This is the balkanization of the internet. We've lived through a brief period of free exchange among peoples, but it's soon over. I predict only one viable future for all technology companies, big and small: Pick a single national jurisdiction, keep your employees and servers inside it.
This is absolutely not what's happening here though. Facebook absolutely could keep the data within the EU, they just think it's more profitable to move UK user data to California. Now, it's a valid question as to why the UK would allow their constituents most personal data to be transferred out of their jurisdiction, but that's up to the UK government. Facebook exists in hundreds of jurisdictions, it's not rare for them to move user data out of a jurisdiction or intio a jurisdiction. It's almost unique that a govenrment encourages that by reducing regulation though.
Maybe I've misread the article, but I didn't see anything about Facebook transferring user data to the US. What has changed is that FB users in the UK will be agreeing to terms with Facebook Inc in California rather than Facebook Ireland.
I suspect this is because the UK has a data sharing agreement with the US, but when Brexit kicks in there is not a legal mechanism in place for easy transfer of data from the EU to the UK (which makes your life hard if you're a company based in Ireland and you need to send data to the UK.)
> why the UK would allow their constituents most personal data to be transferred out of their jurisdiction
Are there limitations with using products/doing business outside the UK, from within the UK? As in, is there any authority that they could use to stop people from, willingly(?), using a foreign internet service? It seems that would require some pretty draconian internet policies.
There are, quite rightly, strict rules about how companies handle personal data (and that includes not transferring it to jurisdictions where those rules don't apply). I don't think any of those rules apply to individuals handling their own personal data.
Would it be possible to store data in a cryptographically decentralized way to stop giving meaning to "where" a data is stored?
Or maybe even just XOR it with a random key, put the result in the UK and put the key in the US. That way neither US nor UK has "personal data" -- independently each country just got a pile of white noise -- but the two countries together do have it, and they wouldn't be able to say who "really" has it.
I suppose, but law has to be governed by written documents, and part of technology's job is to advance society by identifying and operating in the loopholes of those written documents. What does the written law define as "where data is stored"?
The problem is people expect all things to be free (beer).
Naturally there's a cost to all things: developers need to eat; they need a work/life balance.
Unless there's financial backing for a concept or project it will have a hard time getting off the ground.
And unless there's some corporate interest in what's being worked on it simply won't be written.
The best hope is open-source outreach not as benevolence, but as part of a large company's recruitment policy.
One thing I'd like to see is Microsoft licensing Firefox's backend, and allowing the user to chose which engine to use.
Chromium might have some major advantages, but user privacy (and ultimately experience) will never be a part of it - we need to stop relying on corporations that have intentions that are ultimately adversarial to the end user.
Will that ever happen? Fuck no - Microsoft already bundles adware into their $300 operating system.
> The problem is people expect all things to be free (beer).
That may be true, but few people ask the follow up question “why do people expect things to be free?”
The answer is usually because companies like Google had pulled a bait-and-switch of sorts where they offered a service for free long before they made a commercial business of people’s profiles. They set this expectation of free themselves.
And you can’t really blame a consumer for wanting to bag a bargain.
E.g., running a small e-mail service was a popular side business that provided a predictable amount of extra for many developers around the globe. And customers were generally fine with a small charge per month – that is, until GMail effectively put an end to this.
I mean the other simpler answer is that monetization technology lagged compared to the internet, and the generation which grew up with it's growth (us) didn't have things like debit-only Mastercard's to even have the theoretical possibility of paying for things online.
Free was a requirement to have any sort of audience. It's still a burden in a lot ways. I suppose there's some version of the future where Amazon builds a microtransaction platform that allows direct end-user billing of the Lambda-time it took to serve your web request. That would be interesting.
I’m old enough to have had a debit card for the entirety of the webs life and I recall things differently:
- Email wasn’t free (particularly in the pre-web days)
- you had to pay for internet usage per phone call (and it used to be expensive before ISPs went mainstream!)
