My guess is the already-existing trend towards walled gardens will simply continue. When a public space is dangerous, people retreat into "safe" enclosed spaces.
- "Never download anything unless it's from the Apple App Store"
- "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com"
Yes, but observe how that for all three of the things that immediately came to your mind, you have respectively 1. a thing that still has a lot of scams in it (though it may be the best of the three) [1] 2. A thing so full of scams and fake products that using it is already a minefield (one my mother-in-law is already incapable of navigating successfully, based on the number of shirts my family has gotten with lazy-AI-generated art [2]) and 3. a thing well known for generating false statements and incorrect conclusions.
I'm actually somewhat less critical of Apple/Google/Facebook/etc. than probably most readers would be, on the grounds that it simply isn't possible to build a "walled garden" at the scale of the entire internet. It is not possible for Big Tech to exclude scammers. The scammers collectively are firing more brain power at the problem than even Big Tech can afford to, and the game theory analysis is not entirely unlike my efforts to keep my cat off my kitchen counter... it doesn't matter how diligent I am, the 5% of the time the cat gets up there and finds a tasty morsel of shredded cheese or licks some dribble of something tasty barely large enough for me to notice but constitutes a nice snack with a taste explosion for the much-smaller cat means I'm never going to win this fight. The cat has all day. I'm doing dozens of other things.
There's no way to build a safe space that retains the current size and structure of the current internet. The scammers will always be able to overpower what the walled garden can bring to bear because they're so many of them and they have at least an order of magnitude more resources... and I'm being very conservative, I think I could safely say 2 and I wouldn't be really all that surprised if the omniscient narrator could tell us it's already over 3.
[2]: To forstall any AI debate, let me underline the word "lazy" in the footnote here. Most recently we received a shirt with a very large cobra on it, and the cobra has at least three pupils in each eye (depending on how you count) and some very eye-watering geometry for the sclera between it. Quite unpleasant to look at. What we're getting down the pipeline now is from some now very out-of-date models.
I don’t accept the excuse it’s too hard. If they have to spend $10 billion per year to maintain an acceptable level trust on their platforms then so be it. It’s the cost of doing business. If I went into a mall and opened up a fake Wells Fargo bank branch it would be shut down pretty instantly by human intervention. These are the conditions most businesses run under. Why should these platforms given such leeway just because ‘it’s hard’? Size and scale shouldn’t be an excuse. If its not viable to prevent fraud then they don’t have a viable business.
Yes, it's not that it's impossible, it's that it's impossible while operating how they want to operate, scaling as much as they want to scale, and profiting as much as they want to profit. But no business model that can't be pursued ethically and profitably should be execused as simply inevitably unethical. It should be regulated and/or banned.
YouTube regularly shows me ads that fit that analogy quite well. The ECB and Elon Musk take turns offering me guaranteed monthly deposits in my account for one time 200 and 400 euro fees. The deep fakes are intentionally bad enough to filter for good victims.
You don't even need a human to review these ads but inserting one wouldn't be expensive.
But what actually is an acceptable level of trust? Acceptable for whom? For the billionaires, it's good enough if outside is worse, or even if it merely appears worse.
> It is not possible for Big Tech to exclude scammers
It's 100% possible. It might not be profitable
An app store doesn't have the "The optimum amount of fraud is not zero" problem. Preventing fraudulent apps is not a probability problem, you can actually continuously improve your capability without also blocking "good" apps accidentally.
Meanwhile, apple regularly stymies developers trying to release updates to already working and used by many apps for random things.
And despite that, they let through clear and obvious scams like a "Lastpass" app not made by Lastpass. That's just unacceptable. Anything with a trademark should never be possible to get a scam through. There's no excuse.
> Preventing fraudulent apps is not a probability problem
Unfortunately it is. You've even provided examples of a false positive and a false negative. Every discrimination process is going to have those at some rate. It might become very expensive for developers to go through higher levels of verification.
No, it's already a solved problem. For instance newspapers moderate and approve all content that they print. While some bad actors may be able to sneak scams in through classifieds, the local community has a direct way to contact the moderators and provide feedback.
The answer is that it just takes a lot of people. What if no content could appear on Facebook until it passed a human moderation process?
As the above poster said, this is not profitable which is why they don't do it. Instead they complain about how hard it is to do programmatically and keep promising they will get it working soon.
