitled to. But we don’t even have to say, “What could possibly go wrong?” because we already *know* what *has* gone wrong for the Windrush generation. Anyone who has to prove their status off the cuff in time-sensitive situations really needs proof they can show when the system fails.

A proposal like this can only come from an irrational belief in the perfection – or at least, perfectability – of computer systems. It assumes that Internet connections won’t be interrupted, that databases will return accurate information, and that everyone involved will have the necessary devices and digital literacy to operate it. Even without ORG’s and the3million’s analysis, these are bonkers things to believe – and they are made worse by a helpline that is only available during the UK work day.

There is a lot of this kind of credulity about, most of it connected with “AI”. AP News reports that US police departments are beginning to use chatbots to generate crime reports based on the audio from their body cams. And, says Ars Technica, the US state of Nevada will let AI decide unemployment benefit claims, potentially producing denials that can’t be undone by a court. BrainFacts reports that decision makers using “AI” systems are prone to automation bias – that is, they trust the machine to be right. Of course, that’s just good job security: you won’t be fired for following the machine, but you might for overriding it.

The underlying risk with all these systems, as a security experts might say, is complexity: more complex means being more susceptible to inexplicable failures. There is very little to go wrong with a piece of paper that plainly states your status, for values of “paper” including paper, QR codes downloaded to phones, or PDFs saved to a desktop/laptop. Much can go wrong with the system underlying that “paper”, but, crucially, when a static confirmation is saved offline, managing that underlying complexity can take place when the need is not urgent.

It ought to go without saying that computer systems with a profound impact on people’s lives should be backed up by redundant systems that can be used when they fail. Yet the world the powers that be apparently want to build is one that underlines their power to cause enormous stress for everyone else. Systems like eVisas are as brittle as just-in-time supply chains. And we saw what happens to those during the emergency phase of the covid pandemic.

Illustrations: Empty supermarket shelves in March 2020 (via Wikimedia).

Soap dispensers and Skynet

In the TV series Breaking Bad, the weary ex-cop Mike Ehrmantraut tells meth chemist Walter White : “No more half measures.” The last time he took half measures, the woman he was trying to protect was brutally murdered.

Apparently people like to say there are no dead bodies in privacy (although this is easily countered with ex-CIA director General Michael Hayden’s comment, “We kill people based on metadata”). But, as Woody Hartzog told a Senate committee hearing in September 2023, summarizing work he did with Neil Richards and Ryan Durrie, half measures in AI/privacy legislation are still a bad thing.

A discussion at Privacy Law Scholars last week laid out the problems. Half measures don’t work. They don’t prevent societal harms. They don’t prevent AI from being deployed where it shouldn’t be. And they sap the political will to follow up with anything stronger.

In an article for The Brink, Hartzog said, “To bring AI within the rule of law, lawmakers must go beyond half measures to ensure that AI systems and the actors that deploy them are worthy of our trust,”

He goes on to list examples of half measures: transparency, committing to ethical principles, and mitigating bias. Transparency is good, but doesn’t automatically bring accountability. Ethical principles don’t change business models. And bias mitigation to make a technology nominally fairer may simultaneously make it more dangerous. Think facial recognition: debias the system and improve its accuracy for matching the faces of non-male, non-white people, and then it’s used to target those same people with surveillance.

Or, bias mitigation may have nothing to do with the actual problem, an underlying business model, as Arvind Narayanan, author of the forthcoming book AI Snake Oil, pointed out a few days later at an event convened by the Future of Privacy Forum. In his example, the Washington Post reported in 2019 on the case of an algorithm intended to help hospitals predict which patients will benefit from additional medical care. It turned out to favor white patients. But, Narayanan said, the system’s provider responded to the story by saying that the algorithm’s cost model accurately predicted the costs of additional health care – in other words, the algorithm did exactly what the hospital wanted it to do.

“I think hospitals should be forced to use a different model – but that’s not a technical question, it’s politics.”.

