Apple is requesting that Telegram shut down three channels used in Belarus to expose the identities of individuals belonging to the Belarusian authoritarian regime that may be oppressing civilians. Apple’s concern is that revealing the identities of law enforcement individuals may give rise to further violence.
Telegram, however, would prefer to keep the channels open, but the company said that it feels it has no choice in the matter. These channels are a tool for Belarus’ citizens protesting the recently rigged presidential election, but, with a centralized entity like Apple calling the shots on its own App Store, there’s little the protesters can do about it, explains Telegram CEO Pavel Durov.
That’s what happens when you’re a company with zero morals and values, run by people with zero morals and values. We here in the west just accept that it’s entirely okay for corporations to value money over human lives and our core democratic ideals of freedom of liberty, because we’ve been brainwashed that it’s not just acceptable, but entirely desirable to sacrifice every shred of dignity at the altar of shareholder value.
Putting money and shareholders above all else is not a a law of nature, it is not a universal constant – it is a choice. Unless we all shed centuries of indoctrination about the sacredness of shareholder value – from the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the first shareholder-owned company and arguably the most valuable company in human history, and its institutional use of violence, exploitation, and slavery, all the way to Apple, the current most valuable company in the world, and its role in the Chinese surveillance state and thus the genocide taking place there – we will continue to sit idly by as our fellow men and women on the street in our neighbouring countries suffer and the world we live in gets destroyed.
If I were in charge of Telegram, I would just leave the store. Who would Apple be to tell me how to run my business? One less app in their store, one less reason for people in Belarus to “own” (HA!) an apple phone….. if it were so important for people to be able to use telegram, they would be forced to jump to other platforms
eantoranz,
It’s easy to say that, but it’s harder to do it as a dev if apple users make up 60% of your sales. Apple, by forcing restrictions onto consumer devices, is allowing itself to become a fairly powerful tool for government oppression. This sort of censorship by apple is likely to become more common in the future.
It would take a whole lot of users & developers to really send a serious message against apple’s restrictions, however apple is strongly dug into it’s position against giving owners freedoms. There’s a lot that apple could do to be the good guy and liberating technology, however it doesn’t align with apple’s current business model. For apple, and indeed all companies that rely on vendor locking restrictions, profits and being able to block competitors is more important than owner rights. So I think change is unlikely unless we get a real legislative fix.
This may be so, but it’s also not something that can be changed by individuals, or even individual companies. If the law, and society, places value on increasing shareholder returns, then there will always be a Darwinian inevitability to mercenary companies succeeding.
Only governments have the power to make these kinds of societal changes, and right now I see no evidence to suggest this might happen. In fact, as this example shows, governments benefit from these arrangements.
Much more likely is that consumer, company and government pressure forces Apple to make its phones more open and give more control to device owners. For this particular case, that might be enough to shift the balance of power away from Apple quite considerably.
Companies, especially public ones, must and should care exclusively about profits and laws. Profits are the only reason they exist, everything else they do is just a side effect of investors trying to earn money and minimise risk. The other part of the equation, the laws, are (or, again, should be) there to set the basic rules of the game – don’t steal, be honest with investors, pay for the pollution etc. Unfortunately they fail to address many important issues and create new ones.
There are several ways the markets got so distorted in recent years:
– Technological platforms (products used to build and sell other products on top of them) reduce competition. Any platforms do (even opensource), but closed ones are by far the worst.
– Strong encryption and well meaning but harmful laws (e.g. copyright, patents, DMCA) allow companies to own and control products after they “sell” them to customers.
– Markets are flooded with money, so investors are less interested in profits and more in growth and getting the most of another bubble. Growth is often being defined as the strength of the platform, that is a number of users a company is able to lock in and control.
The “basic rules” turn out to be hugely complex, and your inclusion of pollution in the list is a good case in point. Everything we do, and everything companies do, has side effects most of which aren’t captured by the pure financial aspects of the transaction.
These externalities (see Buchanan & Stubblebine, 1962) are what carbon markets are supposed to redress, or the large GDPR fines in the case of data leaks. But in practice, if you arrange things so that companies have profit as their main existential aim, then you absolutely have to have a whole swathe of other laws to balance the externalities.
I’m not really sure what financial disincentives could be put in place to motivate Apple to open up iOS, given how unfathomably large Apple’s profits are right now.
Why is Thom so upset with Apple? They are subject to the laws and whims of every government where they want to do business. So at the end of the day, any company will bow to government pressure.
Instead of getting upset at Apple for acting the way any company would act, we should recognize that fighting these battles THROUGH CORPORATIONS is not the proper platform for these fights.
As a consumer I don’t see any problem with making ethical judgements over the choices a company makes. This seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to factor into a buying decision, or as a topic for discussion.
Apple made a commercial decision early on to be the absolute all-powerful gatekeeper for all code that runs on iOS. It was pointed out at the time that this would ultimately lead to them being responsible for censorship and doing the bidding of governments across the world. They made this choice, they shouldn’t now duck responsibility for it.
Cory Doctorow puts it better than I can: https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1312091004451790849
Usual reason. becuase they give no alternative. Other app store/sideloading should be a requirement of such a devicec these days.
