Making takedowns automatic on any user report means the dictators take down the apps of the dissidents.
In the absence of AI that would necessarily have to be good enough to also radically change society and the economy, the only solution I can even think of is a big increase in funding for the policing of apps. Who exactly would fund that? Governments would want to use such powers to pursue their own agendas, while Big Tech taking a proportion of App Store income is already being called “[Apple|Google] tax”.
Or we could use a different architecture for our applications that isn't so easily taken down. You know like locally installed apps, that can do something without the cloud overlord pushing new code with every pixel or character that is transmitted.
How would that stop, to go up-thread a bit, "an advertiser … that was using JavaScript … to fingerprint user's devices and if an Android device was detected a fake media player or fake CAPTCHA would trick user's into accepting push notifications for fake virus warnings to install questionable apps from the Play Store"?
Why can’t we we reduce cloud provider margins and use that money to fund it!
I mean — why is this not obvious? Force these companies to adhere to certain regulatory standards - the minimum of which is transparency and accountability.
This is besides the point. Just because the Middle East has been in turmoil since it was neo-colonized after WW2 doesn’t mean it’s okay for massive corporations to exert this much influence.
Also, while we are on this subject, your language has some pretty orientalist vibes to it. I wonder who you think created these problems and who feeds them today?
I’m confused. Do you support corporations having this kind of unchecked power or do you support the neo-colonial strategies that have left places like the Middle East in turmoil for the past century?
No dispute there. That’s why you should push for accountability and transparency. When we discover groups like NSO, we (the public) should be able to use FOIA like mechanisms to query these cloud providers and check if they are doing business with these criminals. We should be able to see who exactly approved their application and why they didn’t fail whatever standards we (the public) have decided that cloud providers should uphold. Maybe the standards had gaps or maybe there is corruption. Either way, the public has a method for feedback into key parts of society: cloud providers.
In the meantime, Google and Amazon simply ignore all complaints about spam originating from their networks.
In the olden days of the internet, ISPs that ignored abuse complaints would be blocked by their peers. Now that Gmail and AWS are too big to block, they act with impunity.
This is complicated when you see how non-ethical companies like Lyft are messing with competition I wouldn't be surprised they would flood provider with spam-reports...
It doesn't really matter how difficult it is. What this demonstrates is that AWS is not a public utility and will be swayed by mob rule to take down companies that are no longer "acceptable".
At a minimum we should demand transparency and accountability from all of these scale-enabling organizations.