Narayanan also called out auditing (another Hartzog half measure). You can, he said, audit a human resources system to expose patterns in which resumes it flags for interviews and which it drops. But no one ever commissions research modeled on the expensive random controlled testing common in medicine that follows up for five years to see if the system actually picks good employees.

Adding confusion is the fact that “AI” isn’t a single thing. Instead, it’s what someone called a “suitcase term” – that is, a container for many different systems built for many different purposes by many different organizations with many different motives. It is absurd to conflate AGI – the artificial general intelligence of science fiction stories and scientists’ dreams that can surpass and kill us all – with pattern-recognizing software that depends on plundering human-created content and the labeling work of millions of low-paid workers

To digress briefly, some of the AI in that suitcase is getting truly goofy. Yum Brands has announced that its restaurants, which include Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC, will be “AI-first”. Among Yum’s envisioned uses, the company tells Benj Edwards at Ars Technica, are being able to ask an app what temperature to set the oven. I can’t help suspecting that the real eventual use will be data collection and discriminatory pricing. Stuff like this is why Ed Zitron writes postings like The Rot-Com Bubble, which hypothesizes that the reason Internet services are deteriorating is that technology companies have run out of genuinely innovative things to sell us.

That you cannot solve social problems with technology is a long-held truism, but it seems to be especially true of the messy middle of the AI spectrum, the use cases active now that rarely get the same attention as the far ends of that spectrum.

As Neil Richards put it at PLSC, “The way it’s presented now, it’s either existential risk or a soap dispenser that doesn’t work on brown hands when the real problem is the intermediate level of societal change via AI.”

The PLSC discussion included a list of the ways that regulations fail. Underfunded enforcement. Regulations that are pure theater. The wrong measures. The right goal, but weakly drafted legislation. Make the regulation ambiguous, or base it on principles that are too broad. Choose conflicting half-measures – for example, require transparency but add the principle that people should own their own data.

Like Cristina Caffarra a week earlier at CPDP, Hartzog, Richards, and Durrie favor finding remedies that focus on limiting abuses of power. Full measures include outright bans, the right to bring a private cause of action, imposing duties of “loyalty, care, and confidentiality”, and limiting exploitative data practices within these systems. Curbing abuses of power, as he says, is nothing new. The shiny new technology is a distraction.

Or, as Narayanan put it, “Broken AI is appealing to broken institutions.”

Illustrations: Mike (Jonathan Banks) telling Walt (Bryan Cranston) in Breaking Bad (S03e12) “no more half measures”.

Admiring the problem

In one sense, the EU’s barely dry AI Act and the other complex legislation – the Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act, GDPR, and so on -= is a triumph. Flawed it may be, but it’s a genuine attempt to protect citizens’ human rights against a technology that is being birthed with numerous trigger warnings. The AI-with-everything program at this year’s Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection, reflected that sense of accomplishment – but also the frustration that comes with knowing that all legislation is flawed, all technology companies try to game the system, and gaps will widen.

CPDP has had these moments before: new legislation always comes with a large dollop of frustration over the opportunities that were missed and the knowledge that newer technologies are already rushing forwards. AI, and the AI Act, more or less swallowed this year’s conference as people considered what it says, how it will play internationally, and the necessary details of implementation and enforcement. Two years at this event, inadequate enforcement of GDPR was a big topic.

The most interesting future gaps that emerged this year: monopoly power, quantum sensing, and spatial computing.

For at least 20 years we’ve been hearing about quantum computing’s potential threat to public key encryption – that day of doom has been ten years away as long as I can remember, just as the Singularity is always 30 years away. In the panel on quantum sensing, Chris Hoofnagle argued that, as he and Simson Garfinkel recently wrote at Lawfare and in their new book, quantum cryptanalysis is overhyped as a threat (although there are many opportunities for quantum computing in chemistry and materials science). However, quantum sensing is here now, works (because qubits are fragile), and is cheap. There is plenty of privacy threat here to go around: quantum sensing will benefit entirely different classes of intelligence, particularly remote, undetectable surveillance.

