After months of keeping low profiles while COVID-19 dominated the headlines, the tech industry has apparently decided to make up for lost time with a one-week barrage of bullshit to close out October. Because who doesn't want to slide into the busiest sales season of the year on a slick of one's own mess, and associated consumer ill will? What do you mean, "Nobody with any sense?"
Anyway, here's a roundup of my favourites from yesterday, complete with pithy snarky commentary.
Why not start with a classic? Because EA is making headlines again with their loot box bullshit, as reported by gamesindustry.biz:Electronic Arts is facing more legal action over its use of loot boxes and other randomised monetisation mechanics.
The latest is a class action lawsuit filed in Canada on September 30 by joint plaintiffs Mark Sutherland and Shawn Moore.
[...]
The pair assert that the Criminal Code of Canada prohibits unlawful gaming, betting, lotteries and games of chance.
Since
EA does not hold a gambling license in the region, it is accused of
operating "an unlicensed, illegal gaming system through their loot
boxes."
[...]
The lawsuit is seeking, among other things, damages for Moore and
Sutherland under the Competition Act and a declaration that EA has
contravened the Business Practices and Consumer Protection Act.
Yes, loot boxes are gambling, and it turns out some countries already have laws about that sort of thing. Go figure.
Staying the realm of video games, how about some anti-consumer platform-exclusivity bullshit... but from Microsoft, this time. As reported by The Verge:
Minecraft players have been able to play without a Microsoft
account for the past six years that the company has owned the game, but
that will change in 2021, the official Minecraft blog announced yesterday. Players who own the original version of the game and do not switch to a Microsoft account will be unable to play.
[...]
While not as incendiary as Facebook’s decision to require Facebook accounts for the use of Oculus headsets, Minecraft is still one of the biggest games in the world and now many players will have to take action if they still want to play.
Yes, you're reading that correctly: Microsoft apparently looked at the wave of negative PR that Facebook's decision to require Facebook accounts to use Oculus VR headsets, decided they wanted in, and made is happen.
And speaking of Facebook... Since no roundup of the week's corporate bullshit would be complete without them, here's your taste of Facebook feces, as reported by Mother Jones:
Facebook Manipulated the News You See to Appease Republicans, Insiders Say
Near the close of the first year of the Trump presidency, executives
at Facebook were briefed on some major changes to its News Feed—the code
that determines which of the zillions of posts on the platform any one
of us is shown when we look at Facebook. The story the company has
publicly told is that it was working to “bring people closer together” by showing us more posts from friends and family, and to prioritize “trusted” and “informative” sources of news. The changes would also reduce how much news most people see, and therefore decrease revenue for many publishers.
What wasn’t publicly known until now is that Facebook actually ran
experiments to see how the changes would affect publishers—and when it
found that some of them would have a dramatic impact on the reach of
right-wing “junk sites,” as a former employee with knowledge of the
conversations puts it, the engineers were sent back to lessen those
impacts. As the Wall Street Journal reported
on Friday, they came back in January 2018 with a second iteration that
dialed up the harm to progressive-leaning news organizations instead.
[Facebook] executives were even shown a slide
presentation that highlighted the impact of the second iteration on
about a dozen specific publishers—and Mother Jones was singled out as one that would suffer, while the conservative site the Daily Wire
was identified as one that would benefit. These changes were pushed by
Republican operatives working in Facebook’s Washington office under Vice
President of Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan (who later made headlines
for demonstratively supporting his friend Brett Kavanaugh during confirmation hearings).
I am surprised only that people are surprised. There is no "left-wing media," people; the reverse, however, is not true, and Facebook has been pandering to right-wing extremists for years. One can only assume that Mark Zuckerberg is either a card-carrying Republican, or the second-greediest asshole ever to walk the Earth.
So, we've had Microsoft, and we've had Facebook... I guess we should round things out with a Google story, eh? Here's one about the collateral damage that's likely to result from the USA DOJ's antitrust action again the firm, as reported by VentureBeat:
Mozilla has responded to the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust
lawsuit against Google, but rather than commending the DOJ’s action, the
Firefox browser maker has voiced concerns that its commercial
partnership could make it “collateral damage” in the fight against
Google’s alleged monopolistic practices.
[...]
Mozilla has a long and complicated history with Google. In recent years, Mozilla has launched countless privacy campaigns against the internet giant’s various online properties, and just last month it introduced a new browser add-on to crowdsource research into YouTube’s opaque recommendation algorithm. On the other hand, Mozilla relies heavily on royalties from a search engine partnership with Google. The duo recently extended their deal
to make Google the default search engine inside Firefox in the U.S. and
other markets, which will reportedly secure Mozilla up to $450 million
over the next three years.
But the DOJ has focused on deals like this, across the software and hardware realms, as part of its investigation into Google [...]
One might imagine Mozilla would be delighted to see the DOJ target an
outsized rival like Google. But the lawsuit’s focus on Google’s
“exclusionary” practices has given Mozilla cause for concern — and with
good reason. The organization recently announced a major restructuring of its corporate division, leading to 250 layoffs — a quarter of its workforce — alongside plans to “tighten and refocus” its product lineup, which has led to closures and spinoffs.
Mozilla doesn’t appear to be in the best of health, and now it may have
to worry about its income from Google being compromised by the DOJ’s
investigation.
It would be ironic in the extreme, to put it mildly, if DOJ's antitrust action killed the deal which is keeping Firefox alive, cementing Chrome's stranglehold on the browser market. Given that Trump's DOJ rushed their antitrust filing for political purposes, rather than take their time a get their ducks in a row, I expect to see more stories like this one over the coming weeks and months.
I do think that some form of Big Tech regulation is inevitable, though, and I'm not the only one; former Google CEO Eric Schmidt agrees, as reported by Bloomberg:
Former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said the “excesses” of social media are likely to result in greater regulation of internet platforms in the coming years.
Schmidt, who left the board of Google’s parent Alphabet Inc. in 2019 but is still one of its largest shareholders, said the antitrust lawsuit the U.S. government filed against the company on Tuesday was misplaced, but that more regulation may be in order for social networks in general.
“The context of social networks serving as amplifiers for idiots and crazy people is not what we intended,” Schmidt said at a virtual conference hosted by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. “Unless the industry gets its act together in a really clever way, there will be regulation.”
And just like that, "amplifiers for idiots" is my new favourite phrase.
All of the stories linked above go into way more detail than the excerpts that I've posted here, of course, so if you missed them earlier in the week, I recommend that you click through now for the full stories.