Thread by @doctorow

Tech companies' "mission statements" are easy to dismiss as BS, but they're deadly serious and surprisingly successful in their aspirations to dominate the digital world.

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That's how we've ended up in a situation where a single company might control your email archives, family photos, business's cloud drives, home security system, mobile devices and media collections.

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But these companies don't act like they've deliberately coiled their tendrils around every aspect of your digital life; they act like you're just a customer whom they can kick off the platform the way a bartender would 86 you after last call.

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That's a phenomenon I explore in my latest piece of @EFF's Deeplinks blog, "Utilities Governed Like Empires." It's a piece about how policies governing competition, tech, and contract led inexorably to this situation.

eff.org/deeplinks/2021…

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Anyone who's ever had content removed or their accounts suspended or terminated by a Big Tech firm knows that Kafka was an optimist - The Trial's got nothin' on the endless customer-support email loops where robots ask questions you've already answered.

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The stakes are high - losing your email might cost you the last email from a beloved, dead friend; losing your media account can lock you out of thousands in games, movies, ebooks and audiobooks; losing your home automation account might brick your thermostat and door locks.

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What's more, all these accounts - home automation, email, cloud, media - might be just ONE account. A single nebulous terms-of-service violation or false credit-card fraud alert at just one company can cost you everything.

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DRM laws like DMCA 1201 mean that you can't jailbreak the media you bought, even if the company won't let you access it anymore. Terms of service mean that you sign away any right to seek redress if that happens.

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Lax anti-monopoly enforcement means that companies can hoover up small competitors, so that your health-monitoring wearable, audiobook collection, family photos, and other digital services all end up under one company's umbrella.

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Youtubers and other creative workers warned us about this - when a content removal or account termination process go wrong for them, they lose their livelihood. Despite the high stakes, the platforms maintain their right to enforce "house rules" - no matter how arbitrary.

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This ghastly situation will require multiple remedies to fix. For example, we must abolish rules that ban removing DRM, even for legal reasons (EFF has a lawsuit to do just this):

eff.org/press/releases…

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We must restore muscular antitrust enforcement, banning monopolistic mergers and unwinding the mergers that created monopolization:

us.macmillan.com/books/97812502…

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We should pass the #ACCESSAct, which will require big platforms to interoperate with smaller startups, co-ops and nonprofits, so you can leave the big companies behind without walking away from your friends, communities and customers:

eff.org/deeplinks/2021…

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We should make rules for companies that hold our data, requiring them to act with care and reasonableness when it comes to that information:

eff.org/deeplinks/2018…

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Digital rights are human rights. The fact that our lives are lived online and governed by high-handed terms of service and opaque corporate processes rather than by the rule of law and universal rights was not inevitable - and it's not too late to change it.

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"We have the right to a better digital future - a future where the ambitions of would-be monopolists and their shareholders take a back-seat to fairness, equity, and your right to self-determination."

eof/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/08/04/eig…