We have an Eero system in our house; it does really good and reliable
wifi distribution, including to my office in the garage. And it was nice
to have a piece of home electronics that was neither from one of the
great data-sucking companies like Google, nor from the control-freak
companies like Apple – and also not from a no-name white-label
re-badger or a giant shitty telco switch company whose consumer products
arm is an afterthought.
Now Eero is to become a part of Amazon, and Amazon explains that the
idea is to help the company become better at dominating the Internet of
Shit, which means that it’s going to go way up on both the surveillance
and control-freak league tables, and take Eero with it. The company
promises that it’s not going to revise Eero’s (exemplary) privacy policy
– but this is the same company that promised it would drop Audible’s
DRM 11 years ago and not only hasn’t done so, it also won’t answer
questions about why it hasn’t.
And as Dieter Bohn writes in The Verge, there’s more than one way to spy
on your with an Eero – it doesn’t have to monitor your traffic, it
could enumerate the devices, and/or look at flows of data rather than
content, and/or connect Eero data to the many other data-streams that
Amazon sucks out of your life.
It’s just a minor annoyance – yet another device I’m going to be in the
market to replace with something that has no Alexa support or support
for any other company’s surveillance/silo strategy – but it’s also a
good candidate for this month’s poster child for trustbusting. Companies should not be able to grow by buying up nascent competitors.
This does not produce a good outcome for consumers, nor for markets. It
corrodes our politics and limits our imaginations. It deters the right
kind of entrepreneurs (those who want to grow by serving customers) and
encourages the wrong kind (growth through providing missing
puzzle-pieces to already-bloated giants).
We have this crazy idea that infinite growth is possible in a finite universe.
Perhaps the biggest tragedy of the Internet generation tech world (after eroding personal privacy on the road to an Orwellian dystopia) is the idea that start ups exist to be bought by some monster company.
This isn’t a sometime thing: it is *the* business model of today.
Imagine that: coming up with a cool tech idea or invention, scratching up a prototype, putting it all together in your garage on your own dime or finding some seed money… not to develop a viable business to carry on doing what its doing for decades, but to deliver a fast return on the investment so its bought up by one of the digital giants, to be developed or, more likely to be crated up and stashed in a Raiders Of The Lost Ark style warehouse so it doesn’t mess with the monster company’s business plans.
And here’s the thing: each of those monster companies— whose tentacles are stretching across the world— has but one goal: to become *the* digital monopoly. We might realize some short term gains when they go head to head in this modern day battle of the titans, but once there’s a single winner left standing, it will be game over for us.
The only real way to stop any of this would be for governments to rein it in. Unfortunately the “free world” is dominated by the shortsighted governments that have no comprehension of the big picture, and few if any elected Representatives that even understand technology, so they effectively allow these companies experts to dictate the laws that are supposed to regulate them, and helping these corporate sociopaths grow “to big to fail.”
