Just musing over the latest tech and I'm flabbergasted that we've reached the point where DRM has been accepted into the standards of the web by the W3C. Well, I would have been years ago, but now I'm not actually after thinking about it. Often times this podcast claims not to be political but the libertarian bias is quite clear which isn't really my gripe to tackle in this post but I think the presentation of being apolitical is a misunderstanding of politics and the question of who controls power in society.
Anyway, not going to get into that, but instead what I'd like to explain is why this development doesn't surprise me when we look at the trajectory of the internet 10 years ago when I first started using it to now. The internet back in the day was a scary place where you might be sued for uploading music on limewire, but piracy was by and far pretty rampant anyway and eventually the MAFIAA had to give up their losing battle to win court cases. Now we've moved onto a net that's been comprimised by a plethora of federal raids, takeovers and hacks among other things and finding pirate content is more about "piracy as a service" and people streaming it from shady ass websites instead. Anyway, we're moving away from ownership of content because of how the accumulation of capital(resources) centralizes the computing experience (i.e.: the cloud). By being convienient people adopt it, but further ensnare themselves in the web and its control by relinquishing ownership to someone else's server instead of downloading content directly to their device with P2P solutions.
When we follow the profit motive, it's clear to see why a consortium full of corporate sponsors would be interested in locking down the web. They want to lock down the web for the same reason that Microsoft pays vendors to install it's OS by default and why Mac tries to roll their own experience entirely. (Google you're guilty too on mobile). By locking your experience to corporate code without an alternative people are at your mercy to use a computer and code for your ecosystem. The amount of data to harvest from that experience is enormous and in the world of marketing that's a lot of $$$. Not only that, but if the user is unable to control their own browser it becomes much easier for websites to strongarm their code and avoid circumvention of watching ads (because who in the actual fuck wants to watch ads willingly) or downloading content directly.
So the fact that an internet largely dominated by corporations who rely on ad revenue or advertisements for their product placement would comprimise the collective security of us all as computer users actually comes as little surprise when we think about capitalism.
What is surprising though is how these companies are continually defended in their property "rights" to do this when we think about the power this gives them in relation to the rest of us. In our system of government if a body regulating standards were to impose such dracionian measures to ensure their power over others, people would (rightfully) be up in arms, but as soon as someone is doing it privately it's not a problem? The illusion of a competitive free market may seem like a solution, however the nature of the business cycle means that the mostly ruthless, cutthroat winners from previous business recessions take the booty of competitors past. So instead of starting from 0, in the next round of accumulation when the business boom comes there are players who are already well established in their influence on the market. Eventually they become so big we have 6 corporations that control 90% of the media we consume. Middle class, venture capital start ups just become add-ons to purchase to an increasingly larger operation or coders of failed ones go to work for something like Google/Apple/Microsoft.
The only way to ensure public control of computing, and thus a secure and open internet, is through the code and hardware being owned publically. Enter the Free Software movement. Millions of developers dedicate hours of labor tackling a plethora of computing problems. However, many see competition and the free market as what promotes the growth of Free Software (or at the very least open source which actually isn't entirely untrue in that case and provides yet another model of "code as a service"). However this is a ludicrous claim to make when GNU/Linux fails to surge past 3% of the market share at any given time, let alone other OSes. On a side note, android is doing fine because google's added layer of control and incompatibility with the rest of the linux OSes gives it more control of experience (while ushering desktop and mobile users alike to the cloud where google can hold on to your data for you).
It doesn't have to be bleak though, because the Free Software movement is a testament to the power of open code. When we fight for a collective commons in the realm of computing, the power we have is enormous. Projects like Linux, GIMP, Firefox, and LibreOffice are among a few that have helped propel open standards and control, even if they are limited by the competition of the profit motive to attract good developers into propietary projects that will benefit investors less generous than the ones backing these projects. If we funded free software publically and fought for computing as a basic right (not just the internet), one can only imagine the level of coordination we could acheive in creating an ecosystem that would allow human creativity to flourish and our ability to share content. Instead of dedicating $55bn more to military spending imagine if that was used to fund open source projects and reach some cohesion on linux development by giving it some actual resources and protections to making code public (because seriously, how is shit this fragmented?) Instead we have corporations giving us open code when it's convienient for development on their platforms and holding onto code that's too precious to give away to the masses. That and linux development is only focused on servers because of the infrastructrual need to have open server code with good support while the desktop experience chugs along in the wayside because it's not nearly as proftiable unless it can be monopolized to the extent of other vendors. With public funding and control that isn't focused on turning a profit, we could actually talk about making a decent OS that respects the user.