- hosting wasn’t free (Geocities changed this but there were heavy limitations that even in the 90s surfers felt: storage space, ad banners injected into your site, no friendly domain name, etc)
Most of the free stuff was pretty naff. But people didn’t mind because they used that free stuff for doing generally naff things with. There was a certain beauty to it, like walking through a car boot / yard sale you find the occasional gems but nobody had any illusions of greatness.
What happened after was professional businesses making professional services free. That was the game changer. And it put a lot of non-free services out of business.
Copyright is a different issue but if you want to discuss that then it’s worth noting that when copyright law was invented it was intended a bit like a patent law but to protect authors against the cost of printing books. Stories themselves were considered ideas and thus where considered free because before printed books stories would be passed on to one another for free by word of mouth.
More recently and it is actually perfectly legal to copy music off the radio and programs off the TV. It’s even legal for people to share their VHS recording with friends and family and keep those recordings around indefinitely. A great many of purple took advantage of that — those who could afford to buy singles or films would do so while others were happy to wait until it was aired and then copy it one a blank cassette.
Trademarks were also less aggressively pursued. That might have been because before the internet was as commoditised it was apparent when Bobby Joe used Disney’s IP for their kids birthday. But now it’s so much easier for companies to identify and clamp down on what they perceive as theft of their intellectual property.
Whether you agree with current copyright laws or not, there has still been a long history of precedence of greater consumer rights and minor transgressions being ignored...then that all changed when content went digital. However people’s attitudes didn’t change with the switch to digital content. At least not initially. Napster was born from the generation of people who grew up recording music from the radio but who no longer listened to the radio. At the time of Napster, downloading was still pretty slow (or, more precisely, peers uploading the MP3s you wanted were slow) and most MP3s were sub CD quality anyway. So if you could afford to buy CDs then you probably would have done.
The real change was when downloading became more convenient than legally buying. That’s really when piracy took off into the mainstream. But when that happened that was because consumers were desperate for a more modern business model while content owners kept dragging their heels by squeezing their antiquated business model and threatening anyone who didn’t comply.
Let’s also not forget that, for a long time, legally owned content was worse than the same content pirated. eg CD root kits, the unskipable “you wouldn’t steal a handbag” adverts that ironically only appeared on legally purchased DVDs, DVD region locking, etc. If you owned a pirated CD or DVD then your user experience was often better than those who paid for their legal copy.
So I find it really hard to be sympathetic to content holders because they’ve lobbied to extend copyright, reduce consumer rights on digital content, and have held back the entertainment industries for years with anti-consumer practices while the world evolved around them. And I find it hypocritical that they then moan about how everyone else is playing foul and they’re just the victims in all this. It smacks of playground bullies moaning when kids refuse to give them lunch money.
But this is all a very different topic to the one of online services, which was the topic originally being discussed.
Obviously the EU is a force against that, standardizing regulations across the whole EU. Facebook is changing how it relates to UK users because they have left the EU, of course.
At the moment there aren't really any significant contradictory laws/regulations I am aware of. Facebook could just choose to treat everyone as if they were protected by EU laws, but they choose not to. They didn't have to change how they relate to UK users, but they legally could and they chose to.
I don’t think this is correct. EU is pretty strong in favour of data localisation, UK is not. Moving customers to California doesn’t mean they are no longer under UK privacy rules, which of course are identical to EU privacy rules (for the foreseeable future, could change of course).
While I agree with the theory of what your saying, I'm not so sure it matches the reality.
If it did, then why is Facebook moving the data? There would be no benefit. Also it's currently not clear that it's actually legal to move EU citizen data to the US, because the EU doesn't thing the US has strong enough privacy protections.
I know that EU citizen data is in the US, and people keep coming up with clever legal structures to make it legal. But those structures keep getting ruled illegal by EU courts.
The EU has been one of the strongest pressure points towards forcing the rest of the world to acquiesce to EU specific requirements or leave. As such, the EU is at the forefront of balkanization of the internet.
