<
https://doctorow.medium.com/end-to-end-encryption-is-too-important-to-be-proprietary-afdf5e97822>
"The EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) is set to become law; it will require the
biggest tech companies in the world (Apple, Google and Facebook, and maybe a
few others) to open up their instant messaging services (iMessage, Facebook
Messenger, Whatsapp, and maybe a few others) so that smaller messaging services
can plug into them. These smaller services might be run by startups,
nonprofits, co-ops, or even individual tinkerers.
The logic behind this is sound. IM tools are the ultimate “network effects”
products: once they have a critical mass of users, other users feel they have
to join to talk to the people who are already there. The more users who sign
up, the more users feel they
must sign up.
This gives the big platforms enormous power, for good and for ill. Start with
the good: when Facebook turned on end-to-end encryption for Whatsapp in 2016,
they endowed billions of users with state-of-the-art privacy.
But then there’s the bad: Mark Zuckerberg and his executive team are the
benevolent dictators of Whatsapp. Benevolent dictatorships work well, but fail
badly. By definition, benevolent dictatorships aren’t accountable (that’s why
they’re called “dictatorships”) and that means that any time a benevolent
dictator messes up (or sells out) you are stuck.
This is much worse when network effects are on the dictator’s side. If you
object to Whatsapp’s administrative policies, you can’t just quit — you either
have to convince all your friends to quit with you, or give up on the
customers, communities and friends who stay behind."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