A well functioning society would censure them. We should say that they're not allowed to operate in this broken way until they solve the problem. Fix first.
Big tech knows this which is why they are suddenly so politically active. They reap billions in profit by dumping the negative externalities onto society. They're extracting that value at a cost to all of us. The only hope they have to keep operating this way is to forestall regulation.
> The answer is that it just takes a lot of people.
The more of those people you hire, the higher the chance that a bad actor will slip through and push malicious things through for a fee. If the scammer has a good enough system, they'll do this one time with one person and then move on to the next one, so now you need to verify that all your verifiers are in fact perfect in their adherence to the rules. Now you need a verification system for your verification system, which will eventually need a verification system^3 for the verification system^2, ad infinitum.
This is simply not true in every single domain. The fact people think tech is different doesn't mean it necessarily is. It might just mean they want to believe it's different.
At the end of the day, I can't make an ad and put it on a billboard pretending to be JP Morgan and Chase. I just can't.
> This is simply not true in every single domain. The fact people think tech is different doesn't mean it necessarily is. It might just mean they want to believe it's different.
Worldwide and over history, this behaviour has been observed in elections (gerrymandering), police forces (investigating complaints against themselves), regulatory bodies (Boeing staff helping the FAA decide how airworthy Boeing planes are), academia (who decides what gets into prestigious journals), newspapers (who owns them, who funds them with advertisements, who regulates them), and broadcasts (ditto).
> At the end of the day, I can't make an ad and put it on a billboard pretending to be JP Morgan and Chase. I just can't.
JP Morgan and Chase would sue you after the fact if they didn't like it.
Unless the owners of the billboard already had a direct relationship with JP Morgan and Chase, they wouldn't have much of a way to tell in advance. If they do already have a relationship with JP Morgan and Chase, they may deny the use of the billboard for legal adverts that are critical of JP Morgan and Chase and their business interests.
The same applies to web ads, the primary difference being each ad is bid on in the first blink of an eye of the page opening in your browser, and this makes it hard to gather evidence.
> The more of those people you hire, the higher the chance that a bad actor will slip through and push malicious things through for a fee.
Again, the newspaper model already solves this. Moderation should be highly localized, from the communities for which they are moderating the content. That maximizes the chance that the moderator's values will align with the community. Small groups are harder to hide bad actors, especially when you can be named and shamed by people that you see every day. Managers and their coworkers and the community itself are the "verifiers."
Again, this model has worked since the beginning of time and it's 1000x better than what FB has now.
> What if no content could appear on Facebook until it passed a human moderation process?
While I'd be just fine with Meta, X etc. (even YouTube, LinkedIn, and GitHub!) shutting down because the cost of following the law turned out to be too expensive, what you suggest here also has both false positives and false negatives.
False negatives: Polari (and other cants) existed to sneak past humans.
False positives: humans frequently misunderstand innocent uses of jargon as signs of malfeasance, e.g. vague memories of a screenshot from ages ago where someone accidentally opened the web browser's dev console while on Facebook, saw messages about "child elements" being "killed", freaked out.
> The answer is that it just takes a lot of people. What if no content could appear on Facebook until it passed a human moderation process?
A lot of people = a lot of cost. That would probably settle out lower than the old classified ads, but paying even a dollar per Facebook post would be a radically different use than the present situation.
And of course you'd end up with a ban of some sort on all smaller forums and BBS that couldn't maintain compliance requirements.
You’re right that there will always be some false positives and negatives. At the same time, I do think that if Apple really spent money and effort they could prevent most of the “obvious” scams (e.g. fake LastPass), which make up the majority, without passing the cost onto developers and while minimally affecting their profits.
No, sorry. It's eminently reasonable to ask or demand that a business to reduce its (fantastic) margins/profits in order to remain a prosocial citizen in the marketplace. In fact we do this all the time with things like "regulations".
It may be unreasonable to demand that a small business tackle a global problem at the expense of its survival. But we are not talking about small or unprofitable business. We are talking about Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon. Companies with more money than they know what to do with. These global companies need to funnel some % of their massive profits into tackling the global problems that their products have to some degree created.
> To forstall any AI debate, let me underline the word "lazy" in the footnote here. Most recently we received a shirt with a very large cobra on it, and the cobra has at least three pupils in each eye (depending on how you count) and some very eye-watering geometry for the sclera between it.
