Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates: Tech Companies Inviting Government Intervention (axios.com)
In an interview with Axios on Tuesday, Bill Gates warned Apple and other tech giants that they risk the kind of nightmarish government intervention that once plagued his Microsoft if they act arrogantly. Axios reports: The big picture: "The companies need to be careful that they're not ... advocating things that would prevent government from being able to, under appropriate review, perform the type of functions that we've come to count on." Asked if he sees instances of that now, Gates replied: "Oh, absolutely." Why it matters: With the Big Tech companies feeling they're suddenly drawing unfair scrutiny, this is Microsoft's co-founder saying they're bringing some of the problems on themselves, by resisting legitimate oversight.
They'll keep making as much profit, gain as much market share, and reducing/externalising costs as much as they can until someone or something stops them. The only way they understand of avoiding government regulation is lobbying politicians to stop legislation and funding for regulators from going through. It's the government's responsibility to protect the people from abusive practices by corporations. It's time for government to do their job.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Bullshit meter just pegged.
In another words, using encryption that works and not installing back doors every time the NSA asks.
Gee - thanks Gates, for having our backs. But please go to hell.
No wonder Microsoft can't be trusted with our data if it was founded by assholes like him.
I don't have to buy Google's services; however, I *do* have to buy Uncle Sam's, or be thrown into a cage for refusing.
You can get ahead of it, or you can get run over by it. You may get away with shenanigans for a long time, but once you cross the line, the government hammer is going to hit you hard. Unfortunately a lot of companies have no restraint. They will creep up to the edge of legality, pretty much guaranteeing government intervention.
Funny how redmond never stopped acting arrogantly.
Now you understand why Red Hat is slowly making the world of Linux to march to the beat of its drum.
...warned Apple and other tech giants that they risk the kind of nightmarish government intervention that is Microsoft
You were right in the middle of the crypto wars and you've seen the damage they did even long after they were over. You do not get to feign ignorance. Pleading on the side of backdoors and weakened crypto shows exceptional disdain for the users. Or are you doing it because you need the money?
The problem is that the oversight provided turned illegitimate when the government decided to build a mass surveillance apparatus in violation of the fourth amendment of the US constitution. It is the government itself that is driving people to encryption. It's no surprised that trust has been lost in the government when even the local PD will hack your phone and make a complete copy without a warrant. Encryption is a way to ensure your rights because they abdicated themselves of that responsibility. The fact that they have been burned by their own bad behavior is unfortunate but there is nobody else to blame but themselves.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I don't have to buy Google's services; however, I *do* have to buy Uncle Sam's, or be thrown into a cage for refusing.
You have no choice.
You do consume Google/Alphabet's services and you have no choice in the matter other than staying off the internet and mobile devices.
And considering what little people like me have dealt with the last decade, government is a MUCH lesser evil - even with Trump in office.
It's ok to bully the customers into giving you their lunch money, but if you start shaking them down and they come to class in their underpants, teachers might have to intervene.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
These words are subject to interpretation. I initially jumped to the conclusion that he means encryption; anyone who knows anything about how good encryption works knows that that's just bullshit because math doesn't abide by human law. Then I thought about Uber's Greyball and similar advanced authority-evading tactics and I realized that there is a legitimate point to be made if that's the context he's referring to instead of encryption.
Don't you just LOVE ambiguity?
That's the big problem. Sally and Joe LocalShopOwners don't want to go online and see a torrent of vile, disgusting insults thrown at them just for saying something. Women don't want to experience rape and death threats just for being a woman on a gaming site. People don't want their kids to see racist hate mongering.
There is HUGE pressure to clean up the internet. It may have started as the private playground for a few, but it's a resource for the world now, and Sally and Joe and all others like them are demanding that safe havens for the worst and most vile are taken down, and platforms become a place where reasonable humans can go without fear.
I mean, that's just patently false.
Not only is it a legitimate personal choice to avoid Internet services or mobile devices, and not only is it possible to rig software to thwart Google's machinations, but it's also the case that Google hasn't killed millions of lives in pursuit of its goals, or thrown people into cages for making beer (Prohibition) or smoking a leafy plant in the privacy of their own homes, etc.
You're out of your mind. There is no basis for your analysis. NONE. Your subjective reality is bonkers.
