Digital Revolution

Everyone knows bugs can plague software, but buggy software from Apple still makes big money. There is a unsatisfactory response to the situation: regular backups. For Macs, Time Machine seems quite reliable. For iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches, the reliance on iCloud for backup is quite dangerous, because iCloud reliability isn't very impressive. Yet, people often store critical information on mobile devices. There are cases like losing all Apple Books upon update. It's a horrible experience. The reason Apple can get away with this is that there is little regulatory and legal pressure for fixing bugs. As noted before, consumers have little power and often can not make Apple pay for damages. It seems that this is a much more important issue than crude antitrust against Apple.

In the beginning, social networks hold high hopes of enhancing human relationships. Friends and families far apart can easily share photographs, status updates, and whatever intrigues instantly. Events can easily find participants with detailed information. Even corporations may benefit from continuous CRM. However, market power has driven dominant social networks into degradation. Facebook and Instagram became ad readers. Twitter became a political hack. Only Stack Exchange and the likes remain true to the purpose. It's tasteless to trade greatness for more profit, but market measures success by exchange value, not use value. It seems tech regulation should be more focused on bringing better value to users, rather than destructive Apple bashing. However, doing so requires politicians to transition from capitalist exchange value calculus to socialist use value calculus. Who dare to be a socialist in USA? Facebook as a ad reader is worse than its algorithmic manipulation of user co...

There are many reasons why PC's aren't as good as Macs. But vast population doesn't understand them. Regulators attempt to regulate a market where they have no expertise. Apple's PR encourages magical thinking that further obscures the dynamics of its own success. Thus it seems appropriate to analyze the differences between PC's and Macs to find out what Apple's approach is really successful and why regulators' fashionable Apple-bashing is dangerous. One object that works very differently on PC's and Macs is function keys. On PC's, function keys are rarely used beyond F1 for help documentation. Their bindings are arbitrary and hard to figure out. Comparatively, Macs build function keys into the OS for display brightness, Expose, Launchpad, etc. Each with explicit purpose and properly decorated, function keys on Macs serve as fast shortcuts to frequently used OS controls. It's clear that Mac's function key design offers much better utility th...

It's a economic pitfall to argue for more or less regulation, but not more good regulation and less bad regulation. Good or bad depends on human judgement. However, human judgement is clouded by prejudice, error, and hubris. In this context, regulation is a extremely serious issue that a enterprise may rise or fall at the whim of the government. In the pursuit of antitrust against big tech, politicians threaten to break up giant tech corporations if their business practices are anti-competitive. What constitutes anti-competitiveness is open for debate, but as a first impression, it seems that Boeing and Airbus, or the financial sector, together with their anti-competitive behavior are perfectly fine for politicians. Perhaps the target for antitrust is political, so what? Even if we ignore the politics, it's hard to argue that breaking up giant tech corporations is necessary to restore competition in the industry. Few tech sectors are actual monopolies. Most of them are oligopo...

Politicians often exploit surveillance coverage provided by tech corporations for political ends . As reported by Jack Nicas, Daisuke Wakabayashi and Katie Benner for NYTimes: On Feb. 6, 2018, Apple received a grand jury subpoena for the names and phone records connected to 109 email addresses and phone numbers. It was one of the more than 250 data requests that the company received on average from U.S. law enforcement each week at the time. An Apple paralegal complied and provided the information. The issue is related to and much bigger than antitrust against big tech . Despite all privacy advancements Apple made through the years, user's data, at least data stored on iCloud, still aren't fully encrypted . Unencrypted mails stored on iCloud provide conveniences that ProtonMail lacks, but also introduced risks. It's difficult to balance between surveillance coverage and privacy. Both sides have advantages and disadvantages for users. One solution would be letting the use...

Recently, there is a lot of talks about antitrust against big tech. Certainly, part of it is anti-competitive behavior from giant tech corporations, but it's hard not to feel that political dissatisfaction from politicians of all persuasions, however secret, is the main drive behind antitrust. Otherwise, why not break up big finance, which is much more dangerous economically, too? Or, why accept Microsoft's monopoly in workplace while focusing on Google and Amazon? Breaking up big tech without also breaking up big finance is modern political cynicism. Politicians don't like being slighted, however imaginary, so they break up big tech. Politicians need donations from Wall Street and revolving doors for retirement, so they protect big finance. While algorithms and content moderators are responsible for accentuating extremism and conspiracy theories, it's human nature for herding that produced the fiasco. Addressing tech without also addressing human nature is misleading a...