Hoofnagle and Garfinkel are calling this MASINT, for machine and signature intelligence, and believe that it will become very difficult to hide things, even at a national level. In Hoofnagle’s example, a quantum sensor-equipped drone could fly over the homes of parolees to scan for guns.

Quantum sensing and spatial computing have this in common: they both enable unprecedented passive data collection. VR headsets, for example, collect all sorts of biomechanical data that can be mined more easily for personal information than people expect.

Barring change, all that data will be collected by today’s already-powerful entities.

The deeper level on which all this legislation fails particularly exercised Cristina Caffarra, the co-founder of the Centre for Economic Policy Research in the panel on AI and monopoly, saying that all this legislation is basically nibbling around the edges because they do not touch the real, fundamental problem of the power being amassed by the handful of companies who own the infrastructure.

“It’s economics 101. You can have as much downstream competition as you like but you will never disperse the power upstream.” The reports and other material generated by government agencies like the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority are, she says, just “admiring the problem”.

A day earlier, the Novi Sad professor Vladen Joler had already pointed out the fundamental problem: at the dawn of the Internet anyone could start with nothing and build something; what we’re calling “AI” requires billions in investment, so comes pre-monopolized. Many people dismiss Europe for not having its own homegrown Big Tech, but that overlooks open technologies: the Raspberry Pi, Linux, and the web itself, which all have European origins.

In 2010, the now-departing MP Robert Halfon (Con-Harlow) said at an event on reining in technology companies that only a company the size of Google – not even a government – could create Street View. Legend has it that open source geeks heard that as a challenge, and so we have OpenStreetMap. Caffarra’s fiery anger raises the question: at what point do the infrastructure providers become so entrenched that they could choke off an open source competitor at birth? Caffarra wants to build a digital public interest infrastructure using the gaps where Big Tech doesn’t yet have that control.

The Dutch Groenlinks MEP Kim van Sparrentak offered an explanation for why the AI Act doesn’t address market concentration: “They still dream of a European champion who will rule the world.” An analogy springs to mind: people who vote for tax cuts for billionaires because one day that might be *them*. Meanwhile, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority finds nothing to investigate in Microsoft’s partnership with the French AI startup Mistral.

Van Sparrentak thinks one way out is through public procurement; adopt goals of privacy and sustainability, and support European companies. It makes sense; as the AI Now Institute’s Amba Kak, noted, at the moment almost everything anyone does digitally has to go through the systems of at least one Big Tech company.

As Sebastiano Toffaletti, head of the secretariat of the European SME Alliance, put it, “Even if you had all the money in the world, these guys still have more data than you. If you don’t and can’t solve it, you won’t have anyone to challenge these companies.”

Illustrations: Vladen Joler shows Anatomy of an AI System, a map he devised with Kate Crawford of the human labor, data, and planetary resources that are extracted to make “AI”.

Microsoft can remember it for you wholesale

A new theory: somewhere in the Silicon Valley universe there’s a cadre of techies who have eidetic memories and they’re feeling them start to slip. Panic time.

That’s my best explanation for Microsoft’s latest wheeze, a new feature for its Copilot assistant that will take what’s variously called a “snapshot” or a “screenshot” of your computer (all three monitors?) every five seconds and store it for future reference. Microsoft hasn’t explained much about Recall’s inner technical workings, but according to the announcement, the data will be stored locally and will be searchable via semantic associations and some sort of “AI”. Microsoft also says the data will not be used to train AI models.

The general anger and dismay at this plan brings back, almost nostalgically, memories of the 1990s, when Microsoft was near-universally hated as the evil monopolist dominating computing. In 2008, when Google was ten years old, a BBC presenter asked me if I thought Google would ever be hated as much as Microsoft was (not then, no). In 2012, veteran journalist Charles Arthur published the book Digital Wars about how Microsoft had stagnated and lost its lead. And then suddenly, in the last few years, it’s back on top.

