1/4/2024 0 Comments Tox vs cryptocat![]() ![]() Second, the technologies have become more complicated and specialized. By the time they’re asked to make rules, these technologies are well-entrenched in society. That’s just too fast for the political or legal process. A new technology can go from zero to a hundred million users in a year or less. They don’t always get it right- the sad history of copyright law in the United States is an example of how they can get it badly wrong again and again-but at least they had a chance before the technologies become widely adopted. Legislatures and courts had time to figure out rules for these technologies and how they should integrate into the existing legal structures. There was time for people to figure them out, and for their social repercussions to percolate through society. Traditionally, new technologies were adopted slowly over decades. The fundamental problem is that technology and law are in conflict, and what’s worked in the past is increasingly failing today.įirst, the speeds of technology and law have reversed. These are battles between competing visions of how technology should apply to business, and traditional businesses and “disruptive” new businesses. This isn’t just companies competing in the marketplace. This is how high-stakes these battles can be. If they win in not just shutting down WhatsApp, but Telegram and all the other text-message services, their customers will have no choice. Why would the Brazilian telecoms want to provoke the ire of almost everyone in the country? They’re trying to protect their monopoly. Sometimes the actions of these companies harm the users of these systems and services. Both the old companies and the new upstarts have tried to bend laws to their will in an effort to outmaneuver each other. More recently, municipal taxi companies and large hotel chains are fighting with ride-sharing companies such as Uber and apartment-sharing companies such as Airbnb. Publishers have battled with Google over whether their books could be indexed for online searching. The movie and music industries have tried for decades to hamstring computers in an effort to prevent illegal copying of their products. And traditional industries have long fought back with every tool at their disposal. ![]() The Internet has been disrupting and destroying long-standing business models since its popularization in the mid-1990s. And the types of technology-especially the current Internet of mobile devices everywhere, cloud computing, always-on connections and the Internet of Things-make it worse. The speed of technological progress makes it worse. It’s one aspect of a tech policy problem that has been plaguing us for at least 25 years: technologists and policymakers don’t understand each other, and they inflict damage on society because of that. Earlier this year, the United Arab Emirates blocked WhatsApp’s free voice call feature.Īll this is part of a massive power struggle going on right now between traditional companies and new Internet companies, and we’re all in the blast radius. In Egypt, Vodafone has complained about the legality of WhatsApp’s free voice-calls, while India’s telecoms firms have been lobbying hard to curb messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Viber. Another judge reversed the ban 12 hours later, but there is a pattern forming here. In Brazil’s case, WhatsApp was blocked for allegedly failing to respond to a court order. The Brazilian telecoms hate the service because it entices people away from more expensive text messaging services, and they have been lobbying for months to convince the government that it’s unregulated and illegal. WhatsApp is the most popular app in Brazil, used by about 100 million people. On Thursday, a Brazilian judge ordered the text messaging service WhatsApp shut down for 48 hours.
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