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Top-level
 This week, I lost an argument with my accountants about this. They provide me with my tax forms as links to a Microsoft Cloud file, and I need to have a Microsoft login in order to retrieve these files. This policy - and a prohibition on sending customer files as email attachments - came from their IT team, and it was in response to a requirement imposed by their insurer. 26/ 17 comments
It's that Microsoft - like Google, Apple, Facebook and the other giants - routinely disconnects users for reasons it refuses to explain, and offers no meaningful appeal. Microsoft tells its business customers, "force your clients to get a Microsoft account in order to maintain communications security" but also reserves the right to unilaterally ban those clients from having a Microsoft account. 28/ There are examples of this all over. Google recently flipped a switch so that you can't complete a Google Form without being logged into a Google account. Now, my ability to purse all kinds of matters both consequential and trivial turn on Google's good graces, which can change suddenly and arbitrarily. 29/ If I was like Mark, permanently banned from Google, I wouldn't have been able to complete Google Forms this week telling a conference organizer what sized t-shirt I wear, but also telling a friend that I could attend their wedding. Now, perhaps some people *really* should be locked out of digital life. Maybe people who traffick in CSAM should be locked out of the cloud. 30/ But the entity that should make that determination is a court, not a Big Tech content moderator. It's fine for a platform to decide it doesn't want your business - but it shouldn't be up to the platform to decide that *no one* should be able to provide you with service. This is especially salient in light of the chaos caused by Crowdstrike's catastrophic software update last week. 31/ Crowdstrike demonstrated what happens to users when a cloud provide *accidentally* terminates their account, but while we're thinking about reducing the likelihood of such accidents, we should really be thinking about what happens when you get Crowdstruck *on purpose*. The wholesale chaos that Windows users and their clients, employees, users and stakeholders underwent last week could have been pieced out retail. 32/ It could have come as a court order (either by a US court or a foreign court) to disconnect a user and/or brick their computer. It could have come as an insider attack, undertaken by a vengeful employee, or one who was on the take from criminals or a foreign government. The ability to give anyone in the world a Blue Screen of Death could be a *feature* and not a bug. 33/ It's not that companies are sadistic. When they mistreat us, it's nothing personal. They've just calculated that it would cost them more to run a good process than our business is worth to them. If they know we can't leave for a competitor, if they know we can't sue them, if they know that a tech rival can't give us a tool to get our data out of their silos, then the expected cost of mistreating us goes down. 34/ That makes it economically rational to seek out ever-more trivial sources of income that impose ever-more miserable conditions on us. When we can't leave without paying a very steep price, there's practically a fiduciary duty to find ways to upcharge, downgrade, scam, screw and enshittify us, *right up to the point* where we're so pissed that we quit. 35/ Google could pay competent decision-makers to review every complaint about an account disconnection, but the cost of employing that large, skilled workforce vastly exceeds their expected lifetime revenue from a user like Mark. The fact that this results in the ruination of Mark's life isn't Google's problem - it's Mark's problem. 36/ The cloud is many things, but most of all, it's a trap. When software is delivered as a service, when your data and the programs you use to read and write it live on computers that you don't control, your switching costs skyrocket. Think of Adobe, which no longer lets you buy programs at all, but instead insists that you run its software via the cloud. Adobe used the fact that you no longer own the tools you rely upon to cancel its Pantone color-matching license. 37/ They are designed to shift power away from users to software companies. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it. A cloud app is some Javascript wrapped in enough terms of service clickthroughs to make it a felony to restore old features that the company now wants to upcharge you for. 39/ Google's defenstration of K Renee, Mark and Cassio may have been accidental, but Google's *capacity* to defenstrate *all of us*, and the enormous cost we all bear if Google does so, has been carefully engineered into the system. Same goes for Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and anyone else who traps us in their silos. 40/ The lesson of the Crowdstrike catastrophe isn't merely that our IT systems are brittle and riddled with single points of failure: it's that these failure-points can be tripped *deliberately*, and that doing so could be in a company's best interests, no matter how devastating it would be to you or me. 41/ Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! https://clarionwriteathon.com/members/profile.php?writerid=293388 42/ Image: CC BY 3.0 eof/ |
Gregory's Server
The problem here isn't merely that I must now enter into a contractual arrangement with Microsoft in order to do my taxes. It isn't just that Microsoft's terms of service are ghastly. It's not even that they could change those terms at any time, for example, to ingest my sensitive tax documents in order to train a large language model.
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