Possibilities occur that Microsoft doesn’t mention. For example: could software might be embedded into Windows to draw inferences from the data Recall saves? And could those inferences be forwarded to the company or used to target you with ads? That seems like a far more efficient way to invade users’ privacy than copying the data itself, if that’s what the company ultimately wants to do.

Lots of things on our computers already retain a “memory” of what we’ve been doing. Operating systems generate logs to help debug problems. Word processors retain a changelog, which powers the ability to undo mistakes. Web browsers have user-configurable histories; email software has archives; media players retain playlists. All of those are useful – but part of that usefulness is that they are contextual, limited, and either easily terminated by closing the relevant application or relatively easily edited to remove items that shouldn’t be kept.

It’s hard for almost everyone who isn’t Microsoft to understand the point of keeping everything by default. It seems like a feature only developers could love. I certainly would like Windows to be better at searching for stored files or my (Firefox) browser to be better at reloading that article I was reading yesterday. I have even longed for a personal version of Vannevar Bush’s Memex. As part of that, I might welcome a feature that let me hit a button to record the last five useful minutes of a meeting, or save a social media post to a local archive. But the key to that sort of memory expansion is curation, not remembering everything promiscuously. For most people, selective forgetting is how we survive the torrents of irrelevance hurled at us every day.

What Recall sounds most like is the lifelog science fiction writer Charlie Stross imagined in 2007 might be our future. Plummeting storage costs and expanding capacity, he reasoned, would make it possible to store *everything* in your pocket. Even then, there were (a very few) people doing that sort of thing, most notably Steve Mann, a University of Toronto professor who started wearing devices to comprhensively capture his life as a 1990s graduate student. Over the years, Mann has shrunk his personal gadget array from a laptop and peripherals to glasses and pocket devices. Many more people capture their surroundings now – but they do it on their phones. If Apple or Google were proposing a Recall feature for iOS or Android, the idea would seem a lot less weird.

The real issue is that there are many people who would like to be able to know what somone *else* has been doing on their computer at all times. Helicopter parents. Schools and teachers under government compulsion (see for example Prevent (PDF)). Employers. Border guards. Corporate spies. The Department of Work and Pensions. Authoritarian governments. Law enforcement and security agencies. Criminals. Domestic abusers… So developing any feature like this must include considering how to protect it against these threats. This does not appear to have happened.

Many others have written about the privacy issues in all this – the UK’s Information Commission’s Office is already investigating. At The Register, Richard Speed does a particularly good job of looking at some of the fine details. On Mastodon, Kevin Beaumont says inspection of the Copilot+ software suggests that Recall stores the text it extracts from all those snapshots into an easily copiable SQlite database.

But there’s still more. The kind of archive Recall appears to construct can teach an attacker how the target thinks: not just what passwords they choose but how they devise them.Those patterns can be highly valuable. Granted, few targets are worth that level of attention, but it happens, as Peter Davies, a technical director at eThales, has often warned.

Recall is not the only move – see also flawed-AI-with-everything – that suggests that the computer industry, like some politicians and governments, is badly losing touch with the public. Increasingly, what they want to do seems unrelated to what the rest of us want. If they think things like Recall are a good idea they need to read more Philip K. Dick. And then don’t invent the Torment Nexus.

Illustrations: Arnold Schwarzenegger seeking better memories in the 1990 film Total Recall.

Intents and purposes

One of the basic principles of data protection law is the requirement for consent for change of use. For example, giving a site a mobile number for two-factor authentication doesn’t entitle it to sell that number to a telemarketing company. Providing a home address to enable package delivery doesn’t also invite ads trying to manipulate my vote in an election. Governments, too, are subject to data protection law, but they have more scope than most to carve out – or simply take – exceptions for themselves.

