> The McDonald’s-backed company Plexure sells surveillance data on you to vendors, who use it to raise the price of items when they think you’ll pay more.
Finally I understand why when the McDonalds app was introduced it asked for permission to access my contacts. Of course I refused and deleted the app immediately. But to this day whenever I go to the McDonalds drive-thru the first question they ask is "Are you using the app today?"
McDonalds seems to care so much about their app that I wonder if selling personal information makes them more money than selling hamburgers.
lupusreal 19 minutes ago [-]
It sure seems like whenever a corporation grows old, large or expansive enough, it will inevitably morph into an spy agency. Even what is obstensibly a burger flipping business wants to spy on people.
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?"
baggachipz 11 minutes ago [-]
> Even what is obstensibly a burger flipping business
Technically, McDonald's is a real estate company[1] who wants to spy on people, but that doesn't make it any less egregious.
> Competition is an essential component of effective regulation, for two reasons: First, competition keeps the companies within a sector from all telling the same lie to its regulators.
I'm as pro-competition as anybody, but I don't actually buy this argument.
Firstly, regulating a thousand small players is much harder than regulating a few. Which is why there is a lot of evidence that regulation (even when good or needed) eliminates some amount of competition - crash and emission testing put an end to new car manufacturers for a long time.
Secondly, in industries with lots of competition and individual actors (real estate, healthcare, finance, etc) regulatory capture is actually far worse! Increasing the sheer number of special interests does not, in fact, improve regulation. And if anything, smearing it across as many voting districts as possible gives a level of political entrenchment that software companies could only dream of.
Let me flip the Airbnb argument on its head - why are hotels allowed to build dense dormitory-style housing in cities where it's otherwise illegal to do so? Because their regulatory capture is so entrenched that we don't even think about it.
lokar 1 hours ago [-]
Hotels are allowed to do that because democratically elected representatives passed laws to allow it, subject to strict regulations.
legitster 37 minutes ago [-]
This is backwards. Hotels have always existed, but zoning restrictions on who or what could be a hotel came afterwards through law.
dleeftink 1 hours ago [-]
It's process over product, but somehow we've come to regard the 'product' as end goal over all else. Yet no product lasts forever.
Spooky23 41 minutes ago [-]
I disagree. Finance is a good example. The core regulated parts of finance like retail and commercial banking are pretty good. Costs are low, they’ve gotten more efficient, services are uniform and poor performers get purged.
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.
dreamcompiler 38 minutes ago [-]
> Because their regulatory capture is so entrenched that we don't even think about it.
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.
SoftTalker 25 minutes ago [-]
Clearly your familiarity with lower-tier hotels is limited. People can and do complain when Motel 6 wants to build.
> It's all about not wanting to live near "poor" people.
That much is true. And mostly because poor people make poor neighbors.
dingnuts 1 hours ago [-]
Hotels are a specially designated category for temporary housing so that permanent residents can exclude travelers from their neighborhoods.
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?
aag 59 minutes ago [-]
I like the modern social contract and hotels, but to be fair, AirBNB is inverting what had already been inverted. In some sense, AirBNB is returning to the old model before hotels were everywhere. A traveler would reach a new town and ask for lodging in someone's home. In many countries, providing lodging to strangers is still the norm.
Scrapemist 53 minutes ago [-]
Yes, inverting it back to before there was regulations and a massive tourism industry.
legitster 35 minutes ago [-]
> Why does Airbnb think they have a right to invert the social contract
Firstly, vacation homes existed and were legal long before Airbnb - but finding one anywhere was expensive and a a massive PITA.
Secondly, who's social contract?
bix6 23 minutes ago [-]
And now they’re easy to find and everyone buys them for investment which crowds out community members.
The neighborhood social contract. The one where I know my neighbors and we build a vibrant community. Instead of the drunk idiots who show up for 3 days and throw their beer bottles on the ground.
neerajk 58 minutes ago [-]
Am I allowed to stay with a relative or a friend when I visit their town? I am totally ignorant of local norms, maybe I should be in the Holiday Inn next door instead?
monknomo 56 minutes ago [-]
but you aren't doing that when you stay at airbnb
billy99k 46 minutes ago [-]
"not know local norms and be operating on strange hours?"
What 'local norms' are so different that you won't understand them as a traveler? 99.9% of the population sleep and wake up at the same time. You just need to be a decent human being.
afavour 42 minutes ago [-]
Yeah I don't buy OP's "local norms" argument but as someone who lived in the same building as an AirBnB it's inarguable to me that it affects the standard of living for others in the building.