We seem to be nearing peak big tech which does conflict a bit with the nation state system but looking at technology today it does seem to be a temporary phenomenon with light at the end of the tunnel. Decentralized protocols that operate at the internet layer above the interference of nation states are being built and deployed today and while they are still in their infancy they have a clear path to providing a neutral, private, and reliable platform for people from around the world to work together, build together, and coordinate more easily without any big corporations or authoritarian governments corrupting the systems.
Facebook/Twitter will be turned into a protocol within 10 years that anyone can use. Permissionless systems like the internet always win over centralized systems over time. Big tech will eventually be remembered the same way as we remember AOL.
The future is bright and I'm fairly optimistic. I will enjoy living in a post-nation state driven world where humanity works together as a whole towards our common goals.
What utter nonsense. Facebook and Twitter will not turn themselves into protocols unless explicitly forced to do so by authorities. It's in their interest to be monopolies.
I didn't say they will turn themselves into protocols. The social protocols that are developed will displace those corporations over time as they provide more functionality with fewer restrictions.
The current tech giants will adopt what they can control and will crush whatever they can't. Either technologically, fiscally, politically, legislative or socially.
Are there good cases of Facebook ignoring democratic laws? I've never really heard of Facebook doing anything that isn't in violation of laws (United States laws at least, I cant say other countries). For the U.S. the laws just aren't there yet to put the right restrictions on Facebook
This is pretty incoherent frankly. I don't agree with the categorization of the present as "peak big tech". Most tech firms have long roadmaps and global expansion plans, we are hardly at the peak.
Every social network that has gained any significant popularity (>100M users) is built on a closed system. Email is the only open protocol system that is relevant to bring up, and its flaws and shortcomings are well documented. Most enterprises use a closed system on top of email (Office 365 or G suite primarily) and communication is migrating to entirely closed systems (Slack or Teams).
Closed systems offer huge advantages for innovation, providing excellent user experience and strong privacy controls. As such, closed systems will continue to be the dominant paradigm.
It wasn't feasible to build an effective decentralized social network until a few years ago. It's still not really feasible today but thousands of people are working on it and progress is being made.
I think email is a great example as it's a highly successful protocol that unifies most applications together. When you go to a website you sign up with your email. It's universal. You can guarantee that someone can interface with you via email in a way you can't with centralized services like Facebook. There have been some businesses that primarily work on Facebook but it's uncommon and they always have email as a backup. If you want to notify someone of something or provide an official service it will be over email. Email wins because it's decentralized, warts and all.
I share your optimism, though I think there remain significant economic and technology headwinds that have been slowing down the development of decentralized web technologies.
Could you elaborate on what those protocols are, how they help, what their weaknesses are, and what work remains? I'm really curious to learn more about this area. (Even just a link summarizing this would be awesome.)
There are a lot of open hard technology and business problems to make decentralized systems act as good as centralized systems. In short, The web architecture (HTTP, HTML, URI, MIME) inherently is decentralized for consumption but encourages centralized updates. Many years ago I wrote about these technical challenges and some ideas for solutions on “the Write Side of the Web”.
Mastodon, does not operate above the ability of a nation state to block Mastodon.
At the info tech department of a large flagship university recently, (and for reasons that are a bit salacious), there was a need to block mastodon servers on campus and some coming from off campus. It was almost as easy as the flip of a switch to turn it off. If a university can do it on their network, it's a virtual certainty that a nation state can do the same.
I love talking about this stuff but it does have a lot of technical jargon and dependent knowledge that is very difficult to convey simply. I'll try my best. Also this stuff is still being designed and built so some of it is not even concrete yet. Getting really into this would be a big article too so I'll try to be brief but not too much.
The basic premise is that protocols are more powerful than centralized entities as they are permissionless (anyone can use them without asking first), uncensorable (you can build a business on top of it without worrying about the platform disappearing from under you), and decentralized (no one single entity controls it and thus it becomes a public good). The internet has all of these properties which is why we all use it. Nobody built a Google on top of AOL for the same reason nobody built a successful business on top of Twitter (look this up if curious).