What's the problem with trillion dollar tech companies, Bill? Well, obviously not monopolistic nor oligopolistic behavior. Nor selling our profiles to anyone with money. Nor buying and selling government officials to get the money and laws they need. Nor pushing policy towards increasing inequality, autocracy, and legal invasion. Nor building advanced weaponry so we can wipe out villages and cities around the world. Nor cooperating with our spy agencies, who now know everything about us. Nor profiting from endless new hardware as the old hardware pollutes the earth. Nor accelerating the destruction of local agriculture and production. Nor externalizing and socializing costs while privatizing profit. Nor reshaping everyone's life into the production and consumption of trivial entertainment. Nor hiding the world from us with advertising and monopolized media. Nor blind, self-serving positivism.
No. The tech companies are somehow protecting us too much.
they risk the kind of nightmarish government intervention that once plagued his Microsoft
It was found that Microsoft violated a de facto monopoly position, and they got off with a handslap. "Plagued" is not the right word here, unless you want to say that we were plagued by Microsoft, as it has been said that Microsoft set back computing significantly.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The state is the greatest institutional evil in world history. It legitimatizes murder (war), slavery (conscription), armed robbery (taxation) and authoritarianism on a grand scale, then to make it even more flagrantly offensive, tells us it's all really for our own good despite the fact that it clearly exists to perpetuate its own power and enrich the favored individuals in or around it.
If you fancy yourself to be a member of civilized society, then you should delight in both asking that question and trying to find an answer, not scoff at it.
Perhaps society's resources should be allocated not by "do-as-I-say" coercion, but rather by "do-as-we-previously-agreed" cooperation.
Yes, vote out the entire DNC out of Congress. Obama spied on an opposition campaign, using information from Hillary, and then the DNC congress did its best to prevent citizens from finding out about it. Meanwhile at least 2 DNC senators (Schiff and Warner) were attempting to collude with Russia to get dirt on Trump while claiming doing so was treasonous.
The DNC is the enemy of the 4th amendment. They have shown they believe abuse of government is acceptable and you finding out about it is not.
what happened to Microsoft.
Unless we forget, Embrace Extend Extinguish. Also, some of the "contract" that required paying M$ for every "PC" sold - even if it didn't ship with Windows. I know a company that got around it by selling a rack-mount computer as a "network appliance" running Linux to get around it. You could easily install Windows on it, but there was absolutely no info on the the company web site about ever being able to do that. Abuses against other browser (notably Firefox) products. Yeah, I'd say they pretty much invited government intervention.
Not even comparable to encryption issues.
If the government backdoors encryption, other governments will want the key, too. Then encryption is useless unless you use a non-backdoored one. Which will have to be made illegal. Use to be exporting encryption was on par with exporting a nuke (ITAR). Now importing will be criminal.
Alternatively, if the government backdoors encryption, no other country will buy US products, especially security products, since the US Fed will have the magic key. No government is going to use a US product where they know the US can spy on them, like they want to do on us.
The courts are secret, the decisions are secret, the evidence is secret, the verdicts are secret. And no jury.
Lawmakers however would like you to think, that copyright-violations are bringing our countries to their knees and threatening their foundations.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
The disaster of Somalia is the result of a failed State; the failed government was formed under single-party, "scientific" Communism.
When it inevitably collapsed into chaos, the culture of Authorianism in Somalia naturally led to the rise of warlords, who (along with their minions) are themselves a form of government yet again (that is, they are a form of organization that allocates resources by coercion rather than by agreement in advance).
Nevertheless, without the burden of a monstrous State, the people of Somalia have seen an enormous improvement in the quality of their lives, as old quasi-capitalist means of commerce re-emerged; by some measurements, their quality of life has improved faster and to a greater extent than the quality of life in the surrounding, more "stable" States.
TL;DR: Authoritarians gonna authoritate. Somalia is a warning about Authoritarianism, not Libertarianism.
or the French will do it for you
Anyone remember the Key Escrow crap?
It did not end because Demos or Republican'ts didn't want it.
It ended when PGP hit the market from France proof against casual gov't spying.
You are making up stuff; your deductions are baseless.
The point, I think, was that true libertarianism is inevitably replaced by authoritarianism. You will never see a libertarian paradise, because it can only exist long enough for a strong man to gather enough power to destroy it.
