In an interview with The Register, author and activist Cory Doctorow offers a potential solution to thwarting “encittification,” an age-old phenomenon that pervades the tech industry. I am. It's when a once highly regarded and user-friendly platform gradually degrades in quality, becoming less attractive and difficult to monetize over time. Then it dies. Below are excerpts from an interview conducted by The Register's Iain Thomson. […] Doctorow explained that the reasons for encryption are complex and not necessarily directly malicious, but a product of the current business environment and regulatory landscape. He believes that the way to eliminate ensitization is to force effective competition. “We need prohibitions and regulations that prohibit capital markets from funding predatory pricing,” he explained. “It's very hard to break into a market when people are selling things below cost. We need to ban predatory acquisitions. Look at Facebook. Mark Zucker bought Instagram. Berg sent out an email saying we're buying Instagram because people don't like Facebook, they're moving to Instagram, and we don't want to give them anywhere else to go. is.”
The frustrating part of this problem is that the necessary laws are already in place to break up the big tech monopolies that allow encity and encourage competition. Doctorow lamented the lack of enforcement of these laws. In the United States, the Clayton Act, the Federal Trade Act, and the Sherman Act are all valid, but either are not enforced or are being questioned in the courts. However, that situation seems to be changing in recent years. Recent actions by increasingly powerful regulatory bodies such as the FTC and FCC have begun to move against large technology monopolies as well as other industrial sectors. What's more, Dr. Doctorow pointed out, these are not just products of Democratic administrations, but are actively supported by a growing number of Republicans. He cited Lina Khan, who was appointed FTC chair thanks in part to support from Republican politicians seeking change (though Republicans now regularly criticize her position).
Doctorow said the large size of the largest technology companies certainly gives them an advantage in cases like this, noting that he has seen this in action for more than 20 years. “If you think back to the days of Napster and compare technology and entertainment, entertainment was very concentrated in about seven major companies, and they had complete uniformity and discipline in their message.” Doctorow recalled. “Technology companies were hundreds of companies and much larger. Collectively they were an order of magnitude bigger than entertainment. But their messages were all over the place and contradicted each other. And they just lost. And they lost very badly.'' Doctorow discusses the negative impact big companies have on innovation and security, and how a growth strategy focused on increasing costs and reducing value can lead to vulnerabilities and It points out how this can lead to a decline in employee morale. “Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company before going out on their own to bring it down? Then that dream turned into a dream of working for a few years, quitting and starting a fake startup? “I was reduced to being rehired by the company by my old boss who employed the most inefficient method in the world to get a raise,” he told the Def Con crowd last August. “Then, it shrunk even more. You work for a tech giant for the rest of your life, but you get free kombucha and massages. And now that dream is over, and all that's left is they want your butt.” All you have to do is work with the tech giant until they fire you — like the 12,000 Google employees who were fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid them their salaries for the next 27 years. also deserves good reviews.”
Additionally, Doctorow emphasizes that there is a growing movement toward worker organizing in the high-tech industry, which could be a crucial element in reversing the trend of encityization. “We're a lot closer to tech union organizing than we were just a few years ago. Yes, it's still in its infancy, and sure, it's easy to double a small number, but , the power is doubling very quickly and in a very encouraging way,” Doctorow told the Register. “We're really at a tipping point, and part of that tipping point is coming from the kind of solidarity we're seeing with warehouse workers and tech workers.”
Ultimately, Doctorow argues, it should be possible to reintroduce a more competitive and innovative technology industry environment that better balances the interests of users, employees, and investors. .