Protocols were limited until the invention of shared trust (Ethereum etc) but can now be instantiated for many kinds of discrete data and operations. Protocols are currently being built for identity (BrightID, POAP, many others), commerce (NFTs for art like Rarible, God's Unchained, etc, pretty much a standard way for everyone in the world to exchange physical goods which enables things like OpenSea which is a digital Ebay), primitive social protocols (Peepeth[not a great example but does the trick], Gitcoin, etc) with many more that I'm running out of time to list.
The important thing is that all of these protocols are open for everyone to use and even modify. Everyone is running on a shared data set and even more importantly they all weave together. Many apps are using an identity protocol for all user account type interactions alongside the NFT protocols for representing the objects used in the system. The protocols themselves handle the complexity and enable the scale needed for a single fair system to be used everywhere without the negative effects that would have in today's society (Google running the comments everywhere on the web would be a dystopia, but a Usenet group for each website would actually be nice).
Years of work remain and most protocols are still in the early days. The protocol that weaves a whole bunch of smaller ones together into a cohesive social network is also years away as it relies on the smaller protocols such as identity, file storage (IPFS), systems of moderation (DAOs, Kleros, etc) et all to be further developed to the point where others can take them and create something grander than the sum of the parts.
Hundreds of groups of people are all working hard on lots of aspects of these systems together. It will take time but even the progress today is rather exciting and feels like the early days of the internet itself.
(I'm not the best writer and I have a feeling this was a bit disjointed and not super helpful so sorry in advance and I can try to follow up on things if anyone is still interested.)
I'm an engineer not an educator. Sit in a room with me and a whiteboard and it would come across pretty easily.
Also professional techies doesn't really mean much. If I throw out terms like sybil resistance, economic abstraction, or merkle tree it doesn't really make things clearer for most people here.
I wouldn't really call it balkanization. Most services still operate across borders. Thanks to the internet I have contact to peers from all over the world. Some aspects of the internet will become more localized in the future, but generally inter border communication is still growing I think.
And in fact on an EU level, rules are unified instead of balkanized. The digital single market project brought things like the GDPR or the abolishment of EU roaming charges, allowing you to travel around the EU without having to pay extra to your phone provider.
The EU as a whole is much more consistent than individual countries, in fact, standardization is one of it's biggest strengths.
I used to work for the national vehicle registry in my country. European vehicles were easily registered using standard European "Whole Vehicle Type Approvals". Each new European car came with a type approval number linked to it's info, no problem.
American cars were a nightmare. Every new vehicle type came with it's own adventure of Googling or otherwise gathering information about the vehicle (number of doors, engine size etc...). Just no standards whatsoever. Horrible.
That is not true. Each state has different regulations, that's why the article says "moved to California" and not just "moved to the USA". It's possible that UK law is incompatible with other states.
The USA has as many or more different regulations than the EU, as lobbying is very strong in America.
Everyone remembers that "balkanization" refers to chopping up a nation into pieces (Balkans), right? So it's funny to see nations and multi-nations groups, who often sign treaties to "rationalize" rules, referred to as Balkanizing.
Living in a country where a global total war and several occupations of the most evil totalitarian regimes in history is still within living memory, and having been under an isolationist totalitarian power, comments like these make me shudder.
Globalization has some problems. The benefits so far have massively outweighed them, especially if you take the long view. How about we try to fix those faults, instead of retreating and isolating?
Centralization of supply chains, economic monoculture, increased spread of disease, increased carbon emissions, massively increased pollution. That’s a lot of risks which are mostly unquantifiable; it’s dubious to claim we know which is worse, especially in the long run. We lived without globalism for many thousands of years, it’s incredibly new and unproven.
I think the idea here is that keeping most humans alive, relatively healthy and out of poverty is good end goal and globalization helped with that.
We do have unquantifiable long-term risks but I would wager you don't want to live in the days where you did from a small wound because we don't have the technology or scale to provide antibiotics.
