net.wars

It's been obvious for a long time that if you want to study a thoroughly dysfunctional security system you could hardly do better than doping control in sports. Anti-doping has it all: perverse incentives, wrong assumptions, conflicts of interest, and highly motivated opponents. If you doubt this premise, consider: none of the highest-profile doping cases were caught by the anti-doping system. Lance Armstrong (2010) was outed by a combination of dogged journalistic reporting by David Walsh and admissions by his former teammate Floyd Landis; systemic Russian doping (2014) was uncovered by journalist Hajo Seppelt, who has also broadcast investigations of China, Kenya, Germany, and weightlighting; BALCO (2002) was exposed by a coach who sent samples to the UCLA anti-doping lab; and Willy Voet (1998), soigneur to the Festina cycling team, was busted by French Customs.

I bring this up - again - because two insider tales of the Russian scandal have just been published. The first, The Russian Affair, by David Walsh, tells the story of Vitaly and Yuliya Stepanov, who provided Seppelt with material for The Secrets of Doping: How Russia Makes Its Winners (2014); the second, The Rodchenkov Affair, is a first-person account of the Russian system by Grigory Rodchenkov, from 2006 to 2015 the director of Moscow's testing lab. Together or separately, these books explain the Russian context that helped foster its particular doping culture. They also show an anti-doping system that isn't fit for purpose.

The Russian Affair is as much the story of the Stepanovs' marriage as of contrasting and complementary views of the doping system. Vitaly was an idealistic young recruit at the Russian Anti-Doping Agency; Yuliya Rusanova was an aspiring athlete willing to do anything to escape the desperate unhappiness and poverty of her native area, Kursk. While she lectured him about not understanding "the real world", he continued hopefully writing letters to contacts at the World Anti-Doping Agency describing the violations he was seeing. Yuliya comes to see the exploitation of a system that protects winners but lets others test positive to make the system look functional. Under Vitaly's guidance, she records the revealing conversations that Seppelt's documentary featured. Rodchenkov makes a cameo appearance; the Stepanovs believed he was paid to protect specific athletes from positive tests.

In the vastly more entertaining The Rodchenkov Affair, Rodchenkov denies receiving payment, calling Yuliya a "has-been" he'd never met. Instead, Rodchenkov describes developing new methods of detecting performance-enhancing substances, then finding methods to beat those same tests. If the nearest analogue to the Walsh-described Stepanovs' marriage is George and Kellyanne Conway, Rodchenkov's story is straight out of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, in which an undercover narcotics agent is assigned to spy on himself.

Russia has advantages for dopers. For example, its enormous land mass allows athletes to sequenster themselves in training camps so remote they are out of range for testers. More important may be the pervasive sense of resignation that Vitaly Stepanov describes as his boss slashes WADA's 80 English pages of anti-doping protocols to ten in Russian translation because various aspects are "not possible to do in Russia". Rodchenkov, meanwhile, plans the Sochi anti-doping lab that the McLaren report later made famous for swapping positive samples for pre-frozen clean ones through a specially built "mousehole" operated by the FSB.

If you view this whole thing as a security system, it's clear that WADA's threat model was too simple, something like "athletes dope". Even in 1988, when Ben Johnson tested positive at the Seoul Olympics, it was obvious that everyone's interests depended on not catching star athletes. International sports depend on their stars - as do their families, coaches, support staff, event promoters, governments, fans, and even other athletes, who know the star attractions make their own careers possible. Anti-doping agencies must thread their way through this thicket.

In Rodchenkov's description, WADA appears inept, even without its failure to recognize this ecosystem. In one passage, Rodchenkov writes about the double-blind samples the IOC planted from time to time to test the lab: "Those DBs were easily detectable because they contained ridiculous compounds...which were never seen in doping control routine analysis." In another, he says: "[WADA] also assumed that all accredited laboratories were similarly competent, which was not the case. Some WADA-accredited laboratories were just sloppy, and would reach out to other countries' laboratories when they had to process quality control samples to gain re-accreditation."

Flaws are always easy to find once you know they're there. But WADA was founded in 1999. Just six years earlier, the opening of the Stasi records exposed the comprehensive East German system. The possibility of state involvement should have been high on the threat list from the beginning, as should the role of coaches and doctors who guide successive athletes to success.

It's hard to believe this system can be successfully reformed. Incentives to dope will always be with us, just as it would be impossible to eliminate all incentives to break into computer systems. Rodchenkov, who frequently references Orwell's 1984, insists that athletes dope because otherwise their bodies cannot cope with the necessary training, which he contends is more physically damaging than doping. This much is clear: a system that insists on autonomy while failing to fulfill its most basic mission is wrong. Small wonder that Rodchenkov concludes that sport will never be clean.