I know enough to never choose an apple device (I have had macs from 68k to intel around 10.6 but I saw where it was going and no thanks), however many people out there do not. Most people expect a computer to be able to run whatever they want. As a bare minimum apple should be required to put a warning that you have no control over your device on the box. 100% of the box like the warning on cigs would be reasonable (being in the uk made chosing android easier. I mean wtf did you mean no 3g on launch? and by the next one it was already too late, thanks for helping me dodge that bullet apple).
I would like more opne than android. But hey go further and you removethe convienience. At least ther I can side load, organise my files how I want to, use the apps I want, rip the apps from the device to load onto my fire tablet since they work but are no in the app store or I don’t want to pay twice (yes I could sideload play on the fire, but far too much effort for the 2 or 3 apps I want) (I still say windows mobile was the best phone os ever becuase it was a real os and you were in charge (up to 6.5 other versions were just poor imitations and doomed to failure by being all that was bad with apple)).
I understand people need protecting from themselves. They also need protecting from corperations.
Google’s ecosystem has some advantages but I wouldn’t bet on it in the long term. Locking down an application store is just a matter of pushing one change. So far, Google is choosing to allow 3rd party installations (although not without barriers and with certain features locked) but unless there are alternative platforms that have enough users, developers and hardware offerings that may not last forever.
The real problem is the platform itself. It may look like an old problem (we’ve all been living through Windows, iTunes, PlayStation, Facebook, Youtube, Android, iOS) but as far as competition laws are concerned these issues are still fairly new as far. Fifty years ago no one expect this to be an issue because there were no real platforms (multiple third-party products developed for your product/platform) around. By now, we can say with certainty that having a dominant platform is not due to virtues of the product but mainly timing and scale of deployment. The rest is taken care of by the re-enforcing network effects (positive feedback loop).
At some point regulations will catch up, and as always they will first try addressing symptoms (this is what GDPR is attempting with respect to privacy abuses). But essentially each platform (successful or not) should be treated as a monopoly and at very least its owners should be prevented from implementing additional lock in mechanisms.
There are opensource decentralized alternatives to all of the tools provided by large corporations today. We could use them, but we make the conscious decision over and over again to surrender our control to these few companies. By using them we also help them expand their influence and so others eventually pay for our decisions.
Today you can complain about Apple and/or Telegram, and that will be all that’s left at the end: a complain, and nothing will change.
if you want to change something, promote decentralized alternatives.
“Follow me on Twitter”: Twitter has been put under the spotlight for cooperating with censors.
> We could use them, but we make the conscious decision over and over again to surrender our control to these few companies.
We could use them, but they’re unwelcoming, hard to use, require a neckbeard and no social life to get going, and the answer to genuine questions users might have is “RTFM, n00b”.
If the “opensource decentralized tools” want users, their developers will need to put in the UX/documentation/translation work needed rather than hoping everyone will just learn how to run their own stuff.
nabru,
Maybe some FOSS is hard to use, but to be fair this isn’t true for all of it. I consider 3rd party app stores to be generally on par with vendor’s app stores in terms of usability, still most people stick with whatever is preinstalled and whatever social network their friends & family are already on. In order to grab market share from incumbents, it’s not enough to be of comparable quality, an alternative actually has to be even better. This brings up another issue, sometimes incumbents give themselves an unfair privileges making alternatives less practical than they otherwise would be to users. For example…
http://www.osnews.com/story/132222/android-11-is-taking-away-the-camera-picker-forcing-people-to-only-use-the-built-in-camera/
matlag is right, we need to do a better job promoting alternatives, however to be honest I don’t have any confidence that it will happen. The top corporations are doing everything in their power to keep us tethered to their centralized silos, all the while pretending that it’s in our interests. My prediction is that decentralized and federated services will become little more than historic footnotes, not because they don’t have merit, but because corporations will never stop being greedy for control.
Is the rtfm noob” respones a widespread first respones, is is thst just a sign if frustration when the person writing it, has answered the same relativly basic cuestion 50 times before and the oerson asking it ckearly hasnkt checked more than at most the 5 first hirs on google? I don’t say thst this is the right response far from it, I just say that I can understand the frustration. As for documentation translation, I agree, in an ideal world docs should ifc oe avalabke in all major kanguages. Back in the real world doc translation requires 2 things apart from the time and inclination to do it, a solid grasp if both source and destination language and at least som knowledge if the product. Quite a tall order when you might not have budget, and have to base activities. On volunteers. On top of this writing docs in any language is far from fun ( well ai’ve never done it so I can’t raly do anything but soeculate)
I can’s say that Firefox instead of Chrome (both mobile or desktop), LibreOffice instead of MS Office or OsmAnd instead of Google Maps are unwelcoming or hard to use or have bad UX. I’ve been using those and other alternatives for years without troubles.
>*If the “opensource decentralized tools” want users, their developers will need to put in the UX/documentation/translation work needed rather than hoping everyone will just learn how to run their own stuff.
It’s funny how you expect mostly unpaid people to “put in some work”. Indeed large companies can surely put in the work thanks to deep pockets. The question is where and how they get that money ?