That is a false dichotomy. There was a sweet spot we had in between the invention of the antibiotic in the 1920s and now when societies were more localized. I find it quite doubtful, for example, that disposing of tons of forever chemicals (PFAS, etc.) in the ocean is at all compatible with keeping humans alive, even most humans. These are the unfortunate incentive structures we get when there is so little accountability.
Are you imagining that globalization will somehow create peace and prosperity between Chinese, Arabs, Jews, USAmericans, billionaires, cocoa growing child slaves, and the rest?
Yep. Another scary trend is the recent move of Joe Rogan under exclusively Spotify platform, together with the fact that they've removed the Podcasting part from their app for a number of countries including my own (Ukraine). I really hope there's going to be some common-sense movement that'll put this absurd to an end.
That's like the complete opposite of what the comment you're replying to is talking about. They're arguing against globalization and you're against different rules for different countries.
If you don't want globalization and think multiculturalism is the devil, it's kinda hypocritical to decry isolationism keeping away the global culture you do want.
The comment states it's anti-globalization and then states "it could be a good thing", I didn't see that as "arguing against globalization", felt more like adding points to the discussion.
I don't believe in utopia of full 100% globalization (one nation? one army?), but it definitely seems like a good default, and splitting the internet is kind of a worrysome trend.
This should also a taster for people living in the UK (including me) on what will happen to our rights under a sovereign state after an apocalyptic Brexit. Not politicising this conversation, just seing what is to come outside of the EU and with the struggle that is coming head on.
First they gave our FB data to the americans, next they went for our NHS! :)
ps1: I don't use FB
ps2: I got nothing against the americans (apart from their eating habits and love for guns)
ps3: there is a post-Brexit feast coming, and it won't be the People enjoying the main course(s).
> This is the balkanization of the internet. We've lived through a brief period of free exchange among peoples, but it's soon over. I predict only one viable future for all technology companies, big and small: Pick a single national jurisdiction, keep your employees and servers inside it.
That's better than a race to the bottom, e.g.
> Pick the jurisdiction(s) are most biased towards your selfish interest for your shareholders, tell the rest of the world to quit whining and deal with it. They either they can play ball or opt of of modern society.
Facebook can absolutely operate in each country following their laws. They just have to change their own company structure and data policies. For example, they may need to physically separate EU data from US data completely and have separate employees with access to each.
I don't see any reason they cannot do that. It will hurt their bottom line for sure, but it's completely reasonable imo.
For social networking companies like Facebook, is that bad? Shouldn't each county be able to enforce the things that are important to them (ie, outlawing Holocaust denial or allowing more nudity) rather than the entire world bowing to US mores and customs?
Nothing really changes for the rest of the web. You're allowed to stand up your own webserver if you want.
For business purposes the EU is one jurisdiction, so if a company can find a set of practices that complies both with the EU rules and the US rules, and doesn't violate anything Canada, Japan, the UK, or South Korea requires, they can serve about a billion people. They can probably live with that.
Facebook is in the business of selling advertisement. When they sell advertisement in the EU, they must follow EU legislation, including GDPR. Mercedes Benz is in the business of selling cars. When they sell cars in the US, they must follow US legislation.
Nothing new in that. Different jurisdictions have always had different legislation, both online and offline. For a while, when the internet corporations were small, and most business and life interests were still offline, internet companies flew under the radar. The last 10-15 years, though, larger jurisdictions have very much asserted their influence online.
Whereas some Brits don't care about privacy protection, many do. The British likely already have or will get their own privacy laws after Brexit, but it remains to be seen whether large corporations like facebook will respect those.
When Britain was inside the EU, facebook risked billion euro fines. Outside of the EU, the risk of ignoring the rules is smaller.
The latest move from facebook shows that they believe British users are now fair game. They can prey on them the same way they prey on Californian users.
ok, but this is about moving users' data not employees or servers? I'm not following the leap in logic that seems to be happening to connect these things here.