Illustrations: Grigory Rodchenkov and Bryan Fogel in Fogel's documentary, Icarus.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

At the Congressional hearings a few weeks ago, all four CEOs who appeared - Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sundar Pichai (Google), and Tim Cook (Apple) - said essentially the same thing in their opening statements: they have lots of competitors, they have enabled millions of people to build small businesses on their platforms, and they do not have monopoly power. The first of these is partly true, the second is true, and the third...well, it depends which country you're talking about, how you look at it, and what you think they're competing for. In some countries outside the US, for example, Facebook *is* the Internet because of its Free Basics program.

In the weeks since: Google still intends to buy Fitbit, which for $2.1 billion would give it access to a huge pile of health-data-that's-not-categorized-as-health data; both the US and the EU are investigating.

In California, an appeals court has found that Amazon can be liable for defective products sold by third-party sellers.

Meanwhile, Apple, which this week became the first company in history to hit a $2 trillion market cap, deleted Epic's hugely popular game Fortnite from the App Store because its latest version breaks Apple's rules by allowing players to bypass the Apple payment system (and 30% commission) to pay Epic directly for in-game purchases. In response, Epic has filed suit - and, writes Matt Stoller, if a company with Epic's clout can't force Apple to negotiate terms, who can? Stoller describes the Apple-Epic suit as certainly about money but even more about "the right way to run an economy". Stoller goes on to find this thread running through other current disputes, and believes this kind of debate leads to real change.

At Stratechery Ben Thompson argues that the Democrats didn't prove their case. Most interesting of the responses to the hearings, though, is an essay by Benedict Evans, who argues that breaking up the platforms will achieve nothing. Instead, he says, citing relevant efforts by the EU and UK competition authorities, better to dig into how the platforms operate and write rules to limit the potential for abuse. I like this idea, in part because it is genuinely difficult to see how break-ups would work. However, the key issue is enforcement; the EU made not merging databases a condition of Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp - and three years later Facebook decided to do it anyway. The resulting fine of €110 million was less than 1% of the $19 billion purchase price.

In 1998, when the Evil Borg of Tech was Microsoft, it, too, was the subject of antitrust actions. Echoing the 1984 breakup of AT&T, people speculated about creating "Baby Bills", either by splitting the company between operating systems and productivity software or by splitting it into clones and letting them compete with each other. Instead, in 2004 the EU ordered Microsoft to unbundle its media player and, in 2009, Internet Explorer to avoid new fines. The company changed, but so did the world around it: the web, online services, free software, smartphones, and social media all made Microsoft less significant. Since 2010, the landscape has changed again. As the economist Lina Khan wrote in 2017, two guys in a garage can no longer knock off the current crop by creating the next new big technology.

Today's expanding hybrid cyber-physical systems will entrench choices none of us made into infrastructure none of us can avoid. In 2017, for example, San Diego began installing "smart" streetlights intended to do all sorts of good things: drive down energy costs, monitor air pollution, point out empty parking spaces, and so on. The city also thought it might derive some extra income from allowing third parties to run apps on its streetlight network. Instead, as Tekla S. Perry reported at IEEE Spectrum in January, to date the system's sole use has been to provide video footage to law enforcement, which has taken advantage to solve serious crimes but also to investigate vandalism and illegal dumping.

In the UK, private developers and police have been rolling out automated facial recognition without notifying the public; this week, in a case brought by Liberty, the UK Court of Appeal ruled that its use breaches privacy rights and data protection and equality laws. This morning, I see that, undeterred, Lincolnshire Police will trial a facial recognition system that is supposed to be able to detect people's moods.

The issue of monopoly power is important. But even if we find a way to ensure fair competition we won't have solved a bigger problem that is taking shape: individuals increasingly have no choice about whether to participate in the world these companies are building. For decades we have had no choice about being credit-scored. Three years ago, despit the fatuous comments of senior politicians, it was obvious that the only people who can opt out of using the Internet are those who are economically inactive or highly privileged; last year journalist Kashmir Hill proved the difficulty of doing without GAFA. The pandemic response is making opting out either antisocial, a health risk, or both. And increasingly, going out of your house means being captured on video and analyzed whether you like it or not. No amount of controlling individual technology companies will solve this loss of agency. That is up to us.