The hallways got scuffed up, some guests were excessively noisy, dropped trash all over the place, broke stuff... as a permanent resident if you do that you face consequences. As someone only resident for a weekend it makes no difference to you.
agentcoops 41 minutes ago [-]
Completely agreed: the way he articulates the problem is self-defeating. Apologies if this sounds absurdly abstract or hand-wavy, but I think the correct framing really has more to do with a sort of essential clash between law and software as technologies of social regulation.
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.
SJC_Hacker 1 hours ago [-]
> The death of competition spells doom for regulation. Competition is an essential component of effective regulation, for two reasons: First, competition keeps the companies within a sector from all telling the same lie to its regulators. Second, competition erodes companies’ profits and thus starves them of the capital they need to overpower or outmaneuver their regulators.
Yeah, maybe you can start with Rogers Wireless. Eh, Cory?
lapcat 39 minutes ago [-]
I would say that regulatory capture is merely a consequence of political capture. The politicians write the regulations, supervise the regulators, and in most cases, appoint the judges.
How did Microsoft avoid breakup in 2001? Simple: George W. Bush was elected President, and the Bush administration decided to settle the court case with a slap on the wrist. Don't blame the regulators but rather the politicians.
It's ironic that Doctorow uses the example of "whether you should heed your doctor’s advice to get vaccinated", because the regulators all support vaccination, but again as a result of a Presidential election, HHS has been politically captured by an anti-vaxxer who ignores expert advice.
renewiltord 43 minutes ago [-]
Pretty nonsensical argument. Uber isn't an employer not because it's an app but because it's a service that connects you to someone. Your phone company isn't an employer just because you use them to hire a handyman.
So wordy only to use a nonsensical strawman. I get it: you're trying to create a new buzzword the way you did with "enshittification". So the usual suspects will be big fans. Good luck.
novemp 3 minutes ago [-]
If Uber is just a service that connects you to someone, why does Uber take the majority of a user's payment and why is it against Uber's TOS to share contact information with your drivers so you can call them and ask for a ride outside the app?
SoftTalker 18 minutes ago [-]
Who pays the driver?
efnx 12 minutes ago [-]
Exactly. If Uber is really just providing a service to the drivers, the drivers should be paying a subscription to Uber while taking money directly from the customer.
(Edit) And they should be setting their own prices!
jeffbee 14 minutes ago [-]
I would caution against using this as a discriminator, since the scheme whereby you are billed by the phone company for third-party services has long existed, but that doesn't make AT&T your boss.
efnx 7 minutes ago [-]
Do you mean “but that doesn’t make AT&T _their_ boss”? Because in this scenario I’m paying AT&T, right?
jeffbee 15 minutes ago [-]
There is a lot of jurisprudence regarding whether or not the employer-employee relationship exists, and you can't simply dismiss that with a few words. Obviously the phone company does not employ the handyman, because if the handyman declines to fix your house the phone company is not going to disconnect his phone. But in the case of Uber, Uber absolutely will throw a driver off the platform unless they hew to a strict set of behaviors.
1 hours ago [-]
jeffbee 24 minutes ago [-]
Doctorow should be tried in absentia by professors of English composition, on the charges of poisoning the discourse with his stupid word, and of making posters incorrectly believe they have scored a profound point by including it in their sentences.
Anyway let's dismantle these rickety arguments. 1) That RealPage says they can break the law because they are an app. This has no factual basis. You can read RealPage's argument[1] and draw your own conclusion. RealPage argues that they do not engage in price fixing, they distribute marketplace data which is protected by the First Amendment. No aspect of this argument has anything to do with means or venue. Indeed, the debate is exactly the opposite of what Doctorow suggests. RealPage's opponents are saying that RealPage must be regulated because they are a software platform, even though their activities would obviously be protected by the First Amendment in any other context. Doctorow fails to address the First Amendment implications.
2) That competitive markets have brought us things like antilock brakes. This lacks even the slightest resemblance to reality. The only reason we have widespread functioning ABS is because the whole industry is totally dominated by a few players, and always has been, even if the cartel membership has changed over the decades. The existence of the cartel and its co-evolution with automotive regulators is the enabling reason why the technology works. Doctorow throws out this example but does not grapple with the implications. He believes you won't think about it.
