Doctorow: American Tech Cartels Use Apps to Break the Law

You aren't flipping it on its head at all, the reason hotels exist is because travelers exist and need somewhere to go.

Why does Airbnb think they have a right to invert the social contract that has created a designated place for people who are likely to not know local norms and be operating on strange hours?

The issues with finance are on the edges and areas where there are really a small number of industry players. They have an outsized impact and the worst practices are usually skirting the regulatory framework.

The Airbnb argument isn’t regulatory capture example - the issue there is that it’s impossible to build anything. You have to build a giant hotel to justify the overhead of building anything hotel. Airbnb fills a gap of creative reuse and provides a tax shelter for rich people.

Nonsense. Residents don't complain about hotels because of the perception that hotels are too expensive for poor and working-class people to afford. Whereas the perception of apartments is that they are cheap enough that such people will choose to live in them.

It's all about not wanting to live near "poor" people.

I don't agree with this.

Get you and a thousand friends to submit fake mortgages documents and let me know how many of you end up in jail. Compare that too how many people went to jail from Wells Fargo.

More smaller players is easier to regulate because you can literally use any punishments. If you dissolve Wells Fargo the economy is going to throw a fit (see Enron) but if you dissolve a tiny company then nobody cares.

Real Estate and Healthcare seem to be pretty highly concentrated industries imo. Even though there are a zillion agents/doctors they're part of a professional guild and that guild does the lobbying on their behalf. Like good luck getting antibiotics on your own but after a doctor looks at you for 1 minute you have a prescription for the same drug you always take for an ear infection.

What's practically impossible is regulating a few anticompetitive megacorporations. You can't regulate an entity that writes your nation's laws.

Written law was something very important historically: from unwritten norms to codified representations that, however imperfect and provisional, were more or less accessible to all and changeable through whatever process, democratic or otherwise. Over the last decades, we -- and this could be taken rather literally as "the readers of hacker news" -- have been encoding so many aspects of the world into software in a way that doesn't clearly coincide with the legal norms of any particular let alone every country.

On the one hand, software is clearly "better" than law in at least the sense that the former eliminates the necessary ambiguity of the latter: the interpretation or "implementation details" of even just a particular law are always disputed. Perhaps a particular implementation of cross-border financial transactions, say, or of personal identity doesn't in fact reflect what the developers or product managers intended, but if that is identified it can be changed.

Yet, on the other hand, it is certainly true that, from the perspective of regulators let alone the masses, the resulting situation is much closer to pre-law. Nobody has any idea how or why they were suddenly banned from Instagram or their PayPal account closed, let alone how money actually moves around the world when they send a friend funds through Transferwise. Certainly, if we don't even know how things are working there is no process by which it could be decided that things should work differently, let alone a process by which software would concretely be made to work differently.

Indeed, I am skeptical that law as such will ever be able to regulate software: even just considering the problem in terms of a single country/legal system, how does one actually guarantee that the ever-changing corpus of code complies with the ever-changing and essentially ambiguous body of regulations? One of course sees this with the EU as the "avant-garde" of the struggle to regulate software. They pursue either these incredibly general wars on "cookies" that don't solve real problems, or endlessly deliberate when it's already too late about how to handle AI, or produce something relatively well-conceived like GDPR where enforcement is then incredibly unclear if not impossible.

TLDR I have no idea what the solution is, but I think the intrinsic problem of law and software is incredibly important to take seriously as software eats the world. At the very least, it's not just a problem of "competition" since, as you note, monopoly is at least one sufficient condition [1] of eventually rendering the way software regulates the world transparent and open to change.

[1] Undoubtedly, there are other ways this could possibly transpire through open source etcetc -- however, even in that case there has to be a guarantee that particular software defines the operations of a particular domain, i.e. that there exists software through which one can understand that domain and hypothetically change, which is in some sense just a "public" monopoly.

We had someone come to our house to work on a range hood. They didn’t have ladder training, so the insurance company wouldn’t cover it if they fell off the ladder.

The range hood repairman left without doing any work. I do wonder what a normal day at work looks like for this person. We weren’t billed for the house call.

I think you are mistaking your point of view, which is probably that of an individual business owner, for the point of view of someone looking at the actuarial statistics or whatever and seeing tens of thousands of preventable ladder injuries a year. Just because an event is rare from your point of view doesn't mean that the event costs nothing or that it should be ignored.

I can't believe how common this attitude of "if its too small for me to notice it doesn't matter" is.

Americans: hold my AR15

It's me, I'm the idiot.

Standing on the top step? Yes. Putting a hammer on the top step and forgetting about it? Uh huh. Putting the ladder on plywood on a mattress so I could change a lightbulb without moving the bed and buying a taller ladder? You better believe it. Using a paint sprayer with a 25' latter and no spotter? Absolutely not. Wait, yes.

There are dozens of us: https://old.reddit.com/r/MenonUnstableLadders/

"In 2023, the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons reported that 500,000 people were treated for ladder-related injuries, with 300 of these incidents proving fatal." from https://www.usf.edu/health/public-health/news/2024/cc-ladder...

But he addresses that in the post, by saying that these monopoly/olipolyies actors can amass massive war chests that make them become bigger than the regulator. So by the time MS was a monopoly it was already too late.

Earlier this week I was in a regional gas station getting lunch, they've got maybe 30 or so locations scattered around this part of the state, and watched them tell an old man that he couldn't get a loyalty card from them anymore because they only do apps now. "But I don't have a cellphone" - "Uhhh... You can also do it online?"

Maybe it did at some point but it's not in the list of permissions on Android

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mcdonalds....

Unless one is using something like GrapheneOS, Android/iOS "app permissions" do not meaningfully impede data collection

As long as apps can connect to the internet, data can be collected. By design Android/iOS does not enable users to deny internet access to specific apps. That design is not a coincidence

Like clearly they're OK with forcing a choice between "use the app" and "never eat McDonalds again", because that's effectively what they're doing, and they have to know it.

https://survivalfreedom.com/how-much-does-it-cost-mcdonalds-... [2023]

https://hpshplaidline.org/2024/02/08/breaking-down-the-cost-... [2024]

Historically it's been a real estate company due to the vast portfoloio and usually prime locations. Not sure if this is still the case.