Brett Solomon on Digital Rights
Brett Solomon is retiring from AccessNow after fifteen years as its Executive Director. He’s written a blog post about what he’s learned and what comes next.
Comments
ResearcherZero • July 20, 2024 3:18 AM
Re: “digital transformation” as a quick fix for complex social and political problems
The most efficient means of delivery by the market is essentially free. No cost.
The large tech companies display content from other publishers and earn the ad revenue.
All of that content has a cost for the original publishers and their employees. As such it is an unworkable model that is destroying the traditional media publishing economy.
AI outfits are now supercharging this model where they take content and republish it for free, often ignoring laws. Copyright, plagiarism and regulations surrounding the accuracy of reporting information in specific areas, such as finance reporting and disclosure, are being completely ignored. This undermines the quality of information and trust in it.
Not only were law makers too slow in regulating tech companies that publish content and earn advertising revenue (which are effectively media companies), but existing regulation had already been substantially weakened before these tech companies came into existence.
Just as a failure to regulate the finance sector lead to a market collapse, now a failure to regulate the digital sector has lead to deep fractures running through many sectors.
Civil society depends on accountability. When police officers engage in misconduct, the harm they inflict on people is often on an individual basis -or is confined to their local community. Yet corporate harm can affect entire societies, can reach across borders and silence critics. Founders, boards and CEOs rarely bare responsibility for their actions.
“As the potential for the internet’s biggest companies became apparent, founders started asking for more and more power.”
‘https://www.wired.com/story/ellen-pao-founders-absolute-power-destroying-company-culture/
“With multi-class structures in place, founders and insiders effectively become a superclass, granting themselves many times the voting power of the ordinary shareholder, and often controlling the outcome of a vote, despite owning a relatively small volume of their own company’s stock. The rules around the superclass shares are encoded in the terms of the company’s IPO. In the vast majority of cases, those terms say that superclass shares cannot be sold to the public. They are an exclusive good that can only benefit company insiders.”
dual-class shares
‘https://www.investors.com/news/technology/tech-companies-ipo-super-voting-rights/
ResearcherZero • July 20, 2024 4:36 AM
Not only has our information environment become fragmented, so has everything else.
This has left our society without resilience, along with increasingly fragile sectors.
Walled gardens & Hyperpolarisation
A “techonomic cold war” is already under way—an ongoing, often-invisible state of conflict at the intersection of technology and geopolitics. At the same time, populist and nationalist leaders have been ascendant in much of the world.
“All of this is leading to the partitioning of both the real world (e.g., trade, labor mobility, and investment) and the digital world (e.g., tech platforms and standards).”
‘https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013038/the-fragmentation-of-everything/
For over a decade, tech companies have spread the fiction that “digital is different,” and would be hampered by public interest regulation.
…companies like Google and Facebook argued, because they deliver “free” services to consumers in exchange for “consent” to collect and hoard consumers’ private information.
Congress repeatedly walked away from regulatory oversight.
Internet service providers are typically local monopolies that gave consumers a “take it or leave it” option. The result was to shift the consumer protection burden onto the backs of the consumers themselves while limiting their available tools.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-tragedy-of-tech-companies-getting-the-regulation-they-want/
“when more and more services are ‘free,’ you can see how that really renders antitrust feeble.”
‘https://futurism.com/experts-argue-need-rethink-regulate-tech-companies
ResearcherZero • July 20, 2024 4:54 AM
An era devoid of effective international rule of law.
A risk of “supercharging human rights violations if regulation continues to lag behind advances”.
‘https://www.amnesty.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/POL1072002024ENGLISH.pdf
“States parties are progressively tightening the civic space”
The UN Human Rights Committee found that the number of individual complaints brought before them has reached an all-time high.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/02/rising-trend-violating-freedom-expression-and-political-rights-un-human
cybershow • July 20, 2024 7:36 AM
This is an excellent blog post by Brett Solomon that summarises a vast
landscape of urgent issues. Everyone should post a copy of this to
their political represntative.
ResearcherZero • July 24, 2024 11:05 PM
Is sensitive data being tracked and collected?
“Libert estimates that every day, there are likely trillions of illicitly transmitted cookies on the web.”
‘https://www.wired.com/story/webxray-online-privacy-violations/
impermissible disclosures
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance/hipaa-online-tracking/index.html
ResearcherZero • July 24, 2024 11:36 PM
A “very visible precariat” or workers engaged on ‘gig’ platforms.
’21st-century chimney-sweeps’
‘https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-24/growing-gap-between-knowledge-workers-gig-workers/103975622
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Daniel Popescu • July 20, 2024 12:26 AM
Very, very good article Bruce, and thank you for the post. Loved how he speaks about the output vs. outcome dichotomy and how IaaS usually flies under the radar in all this (re: our global BSOD from yesterday).