Doctorow is one of those older bloggers from the pre-influencer era who realized that they get a lot more eyeballs on their content by leaning into memeing and rage baiting than by sober analysis. At first it was fun but eventually the rigor of his arguments took backseat to his influencer game. What makes him particularly interesting is he's an influencer for the type of person who claims they hate influencers and the modern social media landscape.
I wish he went back to writing cool fiction but I'm guessing that's a lot more effort for a lot less influence.
reidrac 4 minutes ago [-]
I read what I think is his newest book and I liked it. It takes an special author to write a thriller that makes spreadsheets exciting.
mallowdram 24 minutes ago [-]
Fundamentally the issues precede the end states. Neither present-day software nor law-government are efficient enough to service the users to whom the possibilities (and deficiencies) are now apparent to the developers. Both are trapped in their inefficiencies which force the reduction of competition or their monopoly. The state is a myth we workaround by going global. Software operates arbitrary things and then automates them as expedient interfaces that disperse and charge access for what is ultimately specific (a good or service). Decent was a trial and error workaround that simply creates status.
Doctorow pretends these are the ultimate forms, which s how his answers are palliatives not solutions.
It's strange how bureaucratic Silicon Valley has become in relation to his bureaucratic prose, the tech industry once saw solutions beyond the available tech, now it's buried in consultancy rebuttal and Friedman myth ("competition is good").
We have behemoth Goliaths that are living dinosaurs that engage in hierarchical domination of what are really illusions: text, symbols, images. All we need now are the behemoths to mint their own $, copyright it and the circle is complete. Yet these are merely simulations in search of a reality that AI can't deliver, and so the behemoths are using all techniques to remain relevant. It's stillnly one step ahead of a magic act. Obviously they are finished, ready for obliteration by insightful, imaginative succession. Bureaucracies are all targets for replacement, especially Doctorow's type of prose.
tolerance 55 minutes ago [-]
Writing/Reading exercise: Consider this article from the perspective of someone who is pro-ICEBlock-being-removed-from-the-Apple-App-Store.
mads_quist 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, they use apps to break the law.
But, still, regulation - when in doubt - should be avoided. Did you know that in Germany, you need to send your employees to a specialised training if they use a ladder in their day to day work? You don't need to regulate what's common sense.
nathan_compton 46 minutes ago [-]
What is ridiculous is that you think this isn't a good idea. Safely using ladders isn't common sense and ladder injuries probably cost the state and the places where they occur a lot of money.
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.
ToucanLoucan 31 minutes ago [-]
I love this comment. I am so sick and tired of the term "common sense" being used as a panacea for those on the bottom of a Dunning Kruger curve to justify wanting their ignorance to be taken as seriously as other people's knowledge. I can think of dozens of ways someone could misuse a ladder that would definitely result in property damage and quite possibly injuries and even fatalities.
I wonder how many people are killed yearly because they buy various tools and don't read the damn instructions because they're definitely smart enough to use this and be safe already, it's common sense after all!
hedora 56 minutes ago [-]
That’s true in the US too.
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.
mothballed 17 minutes ago [-]
Lol you must not live in the country.
Par for the course for a vanload of meth-heads who've never attended an hour of formal training in their life to be walking around a 45 degree roof without a harness, or one clipped into an ornamental non-structural member.
SoftTalker 12 minutes ago [-]
Haha very true. Last time I had a roof done, several cases of Natural Ice were consumed by the working party. The roof was perfect though.
haunter 25 minutes ago [-]
>You don't need to regulate what's common sense.
Americans: hold my AR15
Scrapemist 46 minutes ago [-]
Did you know in the US Federal law does not require any specific licensing or safety training to purchase a firearm.
ako 26 minutes ago [-]
You do need to regulate what is common sense to protect employees. There's a lot of pressure from employer to do things that go against common sense, accidents happen. The employee is hurt, employer doesn´t care. I large role of regulation is to protect employees from greedy employers.
Rendered at 18:23:18 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Finally I understand why when the McDonalds app was introduced it asked for permission to access my contacts. Of course I refused and deleted the app immediately. But to this day whenever I go to the McDonalds drive-thru the first question they ask is "Are you using the app today?"
McDonalds seems to care so much about their app that I wonder if selling personal information makes them more money than selling hamburgers.
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?"
Technically, McDonald's is a real estate company[1] who wants to spy on people, but that doesn't make it any less egregious.
[1] https://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com/mcdonalds-beyond-the-burg...
I'm as pro-competition as anybody, but I don't actually buy this argument.