And so to the UK’s Department of Work and Pensions, whose mission in life is supposed to be to provide people with the financial support the state has promised them, whether that’s welfare or state pensions – overall, about 23 million people. Schools Week reports that Jen Persson at Defend Digital Me has discovered that the DWP has a secret deal with the Department of Education granting it access to the National Pupil Database for the purpose of finding benefit fraud.

“Who knows their family’s personal confidential records are in the haystack used to find the fraudulent needle?” Persson asks.

Every part of this is a mess. First of all, it turns schools into hostile environments for those already at greatest risk. Second, as we saw as long ago as 2010, parents and children have little choice about the data schools collect and keep. The breadth and depth of this data has been expanding long enough to burn out the UK’s first campaigner on children’s privacy rights (Terri Dowty, with Action for Rights of Children), and keep the second (Persson) fully occupied for some years now.

Persson told Schools Week that more than 15 million of the people on the NPD have long since left school. That sounds right; the database was created in 2002, five years into Tony Blair’s database-loving Labour government. In the 2009 report Database State, written under the aegis of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, Ross Anderson, Terri Dowty, Philip Inglesant, William Heath, and Angela Sasse surveyed 46 government databases. They found that a quarter of them were “almost certainly illegal” under human rights or data protection law, and noted that Britain was increasingly centralizing all such data.

“The emphasis on data capture, form-filling, mechanical assessment and profiling damages professional responsibility and alienates the citizen from the state. Over two-thirds of the population no longer trust the government with their personal data,” they wrote then.

The report was published while Blair’s government was trying to implement the ID card enshrined in the 2006 ID Cards Act. This latest in a long string of such proposals following the withdrawal of ID cards after the end of World War II was ultimately squelched when David Cameron’s coalition government took office in 2010. The act was repealed in 2011.

These bits of history are relevant for three reasons: 1) there is no reason to believe that the Labour government everyone expects will win office in the next nine months will be any less keen on dataveillance; 2) tackling benefit fraud was what they claimed they wanted the ID card for in 2006; 3) you really don’t need an ID *card* if you have biometrics and ubiquitous, permanent access online to a comprehensive government database. This was obvious even in 2006, and now we’re seeing it in action.

Dowty often warned that children were used as experimental subjects on which British governments sharpened the policies they intended to expand to the rest of the population. And so it is proving: the use of education data to look for benefit fraud is the opening act for the provision in the Data Protection and Digital Information bill empowering the DWP to demand account data from banks and other financial institutions, again to reduce benefit fraud.

The current government writes, “The new proposals would allow regular checks to be carried out on the bank accounts held by benefit claimants to spot increases in their savings which push them over the benefit eligibility threshold, or when people send [sic] more time overseas than the benefit rules allow for.” The Information Commissioner’s Office has called the measure disproportionate, and says it does not provide sufficient safeguards.

Big Brother Watch, which is campaigning against this proposal, argues that it reverses the fundamental principle of the presumption of innocence. All pervasive “monitoring” does that; you are continuously a suspect except at the specific points where you’ve been checked and found innocent. .

In a commercial context, we’d call the coercion implicit in repurposing data given under compulsion bait and switch. We’d also bear in mind the Guardian’s recent expose: the DWP has been demanding back huge sums of money from carers who’ve made minor mistakes in reporting their income. As BBW also wrote, even a tiny false positive rate will give the DWP hundreds of thousands of innocent people to harass.

Thirty years ago, when I was first learning about the dangers of rampant data collection, it occurred to me that the only way you can ensure that data can’t be leaked, exploited, or used maliciously is to not collect in the first place. This isn’t a choice anyone can make now. But there are alternatives that reverse the trend toward centralization that Anderson et. al identified in 2009.

Illustrations: Haystacks at a Moldovan village (via Wikimedia).

Deja news

At the first event organized by the University of West London group Women Into Cybersecurity, a questioner asked how the debates around the Internet have changed since I wrote the original 1997 book net.wars..