You keep using that word, "we". I do not think it means what you think it means.
... you're wrong.
And your equating of "Government" and "Community" just shows that you have no respect for other individual, sentient beings.
Your democratic voting isn't about convincing others; your democratic voting is about forcing your will on others.
You are a collectivist, who has bound his personal identity with this one particular organization in society—the organization that calls itself "government". You are trying to force those same bindings onto other people, and it seems to be quite disturbing to you when people reject those bindings.
You have founded your world view on coercion, not cooperation.
You're just stating that point as fact; nobody made a case for it.
In fact, the other AC made the point that authoritarianism fails and is replaced by weaker authoritarianism (or even some kind of libertarianism), which improves people's lives; indeed, the very history of civilization has been the slow progression from extreme authoritarianism (the God King) toward societal mechanisms that protect a growing libertarianism (individual rights; nobody is above the law).
In the future, perhaps "the law" will not be a collection of papers written by legislators, but rather the collection of all contracts between individuals (which, frankly, is not much different from the way things are today; you and I are bound by different contractual obligations); the negotiation and enforcement of such contracts are just services, and need not be implemented by one particular, culturally blessed, violently imposed service provider (e.g., "government").
I remember many years ago, when the antitrust litigation was just winding down against Microsoft ... one of my best friends said to me, "Have you noticed how it seems like the government really got to Bill Gates? The comments he's making suddenly all sound like exactly what they told him to say. I wonder if this was part of the settlement with them?"
At the time, I thought that was somewhat insightful -- but perhaps a bit too "tin foil hat". As time has gone on though, I'm thinking he was right on the money.
If you look at the statements Bill made before and after the Justice Dept. got ahold of him, it's a night and day difference. And ever since then, he's continued to be pretty much a mouthpiece for Federal government agendas. The latest I've seen him advocating for (after pushing "Common Core" teaching in schools) is "IEPs for all students". Honestly, that would be a horrible idea, considering the current IEP is difficult enough to get teachers and faculty up to speed on and cooperating with, when you have a student with real disabilities or behavioral problems affecting their learning. If everybody had an individualized list of requirements and details on accommodations that would "best suit them", you'd probably double or triple the cost of running public schools. You'd need far more faculty to actually go through all of the IEPs and to implement them for everyone, plus more expense providing all the things they'd ask for like quiet places to take exams by themselves.) It's madness.
National governments exist in anarchy; they are organizations that have no governing body, and have never existed under such an organization (no, the UN doesn't count; the UN has no power to allocate resources by coercion).
Yet, what we've seen is a progression from beligerence among competing powers to cooperation between competing powers.
So, not only are you factually wrong, but you've failed to realize that what seems to matter for productive cooperation is not the overriding control of a government, but rather competition, because that competition is a check and balance on power.
The founders of the United States' governments at least realized the importance of competition; that's why they founded a government on the principle of the Separation of Powers. Not only is power split among the States, but many of the governments are split among various branches (executive, judicial, legislative).
Well, the most generalized implementation of a separation of powers is the free market, where resources are allocated solely by agreement in advance. One day, the world will develop the logistical technology to support such cooperation, and there will be no more "government" (that is, there will be no organization that allocates resources by coercion).
This is no different from the fact that people scoffed at "democracy" as being unworkable; it was logistically impossible to implement, the population wasn't sufficiently educated, and surely a strong man would ultimately vote himself into a traditional kingship. Those naysayers were wrong, and you are wrong.
"Bill Gates warned Apple and other tech giants that they risk the kind of nightmarish government intervention that once plagued his Microsoft..."
And MS showed that if you have enough money, nothing bad will happen to you. So, no worries, tech giants.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
If this is an example, then few people have anything to worry about. Communications and storage can be secured, and if someone wants it enough to be bothered making sure they have it, then nobody can do anything about it. It just takes software. And if the last couple decades have taught us anything, it's that if you want good software, you don't just get that from some company. You get it from humanity-at-large. You can even DIY (the software; you probably shouldn't try that with the algorithms unless your name is Bruce).
The main fuckup with the iPhone situation, is that Apple is in control instead of the user. If the user takes control, the user will win. Apple just happens to fight both the government and their users on this issue, because they want neither to be in control; they want Apple to be in control. I think that is an unusual situation and doesn't generalize. In most cases, the manufacturers won't have the arrogance to be as user-hostile. They'll simply make their computers good, and that will mean that the users will have the means to secure them.