Illustrations: Orwell's house at 22 Portobello Road, London, complete with CCTV camera.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week, the Mozilla Foundation announced major changes. As is the new norm these days, Mozilla is responding to a problem that existed BCV (before coronavirus) but has been exposed, accelerated, and compounded by the pandemic. But the response sounds grim: approximately a quarter of the workforce to be laid off and a warning that the company needs to find new business models. Just a couple of numbers explain the backdrop: according to Statcounter, Firefox's second-position share of desktop/laptop browser usage has dropped to 8.61% behind Chrome at 69.55%. On mobile and tablets, where the iPhone's Safari takes a large bite out of Chrome's share, Firefox doesn't even crack 1%. You might try to trumpify those percentages by suggesting it's a smaller share but a larger user population, but unfortunately no; at CNet, Stephen Shankland reports that usage is shrinking in raw numbers, too, down to 210 million monthly users from 300 million in 2017.

Yes, I am one of those users.

In its 2018 annual report and 2018 financial statement (PDF), Mozilla explains that most of its annual income - $430 million - comes from royalty deals with search engines, which pay Firefox to make them the default (users can change this at will). The default varies across countries: Baidu (China), Yandex (Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Ukraine), and Google everywhere else, including the US and Canada. It derives a relatively small amount - $20 million or so in total - of additional income from subscriptions, advertising, donations and dividends and interest on the investments where it's parked its capital.

The pandemic has of course messed up everyone's financial projections. In the end, though, the underlying problem is that long-term drop in users; fewer users must eventually generate fewer search queries on which to collect royalties. Presumably this lies behind Mozilla's acknowledgment that it needs to find new ways to support itself - which, the announcement also makes clear, it has so far struggled to do.

The problem for the rest of us is that the Internet needs Firefox - or if not Firefox itself, another open source browser with sufficiently significant cloud to keep the commercial browsers and their owners honest. At the moment, Mozilla and Firefox are the only ones in a position to lead that effort, and it's hard to imagine a viable replacement.-

As so often, the roots of the present situation go back to 1995, when - no Google then and Apple in its pre-Jobs-return state - the browser kings were Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, both seeking world wide web domination. Netscape's 1995 IPO is widely considered the kickoff for the dot-com boom. By 1999, Microsoft was winning and then high-flying AOL was buying Netscape. It was all too easy to imagine both building out proprietary protocols that only their browsers could read, dividing the net up into incompatible walled gardens. The first versions of what became Firefox were, literally, built out of a fork of Netscape whose source code was released before the AOL acquisition.

The players have changed and the commercial web has grown explosively, but the danger of slowly turning the web into a proprietary system has not. Statcounter has Google (Chrome) and Apple (Safari) as the two most significant players, followed by Samsung Internet (on mobile) and Microsoft's Edge (on desktop), with a long tail of others including Opera (which pioneered many now-common features), Vivaldi (built by the Opera team after Telenor sold it to a Chinese consortium), and Brave, which markets itself as a privacy browser. All these browsers have their devoted fans, but they are only viable because websites observe open standards. If Mozilla can't find a way to reverse Firefox's user base shrinkage, web access will be dominated by two of the giant companies that two weeks ago were called in to the US Congress to answer questions about monopoly power. Browsers are a chokepoint they can control. I'd love to say the hearings might have given them pause, but two weeks later Google is still buying Fitbit, Apple and Google have removed Fortnite from the app store for violating its in-app payment rules, and Facebook has launched Tiktok clone Instagram Reels.

There is, at the moment, no suggestion that either Google or Apple wants to abuse its dominance in browser usage. If they're smart, they'll remember the many benefits of the standards-based approach that built the web. They may also remember that in 2009 the threat of EU fines led Microsoft to unbundle its Internet Explorer browser from Windows.

The difficulty of finding a viable business model for a piece of software that millions of people use is one of the hidden costs of the Internet as we know it. No one has ever been able to persuade large numbers of users to pay for a web browser; Opera tried in the late 1990s, and wound up switching first to advertising sponsorship and then, like Mozilla, to a contract with Google.

Today, Catalin Cimpanu reports at ZDNet that Google and Mozilla will extend their deal until 2023, providing Mozilla with perhaps $400 million to $500 million a year. Assuming it goes through as planned, it's a reprieve - but it's not a solution - as Mozilla, fortunately, seems to know.

Illustrations: Netscape 1.0, in 1994 (via Wikimedia).

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"Companies aren't bad just because they're big," Mark Zuckerberg told the US Congress ten days ago, though he failed to suggest aspirational counterexamples. Of course, the point isn't *that* a company is big - but *how*.

