alt Hacker NewsIt has been clear for a while that certain providers and services need to be regulated as utilities - Microsoft, Google, Apple, Visa, Mastercard, and soon Openai and Anthropic.
It should be illegal for these companies, just like utilities, to deny service to anyone or any entity in good standing for dues.
There is little hope for getting this through in the US where most politicians of any stripe hate the public, and the ones that don't have hardly any power. But it might be possible to do this in the EU.
Then, we non-EU folks need to apply for Estonian e-residency [1] which may get us EU regulatory coverage.
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We need a law that a human representative can be spoken to within 24 hours or directly when something critical happens.
Also “there is no appeal possible” should be plain illegal.
If it is regulated as a utility, the government will want to ban these hacking tools.
It always weird to see how dichotomy of some people saying AI will never be profitable and are doomed to fail and others saying that they are such a essential public service that they are a utility and should be subject to government regulation. Hopefully they are not the same group of people, but I suspect there is a greater overlap that one would expect.
I have a feeling, that the resolve to do something about it is waning in the EU, because of the plans to soften up the GDPR.
I've gotten business verification for Microsoft before. The kind you need in order to get certain oauth scopes for their O365 platform.
Do not discount complete, total, utter, profound fucking incompetence as the driving reason behind this.
Getting the business verification was an astounding shitshow. With a registered C corp and everything, massively unclear instructions, UI nestled in a partner site with tons of dead ends. And then even after all the docs, it took another week because -- in an action that nobody could possibly have ever foreseen -- we had two different microsoft accounts due to a cofounder buying ONE LICENSE of O365 for excel and doing domain verification because it suggested it.
It would not surprise me if these actions are coming at the requests of governments. Strong encryption is one of the few things that challenges their monopoly on information; they have a very strong incentive to apply political pressure to the maintainers of these projects to, well, stop maintaining the projects. We've seen this in overt actions that the EU takes; in more covert actions that the U.S. government is suspected of taking; and in the news headlines about third-world dictatorships that just shut off the Internet. Tech companies are perhaps the most convenient leverage point for these actions.
More regulation won't help here, because the regulation-maker is itself the hostile party.
What would help is full control over the supply chain. Hardware that you own, free and open-source operating systems where no single person is the bottleneck to distribution, and free software that again has no single person who is a failure point and no way to control its distribution.