"The commies did it". U.S.A, U.S.A!!!
Yaaawn.
I think you're missing my argument here. (I can't speak for those who push for Communism from their public education. I'm certainly not advocating for that.)
We have 3 kids in the public school system right now, and what I've seen wrong includes:
1. Systemic issues with spending FAR too much taxpayer money on administrative staff. When I was in public high school, it was a pretty good-sized school and yet you only had one person with the title of principal. Today, smaller schools than the one I attended will regularly have 3 principals, plus a number of assistant principals. What changed to require 3x or more work from that job title since the late 1980's or early 1990's??
2. Far too much focus on standardized testing, to the point where our high schools don't even have a formalized program in place for reading skills. In one area school (not even in a poor neighborhood, like some would guess), about 70% of the kids coming in as Freshmen can't read at a high school level. The high schools respond by teaching to the proficiency tests they're required by law to give - rather than ensuring the kids are actually capable of reading at the proper grade level. The teachers all claim they "don't have enough time in the class day" to do anything else. And really, this problem seems to stem from further back in the middle and grade schools, where many of them no longer teach grammar, phonics or even "sight words".
3. The Bill and Melinda Gates' vision for "IEPs for all!" revolves around having the ability to custom tailor computer teaching/testing software to each student's needs, so they can sit down in front of screens for more of a class day and let the machines do the teaching and testing. IMO, it's the LAST thing we need more of in our public schools -- and it's somewhat telling that Gates sent his OWN kids to a private school where technology was essentially off limits.
4. It's not really been my experience that parents are "pushing mediocre students into advanced programs". Rather, the standard classrooms have become such a "zoo" or "free for all", the kids who care at all about learning are frustrated by all the noise and distraction - so THEY push to be put into honors classes, even if their academic proficiency doesn't really justify it.
Isn't going to take any advice, not even from one of its own who knows a thing or two about "inviting" the government to clean up up your act for you.
What is being enforced here? Presumably you mean "the law".
Well, law-by-legislation is once again coercion, not cooperation; in contrast, law-by-contracts (agreements between individuals and their organizations) is cooperative—there is agreement in advance of interaction.
Under law-by-contracts, your obligations in life are different from my obligations in life; each of our sets of obligations is derived from a lifetime of individual negotiation and enforcement. In this case, negotiating and enforcing contracts are both just services, and can be implemented by service providers in the market just like any other service.
To be explicit: The means of enforcement are necessarily defined by the contract that must be enforced—that's an essential part of agreement; that is an essential aspect of cooperation.
Indeed, much of the modern world already operates in this fashion; when a company does business "in country X", it is explicitly specifying that the government of country X is going to be the enforcer of all the relevant contracts.
However, there is no fundamental reason why the enforcer must be a culturally blessed, violently imposed monopoly. In fact, competition between suppliers is an excellent check and balance on the abuse of power: If country X becomes an irritating enforcer, a company may take its business to country Y instead. There has never been One World Government; competition is what matters, not unified authority.
Even if a monopoly on enforcement arises, it will have arisen through cooperation rather than coercion, which is surely preferable; it will have arisen in a culture that respects cooperation above coercion, which is surely safer in the long run.
None of this requires goodness of heart. It stands as well under cold, heartless, self-interest, and that's why it's superior; if anything, a culturally blessed, woshipped, monopoly on violence (e.g., a "government") is what requires men to be Angels.
I'm for standardized tests. It sounds like it's done poorly in the US. There should be a consistent planned curriculum for the whole state that all kids are taught. At the end of the year, you and everyone needs to know how much is learned/retained. This measures the effectiveness of teaching and the materials. When I took Canada wide standard tests in middle and junior high, the results were pretty fucking close to each kids average grades and reflected the strengths (math) and weaknesses (English). They weren't cooked tests, they covered actual fucking stuff we learned. Nowadays, there's schools intended for the smarter ones so they can accelerate. Very few actually thrive in those schools, so they take a 3 week summer school to replace a 9 month course (or they combine shit, like getting English credit for a history report). There's no fucking way the material covered and obsorbed is the same. The final exam I take and graded on that I would compete for job or college applications, better fucking judge us fairly, and you do that with a standard test. I have 4 sisters that are teachers. They complain about shitty parents, overactive kids without discipline, and large class sizes. (They also complain about teachers passing shitty kids because they don't want them a second year, so lots get to grade 9 and still haven't been tested for learning disabilities). It seems the US is mostly fucking the standard testing because of the funding based on results. That is what encourages the shortcuts and shitty teaching. Full. Stop.