Okay, but if it matches the illustration on the storefront, can it really be called a scam?
Fair, I was sloppy there. The cobra isn't a scam itself, it's just a demonstration that it's already a hard place to navigate what with everything that is going on there. A deluge of AI garbage may not be a "scam" in the strictest sense of the term but it still breaks certain unspoken expectations the Boomer generation has about goods and what exactly it is you are buying.
We have also received a number of shirts where AI has been used to create unlicensed NFL shirts and other such actual frauds. And whatever your feeling about IP laws, it was definitely low quality stuff... looked good if you just glanced at it but when you went to look at any particular detail of the shirt it was AI garbage. (I say "AI garbage" precisely because not all stuff from AI is necessarily garbage... but this was.)
> it still breaks certain unspoken expectations the Boomer generation has about goods and what exactly it is you are buying.
Sigh. I learned from my pre-boomer parents that if the product were any good it wouldn't need to be advertised.
> looked good if you just glanced at it but when you went to look at any particular detail of the shirt it was AI garbage.
To be fair, that was also all over the place before "AI" as currently understood. (And I don't think that previous iterations of machine learning techniques were involved.)
The Apple App Store is full of scam apps. It’s all the disadvantages of a walled garden with none of the supposed advantages for users. In that way, the App Store itself is a scam.
Amazon has the advantage over some company I don't have experience with, of that I know returns are pretty easy and generally not questioned at all (at least for me, long-standing account in the UK, with infrequent returns, it might vary for new accounts, those who return more than they keep, or those in countries with worse consumer rights at the legally enforced level).
My two most recent examples: a couple of rolls of 3D printer filament that looked nothing like as advertised (bad sales images there I think, rather than a comingled-with-a-cheap-scammy-alternative issue) which was taken back unquestioned for same-day full refund despite one of them being opened, and a couple of years ago a replacement drive for my media RAID array that, while the right drive and not, as far as I could tell, counterfeit, certainly wasn't new/unused which is what I ordered, which again was taken back with no quibble or cost (other than my time of course).
There are problems dealing with Amazon sellers, but those can mostly be avoided with care and a healthy dose of cynicism (to avoid ordering crap in the first place). I'd never buy some things from there though: safety equipment, for instance.
I order a lot from Amazon--especially over the past year for house-related reasons. I just haven't had (touch wood) the apparently pervasive problems that some people seem to experience. Maybe I'm more selective about not picking whatever is cheapest regardless of brand that I've never heard of.
Not sure how this works on Amazon, but Bol.com (dutch "amazon competitor") sells a lot of crap too. Stuff that sometimes has the images and literal description taken from e.g. aliexpress. People literally re-sell stuff from chinese webshops on there with profit.
Technically, on Bol.com, a EU-platform, EU consumer protection is in place. So if a product breaks within guarantee terms, is dangerous, never gets delivered etc. the person re-selling is responsible. They are importing "illegal" goods and could even go to jail for it.
So, technically, that premium price brings me me the assurance that I am protected by EU consumer laws. That a TV I buy can be returned, is CE certified, won't explode and isn't a 12" TV pictured in a tiny living-room on the images on unpacking.
Except these products often don't meet EU criteria, aren't adhering to (food, safety, chidren protection) EU laws and money-back is often hard because the re-seller just dissapears. In the last case, Bol.com will step up and refund, because they have to. But for the rest, they plead innocence: It wasn't us that sold illegal goods, it was that reseller from which we skim a lot of fees.
The incentives are just wrong. And the solution simple: Make platforms by proxy legally responsible for their "users". Resellers in my case. Or advertisers in the case of TLA.
If some-guy sells a TV that explodes, and can't be found or held responsible, then make Bol.com responsible. Let their CEO go to jail in the very worst case. Let's see how fast they solve this.
> Not sure how this works on Amazon, but Bol.com (dutch "amazon competitor") sells a lot of crap too. Stuff that sometimes has the images and literal description taken from e.g. aliexpress.
That is bog-standard drop-shipping. Every open online market had a pile of that. It isn't that they've taken the images from AliExpress it is that both sets of sellers are drop-shipping product from the same source or collection of sources (or buying and reselling though that is much less common as it means managing stock) and the images come & other sales material come from there.
> So, technically, that premium price brings me me the assurance that I am protected by EU consumer laws.