July 28, 2020 saw Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and Sundar Pichai lined up to face the House Judiciary committee in a hearing on Online Platforms and Market Power. As so often these days - and as Julia Angwin writes at The Markup, Democrats and Republicans (excepting Kelly Armstrong, R-ND), conducted different hearings. Both were essentially hostile. Democrats plus Armstrong asked investigative journalism-style questions about company practices, citing detailed historical examples: unfair competition, abuse of a dominant position (Apple, Amazon), editorial manipulation (Facebook, Google), past acquisitions, third-party cookies (Google), targeted advertising, content moderation, hate speech, Russian interference in the 2016 election (Facebook), smart speakers as home hubs (Amazon), counterfeit products (Amazon), and so on for five and a half hours. Each of the four, but particularly Cook, spent a fair bit of time waiting through other people's questions. Overall response: this stuff is *hard*; we're doing a *lot*, we have lots of competition, while their questioners fretted at the loss of every second of their limited time. It must be years since any of these guys has been so frequently peremptorily interrupted while waffling: "Yes or no?"

The Markup kept a tally of "I'll get back to you on that": Bezos edged out Zuckerberg by a hair. (Not entirely fair, since Cook had many fewer chances to play.)

At one point, Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) explained to Bezos that the point of the committee's work was to ensure that more companies like these four could be created. (Maybe start by blocking Google from buying Fitbit.) She was particularly impressive asking about multi-sided markets and revenue sharing, and also pushed Zuckerberg to quickly implement the recommendations in its recent civil rights audit (PDF). But will her desired focus be reflected in the final report, or will it get derailed by arguments over political bias?

Aggrieved Republicans pushed hard on their claim that social media stifles conservative voices, perhaps not achieving the effect they hoped. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) asked Zuckerberg why Donald J. Trump Jr's account was suspended (for sharing a bizarre video full of misinformation about the coronavirus). Zuckerberg had to tell him that was Twitter, although Facebook did remove that same video. Greg Steube (R-FL) demanded of Pichai why Google sorted his campaign emails into his parents' spam folder: "This appears to only be happening to conservative Republicans." (The Markup has found this is non-partisan sorting of "marketing" email, and Val Demings (D-FL) noted it happens to her.) Steube also claimed that soon after the hearing was agreed conservative websites had jumped back up out of obscurity in Google's search results. Why was that? While Pichai struggled to answer, someone quipped on Twitter, "This is everyone trying to explain the Internet to their parents."

Jim Jordan (R-OH), whose career aspiration is apparently Court Jester, opened with: "Big Tech is out to get conservatives - that is a not suspicion, not a hunch, it's a fact." He reeled off a list of incidents and dates: the removal of right wing news website Breitbart, donations from Google employees to then-presidential-candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Twitter removing posts from Donald Trump calling for violence against protesters, and claimed he'd been "shadowbanned" when Twitter (still not present) demoted his tweets to make them less visible, adding that he tried to call Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey as "our" witness. Was Google going to tailor its features to help Joe Biden in the upcoming election? "It's against our core values," said Pichai. Jordan pounced: "But you did it in 2016." He had emails.

Matt Gaetz (R-FL) also seemed offended that - as an American company - Google had withdrawn from the Department of Defense's Project Maven and asked Pichai to promise the company would not withdraw from cooperating with law enforcement, accusing the company of "bigoted, anti-police policies". Gaetz was also disturbed by Google's technical center and collaboration on AI in China - a complaint seemingly pioneered by Peter Thiel..

Steube also found time to take a swipe at the EU: "It's no secret that Europe seems to have an agenda of attacking large, successful US tech companies, yet Europe's approach to regulation in general, and antitrust in particular, seems to have been much less successful than America's approach. America is a remarkable nursery for market innovation and entrepreneurship in pursuit of the American Dream." The irony of saying this while investigating the resulting monopoly power appeared lost on him.

In their opening statements, all four CEOs had embraced only-in-America. At last week's gikii, Chris Marsden countered with this list of technology inventions by Europeans: the Linux kernel (Finland); the Opera browser (Norway), Skype (Estonia); the chip maker ARM (UK), the Raspberry Pi (UK); the VLC media player, and an obscure technology called the World Wide Web (UK, working in Switzerland). "Social good," Marsden concluded, "rather than unicorns". Some of those - Skype, ARM, Opera - were certainly sold off to other parts of the world. But all of the big four have benefited from at least one of them.

Illustrations: Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Tim Cook are sworn in via Webex.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)