Over at boingboing, Cory Doctorow has an excellent essay on adversarial interoperability, or as he puts it, How about nah? The central theme of the piece is the idea that Web sites are offering a one sided deal: “Let us and everyone we do business with track you in every way possible or get lost[.]” It’s meant to be a take it or leave proposition. Agree to this or leave the premises.
As Doctorow says, consumers are saying, “Nah, I don’t think so. I’ll just use an ad blocker and stop the tracking at its source.” This is what he means by adversarial interoperability. The users have found a way to use (or interoperate with) the Web sites in a way not envisioned or approved by the sites’ owners. The owners, of course, respond with ad blocker blockers—software that detects if an ad blocker is operating and refuses to render the site if so. The users respond with ad blocker blocker blockers and so on.
The larger point of the essay is that until now, there was little that the advertisers could do—although they certainly tried—to stop this. Now, however, the W3C has sold users out by standardizing and lending their imprimatur to the Encrypted Media Extensions. Once implemented, advertisers will be able wrest control from the users by leveraging the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to punish anyone who tries to subvert it.
I don’t know if things are as bleak as Doctorow portrays them but it certainly isn’t good. Of course, politicians famously refuse to stay bought and if there’s enough outcry, perhaps they’ll get serious about privacy legislation. Or not. Who knows? In any event, Doctorow’s essay is very much worth reading.