Firstly, regulating a thousand small players is much harder than regulating a few. Which is why there is a lot of evidence that regulation (even when good or needed) eliminates some amount of competition - crash and emission testing put an end to new car manufacturers for a long time.
Secondly, in industries with lots of competition and individual actors (real estate, healthcare, finance, etc) regulatory capture is actually far worse! Increasing the sheer number of special interests does not, in fact, improve regulation. And if anything, smearing it across as many voting districts as possible gives a level of political entrenchment that software companies could only dream of.
Let me flip the Airbnb argument on its head - why are hotels allowed to build dense dormitory-style housing in cities where it's otherwise illegal to do so? Because their regulatory capture is so entrenched that we don't even think about it.
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.
> It's all about not wanting to live near "poor" people.
That much is true. And mostly because poor people make poor neighbors.
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?
Firstly, vacation homes existed and were legal long before Airbnb - but finding one anywhere was expensive and a a massive PITA.
Secondly, who's social contract?
The neighborhood social contract. The one where I know my neighbors and we build a vibrant community. Instead of the drunk idiots who show up for 3 days and throw their beer bottles on the ground.
What 'local norms' are so different that you won't understand them as a traveler? 99.9% of the population sleep and wake up at the same time. You just need to be a decent human being.
The hallways got scuffed up, some guests were excessively noisy, dropped trash all over the place, broke stuff... as a permanent resident if you do that you face consequences. As someone only resident for a weekend it makes no difference to you.
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.
Yeah, maybe you can start with Rogers Wireless. Eh, Cory?
How did Microsoft avoid breakup in 2001? Simple: George W. Bush was elected President, and the Bush administration decided to settle the court case with a slap on the wrist. Don't blame the regulators but rather the politicians.
It's ironic that Doctorow uses the example of "whether you should heed your doctor’s advice to get vaccinated", because the regulators all support vaccination, but again as a result of a Presidential election, HHS has been politically captured by an anti-vaxxer who ignores expert advice.
So wordy only to use a nonsensical strawman. I get it: you're trying to create a new buzzword the way you did with "enshittification". So the usual suspects will be big fans. Good luck.
(Edit) And they should be setting their own prices!
Anyway let's dismantle these rickety arguments. 1) That RealPage says they can break the law because they are an app. This has no factual basis. You can read RealPage's argument[1] and draw your own conclusion. RealPage argues that they do not engage in price fixing, they distribute marketplace data which is protected by the First Amendment. No aspect of this argument has anything to do with means or venue. Indeed, the debate is exactly the opposite of what Doctorow suggests. RealPage's opponents are saying that RealPage must be regulated because they are a software platform, even though their activities would obviously be protected by the First Amendment in any other context. Doctorow fails to address the First Amendment implications.
2) That competitive markets have brought us things like antilock brakes. This lacks even the slightest resemblance to reality. The only reason we have widespread functioning ABS is because the whole industry is totally dominated by a few players, and always has been, even if the cartel membership has changed over the decades. The existence of the cartel and its co-evolution with automotive regulators is the enabling reason why the technology works. Doctorow throws out this example but does not grapple with the implications. He believes you won't think about it.
1: https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/re...
I wish he went back to writing cool fiction but I'm guessing that's a lot more effort for a lot less influence.
Doctorow pretends these are the ultimate forms, which s how his answers are palliatives not solutions.
It's strange how bureaucratic Silicon Valley has become in relation to his bureaucratic prose, the tech industry once saw solutions beyond the available tech, now it's buried in consultancy rebuttal and Friedman myth ("competition is good").
We have behemoth Goliaths that are living dinosaurs that engage in hierarchical domination of what are really illusions: text, symbols, images. All we need now are the behemoths to mint their own $, copyright it and the circle is complete. Yet these are merely simulations in search of a reality that AI can't deliver, and so the behemoths are using all techniques to remain relevant. It's stillnly one step ahead of a magic act. Obviously they are finished, ready for obliteration by insightful, imaginative succession. Bureaucracies are all targets for replacement, especially Doctorow's type of prose.
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.
I wonder how many people are killed yearly because they buy various tools and don't read the damn instructions because they're definitely smart enough to use this and be safe already, it's common sense after all!
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.
Par for the course for a vanload of meth-heads who've never attended an hour of formal training in their life to be walking around a 45 degree roof without a harness, or one clipped into an ornamental non-structural member.
Americans: hold my AR15