OK, cool, I suppose. If you get us to a point where we don't need a government to not get screwed by everybody else, I'll be psyched about that. But it sounds like you agree that that isn't possible today.
No amount of bold text changes the fact that "government" is not some evil force that descended from the stars to harm us. In the case of the US, it was just a bunch of guys who got together to build a decision-making framework so we could decide as a group:
1) what happens when my freedom to do what I want butts up against your freedom to not have it done to you,
2) what services we want to provide for the community so that each individual person doesn't have to worry about those things, and
3) how we're going to pay for that.
All of the results of that are government. Not the evil "other" that a few of these comments have been making it out to be.
It really doesn't matter to me how you vote, but as long as you think of government as an uncontrollable evil, your locus of control will always be external and you'll be stuck in learned helplessness and despair. Once you understand that government is what we make it, you get to try to remake it, and as frustrating as that is, it's better than the alternative.
The disaster of Somalia is the result of a failed State; the failed government was formed under single-party, "scientific" Communism.
When it inevitably collapsed into chaos, the culture of Authorianism in Somalia naturally led to the rise of warlords, who (along with their minions) are themselves a form of government yet again (that is, they are a form of organization that allocates resources by coercion rather than by agreement in advance).
Nevertheless, without the burden of a monstrous State, the people of Somalia have seen an enormous improvement in the quality of their lives, as old quasi-capitalist means of commerce re-emerged; by some measurements, their quality of life has improved faster and to a greater extent than the quality of life in the surrounding, more "stable" States.
TL;DR: Authoritarians gonna authoritate. Somalia is a warning about Authoritarianism, not Libertarianism.
As a Tanzania who grew up in a socialist/communist state and the most stable country in the region. Quit your bullshit.
The failure of Somalia is its involvement in the geopolitics of the cold war and the imposition of authoritarian and illiterate leaders who yelled capitalism the loudest and were embraced by western powers. And the stupidity is further exemplified by intervention in the middle east. Idiots like you never learn.
*absorbed. Don't know how that slipped past spell check. I must have done that before.
In the long term, cooperation as defined by explicit contracts is the most profitable approach to existence; people choose to drive on the same side of the road not because a government says so, but because people want to get to a destination without dying.
The major problem in your overarching scenario is the fact that you're still thinking in terms of a coercive monopoly: "The local police". Well, policing is a service, and should similarly be implementable in the market by competing service providers, just like any other service.
Also, underlying your scenario is really the question of risk in life, and how to manage that risk. There's a whole industry devoted to the question of risk management: Insurance. I imagine that in a libertarian world, much of the order in society would ultimately be developed and propagated by networks of insurance companies, and probably in a very transparent fashion: Houses will be built with sprinklers, because someone somewhere is paying cheaper insurance for a house whose fire mitigation doesn't require burly men to go riding around in a comically large red truck.
Perhaps insurance fits in well with crime prevention and redress; the market will figure it out, given enough time. In the meantime, take the question seriously and try to think about it more yourself.
In a free society, a government is interpreted as damage, and routed around.
Tell me, how does bursting into someone's private home, shooting his dog, roughing him up, and then throwing him into a cage, all for growing and smoking a plant in the "privacy" of "his own" home, come out of your 3 points?
One should consider why these companies want stiff regulation. They are big. They own their markets. They can absorb the extra costs and simply pass it along. Small startups cannot absorb the cost or pass it along. So effectively these companies are asking the government to stifle competition from startups. Think about it.
{^_^}
M$ and BillWG seem to have made out okay despite the DOJ's attempts to prosecute them for all of the anti-trust, anti-competitive activity and the piracy they commited to build Windows and Office.
They showed the rest of tech how to buy your way out of a lawsuit with the DOJ.
Antitrust is the way that the government promotes markets when there are market failures. It has nothing to do with the idea of free information. - Bill Gates