Doctorow: American tech cartels use apps to break the law

Competition, Concentration, and Regulation

• Some argue competition doesn’t automatically improve regulation: industries with many fragmented actors (real estate, healthcare, finance) can have worse capture via professional guilds and local entrenchment.
• Others respond that concentrated megacorps are actually harder to regulate: you can dissolve small firms, but not a systemic giant without risking economic shock.
• Distinction raised between “many actors” vs “market concentration” – you can have lots of entities but power still centralized.

Hotels, Airbnb, and the “Social Contract”

• Dispute over whether Airbnb is “flipping” an existing social contract where short‑term visitors are channeled into hotels, which are tightly regulated and spatially segregated.
• Counterpoint: historically, hosting travelers in homes predates modern hotels; Airbnb is partly a reversion, but on a totally different scale (mass tourism) and with different neighborhood impacts.
• Concerns: investment-driven short‑term rentals crowd out residents, undermine community, and externalize nuisances (noise, damage) onto neighbors.

Law vs Software as Governance

• One strand sees a deeper conflict: law is transparent, debatable, and inherently ambiguous; software is opaque, global, and rigid.
• As more social rules are encoded in code, citizens and regulators often can’t even see what rules are being enforced (account bans, payment flows, algorithms), making meaningful oversight difficult.

Regulation, “Common Sense,” and Workplace Safety

• Ladder‑safety training becomes a proxy debate: one side says you shouldn’t regulate “common sense”; the other notes hundreds of thousands of ladder injuries show “common sense” isn’t enough.
• Skeptics question training mandates’ real efficacy vs bureaucratic friction and box‑ticking. Supporters emphasize actuarial data and the need to protect workers from employer pressure.

Uber, Employment Status, and Taxi Medallions

• Some dismiss the idea Uber “uses an app to break the law,” framing it as just a connector like a phone company.
• Others note Uber sets prices, takes the main cut, enforces behavior, and can de‑platform drivers—classic employer‑like control.
• Disagreement on whether bypassing taxi‑medallion regimes was justified civil disobedience against bad laws or simple law‑breaking that exploited workers.

Political vs Regulatory Capture

• Debate whether the core problem is regulators themselves or politicians who appoint them and decide enforcement priorities.
• One view: once firms become rich monopolies, they can shape both politics and regulation, making ex‑post fixes exceedingly hard.

Surveillance Apps and Dynamic Pricing

• Strong concern that “apps” are primarily data‑collection and price‑discrimination tools (example: fast‑food apps, Plexure’s payday surcharge idea).
• Some describe real‑world pressure to use loyalty apps (higher non‑app prices, app‑only rewards), and argue this normalizes pervasive surveillance.
• Thread wrestles with whether pushing back via individual rudeness to frontline workers has any meaningful effect versus boycotts or formal complaints.

AI as the Next “App Loophole”

• Parallel drawn to AI: firms can avoid rules that would apply to humans (licensing, liability, copyright) by routing activities through “AI” instead, until law catches up.