When comparing Amazon (UK) or eBay to the sellers on, for example, Facebook, often there isn't a premium, Amazon (or AliExpress, or similar) are often cheaper than sellers on social media and/or advertising via adverts on YouTube and their ilk. Those sellers will often try to make the product out to be some unique high quality item with a price to match (which of course is heavily discounted if you buy in the next hour or two), and if you check your preferred general marketplace you'll find several people with the same thing, often with the same images, making no such pretence of it being unique or high-value, at a price noticeably cheaper than the seller from SM/etc. I assume this is the same with Amazon in other jurisdictions and other marketplaces like Boi.
But how are you going to enforce that liability? Making and selling knock-off "Lego ™" is already "illegal"¹ yet Ali-express is filled with this. How would this change when this knock-off-lego is also made with poisonous plastics?
Point is that e.g. within the EU the liability is clear and enforcable and the manufacturer has a role there. But with imported products, it doesn't. That liability lies entirely on the importer.
¹ (in legislations that recognize the International Trademark and copyright laws)
Yeah there were entire categories of products I'd never buy again on Amazon because of the scams and the list got so large that I cancelled Prime a while ago.
The most common one I've run into is third party sellers taking items that come in multiple to a pack from the manufacturer and splitting them up but then also listing the single item for the same price as the multi-pack's MSRP.
As an example, pouches of cat food treats that come 10 to a pack. Scam sellers will split the pack and sell each pouch for the same price as the full 10 pack and because Amazon has historically done nothing to guard against this, their scam listing appears fully comingled with the manufacturer's listing in a way where it is very hard to recognize the scam option even if you are aware of the possibility.
Amazon has made some noise about fixing these comingling issues this year, but their plans have been vague and for me the well is already poisoned after years of letting it go.
Its actually shocking that it took until this year for Amazon to really acknowledge this as an issue. Manufacturer/brands can't have been happy about this considering that for any item that can be scammed like this you'll find lots of bad reviews on Amazon where the review isn't really complaining about the product, but the scam.
Some example reviews that I just randomly and easily found on Amazon:
I'm in Austria. There are price aggregator sites likes Geizhals and Idealo that helps you find deals across many stores. More often I just go to a store I know and like. It happens I pay a little more, but not having 15 cheap options with one off brand names is actually more a pro than a con..
Where the consumer ends up out of pocket? I realise scamming ligament sellers and brands is endemic; but it is still a safe place to buy as far as I can tell?
Out of pocket? Perhaps not, especially if it "works" as intended. Putting your life in danger and house burnt down though? More likely than you realize.
Let's not even mention the health and nutrient products that make the FDA shudder.
Sure, you can ask for your money back, and flag the seller. But new sellers pop up selling the same crap all over again with a new name and company ID. This is all while real sellers of real (and safety certified products) get pressured by Amazon and dissuaded from taking their business off platform.
Avoid Amazon if at all possible. It's not good for consumers nor sellers, and it's keeping a leach on online retail.
Most countries have laws around liability of sold products. This is often set up to fall on the importer of said product. Amazon Europe (and perhaps USA) is doing something very funny with these laws; You, the consumer, is the importer. If your house burns out, then it's between you and a random chineese ghost companny that just disappeared into smoke. Amazon is "handling the import paperwork for you", and not taking liability for anything.
A lot of consumers have no idea they got a cheap imitation. Counterfeiters have gotten quite good, and in many cases the scam is "falls apart in a year instead of ten", not "it's completely non-functional".
I use walmart.com, they have fast local delivery (often next day) but you do have to be careful, as they also have listings for third party sellers and they are just as shady as Amazon. I only buy items sold by Walmart, never a third party. You can filter your searches for that pretty easily.
I never buy food, supplements, OTC meds, etc. online from any source. That stuff I always buy in person at a local retailer.
That would be one possible dystopia, but I think we actually are going to dodge it.
Smart, on device agents that are aligned with a user's interests will be able to act as the "walled garden" the user needs. In fact, this future is anti-dysopian, because the agent will not care about existing walled gardens and digital fiefdoms, and to the extent that it's using them it's going to deprive them of ad revenue, and they'll have to sit and take it because being agent unfriendly will be a death sentence for a business.
- "Never download anything unless it's from the Apple App Store"
- "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com"
- "Dont use the internet outside of ChatGPT"