And this is where it gets interesting: this article is about pointing finger at an ethically questionable move from a company on another, and the latter will most likely comply. Do you think they will stop because of this article ? Do you think they will stop if there are 100 articles ? 1000 ? What could you possibly do if they were going ahead anyway ?
-Apple buyers will still buy Apple products
-Telegram users will still use Telegram
-Twitter will still propose that nice feature about “blocking access to certain content based on geographic location” to “authoritarians” countries.
So what can you possibly do to stop them?
-Complain ? There have been massive complains about morally corrupted practices from all of these large companies. It’s not because they’re evil, but because the business model requires to stay in business in the target country. So of course, absolutely nothing happened.
-Stop paying: you’ll go from 0 to 0. That should hurt…
-Stop using ? That would hurt. Actually that is really the only leverage you have, but you just made clear that you want a nicely finished service used by the large majority of people, so… you won’t stop, and they are very well aware of it. And if you do find an alternative, it will be another large company with the same business model that will inevitably lead to the same policies.
So while you’ll write on Twitter, Facebook and co how much censorship is bad, you will actually help these companies make more money, touch more people and… let them apply whatever policy they deem appropriate. You’re not really ok with it, but it’s not disturbing enough to actually do anything about it.
What’s with the linking to silly cartoons? I thought this was supposed to be a serious news site. There is no need for bandwidth-wasting crap like that.
Minuous,
Silly satirical cartoons have been a feature of serious news papers for a very long time. They often have a serious point. In any case it’s Thom’s blog and he can do what he wants, no?
They are not in serious newspapers, except in the cartoon section and sometimes on the letters to the editor page, and always in the same spot so that readers don’t need to bother with them. Not just arbitrarily thrown in with random articles. Also with a physical newspaper there are not any bandwidth issues. Of course he can do what he wants but it is hard to take his journalism seriously when he just throws in random crap that just distracts from the article.
Minuous,
You are mistaken, or perhaps you are younger and it’s changed in the past two decades (I haven’t gotten newspapers in a long time), but there’s absolutely no question that newspapers often had such cartoons. And just to be clear, these were usually in the political news sections and not in the “comics” section like Garfield or Peanuts. Of course whether you read them or not is up to you, but regardless it is true that they are/were in serious newspapers.
Physical newspapers rely on paper and ink, arguably that can be pretty wasteful.
IMHO satire can be both amusing and informative, to each their own I suppose. I personally hate when news sources link to tweets because I think it’s a bad medium for details, but whether I like it or not this has become fairly common particularly with the white house using tweets to make announcements. I can complain about it, but it’s not going to change much.
I think the situate is a little more complex that Thom made it out to be:
Source (emphasis mine): https://meduza.io/en/news/2020/10/09/apple-says-it-never-asked-telegram-to-delete-belarusian-channels-for-doxing-cops-it-just-wants-specific-posts-removed
I am NOT pro the belarusian regimen, but when you start talking about doxxing people suspected of being the bad guys then I get nervous, and a policy against doxxing really does cut both ways.
Good find!
But nevertheless, overall for me it is also an issue of missing decentralisation. If federated and distributed protocol like Matrix (with its clients like Element, Nheko, Fluffychat and others) was used in Belarus, then app and content would be separated. And whom would Apple order then to remove content?
If people browse with Firefox an website with “individual’s private data without their consent”, then who would be responsible? (… yeah I know the rendering engine is the same in iOS for all browsers, but still in a way FF there is separate app)
I don’t actually disagree with you, but I did think it was important to point out that at the core of it all it was about doxxing people. I get really nervous when Thom essentially argues that doxxing is ok so long as it is the right people doing it.
War— cold, hot, civil, asymmetrical, etc — is brutal, and mistakes are going to be made and bad things are going to happen; but I think we should be honest about what is actually happening and what these Telegram channels are being used for.
Thom has argued in the past that companies should use their free speech rights to keep extremist off of platforms, and then turns around and says that it is ok to dox people suspected of being the bad guys, with no oversight or appeal in this process.
I genuinely don’t know what the right behavior is, but I do want us to be clear about what the actual issue is about
There’s a compromise solution Telegram could take: block the channel/posts only when viewed via the App store’s version of Telegram, and include a placeholder saying “Apple requested this content to be unavailable, try Andoid or the web app instead”. It complies with the censorship without abandoning core values, and nudges consumers to move to freer pastures (which is the only feedback that shareholders understand).
This applies to any other distributor/censor combination (for example GoogleMaps shows different country borders depending on the viewer’s country).
According to Durov from Telegram, currently Apple doesn’t allow this sort of compromise:
(see here under the “CENSORSHIP” heading).
I can say from myself that now there is a nightmare and human rights are constantly being violated there. This is what it is like to live under a totalitarian regime. It should be a signal to us to reduce these sentiments. Even though these rights are often violated in our country. I recently studied an essay on this topic here studydriver.com/human-rights/ and what it describes is how orthodox rights are not respected by anyone and this is a serious problem and a signal for current democracies. Therefore, I hope that everyone will understand this moment for himself.