Not much, I said. Some chapters have dated, but the main topics are constants: censorship, freedom of speech, child safety, copyright, access to information, digital divide, privacy, hacking, cybersecurity, and always, always, *always* access to encryption. Around 2010, there was a major change when the technology platforms became big enough to protect their users and business models by opposing government intrusion. That year Google launched the first version of its annual transparency report, for example. More recently, there’s been another shift: these companies have engorged to the point where they need not care much about their users or fear regulatory fines – the stage Ed Zitron calls the rot economy and Cory Doctorow dubs enshittification.

This is the landscape against which we’re gearing up for (yet) another round of recursion. April 25 saw the passage of amendments to the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act (2016). These are particularly charmless, as they expand the circumstances under which law enforcement can demand access to Internet Connection Records, allow the government to require “exceptional lawful access” (read: backdoored encryption) and require technology companies to get permission before issuing security updates. As Mark Nottingham blogs, no one should have this much power. In any event, the amendments reanimate bulk data surveillance and backdoored encryption.

Also winding through Parliament is the Data Protection and Digital Information bill. The IPA amendments threaten national security by demanding the power to weaken protective measures; the data bill threatens to undermine the adequacy decision under which the UK’s data protection law is deemed to meet the requirements of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. Experts have already put that adequacy at risk. If this government proceeds, as it gives every indication of doing, the next, presumably Labour, government may find itself awash in an economic catastrophe as British businesses become persona-non-data to their European counterparts.

The Open Rights Group warns that the data bill makes it easier for government, private companies, and political organizations to exploit our personal data while weakening subject access rights, accountability, and other safeguards. ORG is particularly concerned about the impact on elections, as the bill expands the range of actors who are allowed to process personal data revealing political opinions on a new “democratic engagement activities” basis.

If that weren’t enough, another amendment also gives the Department of Work and Pensions the power to monitor all bank accounts that receive payments, including the state pension – to reduce overpayments and other types of fraud, of course. And any bank account connected to those accounts, such as landlords, carers, parents, and partners. At Computer Weekly, Bill Goodwin suggests that the upshot could be to deter landlords from renting to anyone receiving state benefits or entitlements. The idea is that banks will use criteria we can’t access to flag up accounts for the DWP to inspect more closely, and over the mass of 20 million accounts there will be plenty of mistakes to go around. Safe prediction: there will be horror stories of people denied benefits without warning.

And in the EU… Techcrunch reports that the European Commission (always more surveillance-happy and less human rights-friendly than the European Parliament) is still pursuing its proposal to require messaging platforms to scan private communications for child sexual abuse material. Let’s do the math of truly large numbers: billions of messages, even a teeny-tiny percentage of inaccuracy, literally millions of false positives! On Thursday, a group of scientists and researchers sent an open letter pointing out exactly this. Automated detection technologies perform poorly, innocent images may occur in clusters (as when a parent sends photos to a doctor), and such a scheme requires weakening encryption, and in any case, better to focus on eliminating child abuse (taking CSAM along with it).

Finally, age verification, which has been pending in the UK ever since at least 2016, is becoming a worldwide obsession. At least eight US states and the EU have laws mandating age checks, and the Age Verification Providers Association is pushing to make the Internet “age-aware persistently”. Last month, the BSI convened a global summit to kick off the work of developing a worldwide standard. These moves are the latest push against online privacy; age checks will be applied to *everyone*, and while they could be designed to respect privacy and anonymity, the most likely is that they won’t be. In 2022, the French data protection regulator, CNIL, found that current age verification methods are both intrusive and easily circumvented. In the US, Casey Newton is watching a Texas case about access to online pornography and age verification that threatens to challenge First Amendment precedent in the Supreme Court.

Because the debates are so familiar – the arguments rarely change – it’s easy to overlook how profoundly all this could change the Internet. An age-aware Internet where all web use is identified and encrypted messaging services have shut down rather than compromise their users and every action is suspicious until judged harmless…those are the stakes.

Illustrations: Angel sensibly smashes the ring that makes vampires impervious (in Angel, “In the Dark” (S01e03)).