Utilities governed like empires

One bad account disconnection can cost you everything.

Tech companies’ “mission statements” are easy to dismiss as BS, but they’re deadly serious and surprisingly successful in their aspirations to dominate the digital world.

That’s how we’ve ended up in a situation where a single company might control your email archives, family photos, business’s cloud drives, home security system, mobile devices and media collections.

But these companies don’t act like they’ve deliberately coiled their tendrils around every aspect of your digital life; they act like you’re just a customer whom they can kick off the platform the way a bartender would 86 you after last call.

That’s a phenomenon I explore in my latest piece of EFF’s Deeplinks blog, “Utilities Governed Like Empires.” It’s a piece about how policies governing competition, tech, and contract led inexorably to this situation.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/utilities-governed-empires

Anyone who’s ever had content removed or their accounts suspended or terminated by a Big Tech firm knows that Kafka was an optimist — The Trial’s got nothin’ on the endless customer-support email loops where robots ask questions you’ve already answered.