Archive for the ‘Free Software’ Category

The best Software as a Service (SaaS) companies of the 2010s decade – TechRepublic

Thousands of SaaS companies provide cloud services to customers all over the world, but some stood out from the crowd during the decade that started with 2010.

Image: Iurii Motov, Getty Images/iStockphoto

The widespread adoption of cloud-based computing services by businesses and organizations around the world continues to accelerate at a remarkable clip. According to Gartner, total worldwide cloud revenue will reach $214.3 billion by the end of 2019. Contrast that amount with TechJury's estimate that the same worldwide cloud revenue amount was only $24.65 billon in 2010. Nearly a complete order of magnitude better in 10 years.

Drilling down on Gartner's statistics, one can see that the Software as a Service (SaaS) market is expected to reach nearly $100 billion in 2019. Obviously, the growth of the SaaS market during the 2010 decade has contributed substantially to the overall growth of cloud computing services. But of the 12,000 or so SaaS companies offering services, which few stood out during the decade?

SEE: Top cloud providers 2019: A leader's guide to the major players (TechRepublic Premium)

Before we start naming names, let me state for the record that this list of best SaaS companies is purely a personal choice and not based on any firm set of measurable criteria. There are literally tens of thousands of SaaS companies providing exceptional services to customers all over the world. If your favorite is not listed here, feel free to tell us why it should be in the discussion below.

For the purposes of this list we are also going to skip over the obvious big three players in the cloud computing services spaceAmazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. In this article, we will consider those companies' collective offerings to fall into the Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) categories.

You would be hard-pressed to find a company that epitomizes the SaaS category over the past decade as well as Salesforce. Since its inception in 1999, Salesforce has been on a mission to provide quality CRM services for its customers and has seen its revenue grow from $1.4 billion in 2010 to $13.28 billion in 2019.

Perhaps even more noteworthy is Salesforce's commitment to cloud computing as a service that can transform also-ran businesses and organizations into industry leaders. In many ways, Salesforce has been the decade's primary cheerleader for the benefits of the SaaS and cloud services industry.

When CEO Satya Nadella took over at Microsoft, he committed the company's product line and services to the business enterprise and the cloud. That transition and refocusing of resources has paid off in many ways, including the aforementioned Azure and the venerable productivity suite Office 365.

By making the primary components of Office cloud-based services, which are accessed on a per user subscription model, Microsoft has been able to maintain and even grow its market share in the productivity space. The cloud nature of Office 365 means that the productivity suite can be updated with new features and security patches at willa model businesses have come to expect from all cloud-based services.

As a cloud-based system, Office 365 can tap into the growing mobile workforce trends of the 2010s. For example, collaboration through cloud services like text, video conferencing, email, shared documents, etc., are now, after a decade of transition, standard operating procedure for many enterprises. Microsoft Office 365 caters to these trends and can therefore maintain its relevancy.

SEE:Office 365: A guide for tech and business leaders (free PDF)(TechRepublic)

While an established tech company like Microsoft had to transition to the cloud, Slack's trajectory was organic and powered by a perceived need. Slack grew from a small, internal grass-roots idea of making a better collaboration tool to a major cloud-service company in the span of about seven years.

Launched in August 2013, Slack and the products and services it developed have defined an entire new genre of business softwarethe collaboration hub. The success of Slack is part of the reason there is such a thing as Office 365. Slack became a publicly traded billon-dollar company in 2019 and is now a primary player in the all-important team collaboration space.

Like Slack, Zoom Video Communications burst on the scene in 2011 to change the way businesses and collaborating teams hold meetings, especially video conference meetings. Zoom provides remote conferencing services using the power of cloud computing.

Before Zoom, video conference systems were expensive, clunky, and often failed to work as advertised. By removing that bulky and unreliable infrastructure from the equation, Zoom has been able to make video conferencing a productive reality for many businesses that could not afford such niceties before.

By adding additional collaboration, scheduling, and educational tools, Zoom has become an integral part of the team collaboration space. Many Zoom services can be accessed for free, with the basic business package available for about $15 a month.

SEE:More Decade in Review coverage (TechRepublic on Flipboard)

Another company operating in the collaboration marketplace is Dropbox. The company was founded in 2007 but earned its prominent standing in cloud-based SaaS circles during the 2010s. Dropbox went public in 2018 and has more than 14 million paying customers as of November 2019. The standard plan sells for $12.50/month/user.

Dropbox provides a shareable cloud-based file storage system that is simple to use and is not reliant on the IT infrastructure of the customers it serves. If a user can access the Internet, they can access their Dropbox stored files. A team that can access the same document at the same time can collaborate on the contents of that document. A simple, but important, concept with a simple solution.

The success of the subscription payment model for so many cloud-based SaaS companies has led many "old-tech" companies to change the way they do business. Adobe, for example, now offers its familiar set of business products online, with access granted by subscription. This change of pricing philosophy took place in the latter half of the 2010s decade and can be attributed to Adobe's renewed success.

By offering Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat for about $30 a month instead of requiring thousands of dollars up front, Adobe has become affordable to more users, raising profits, and raising the profile of the company. The prominence of collaboration as a standard business practice has also inspired the company to create new products for a new generation of users.

Another old-tech company to find renewed success in the 2010s by embracing the cloud is the Oracle Corporation. While still concentrating on large business enterprises and their need for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and databases, Oracle has modified its approach away from expensive hands-on installations of new hardware with long-term maintenance contracts toward cloud-based SaaS services that more customers can afford. The transformation, started and completed during the past decade, has made Oracle relevant again.

During the 10 years that make up the 2010s, cybersecurity attacks have skyrocketed to become a daily problem for any business connected to the internet. It is practically impossible for an individual business to keep up with ever-changing cybersecurity protocols. This is where a cloud-based SaaS like Sophos can step in to help.

Using the power of cloud computing, Sophos can offer businesses security protections and protocols ranging from an improved firewall to threat detection to breach responses. By outsourcing these security measures organizations can focus on their daily business while Sophos worries about keeping ahead of criminal cybersecurity activity.

Looking at the list of best SaaS companies in the decade of the 2010s, you will notice several trends that will continue to be relevant in the 2020s.

Without a doubt, the most successful businesses in the next decade will be the ones that embrace the capabilities and predilections of the modern, always-mobile workforce. As younger employees enter the workforce, their affinity for mobile devices will continue to pervade day-today operations, and businesses must be prepared to take advantage. Contracting with prominent SaaS companies may be the most cost-effective method.

The other major trend to be gleaned from the 2010 decade is cybersecurityor rather the lack thereof. With ransomware and other attacks, criminals have found a lucrative form of security breach that is not likely to go away any time soon. Cybersecurity attacks happen every day, and businesses will likely need help from dedicated cloud-based services just to survive the onslaught.

Your go-to knowledge base for the latest about AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Docker, SaaS, IaaS, cloud security, containers, the public cloud, the hybrid cloud, the industry cloud, and much more. Delivered Mondays

Original post:
The best Software as a Service (SaaS) companies of the 2010s decade - TechRepublic

FlipHTML5 Flipbook Creator Offers a Free Version with Plenty of Features – WhaTech – WhaTech

Users are treated to plenty of tools and features from the free flipbook creator. They can use them to create different digital flipbooks and share them freely with readers online.

FlipHTML5 is a custom digital software developer that offers a free version of flipbook creator for all its users. Users can create captivating flipbooks including magazines, brochures, catalogs, photo albums and more. Furthermore, no professional skills are needed in order to use the software. FlipHTML5 has plenty of free preset templates, themes and other interactive elements that can be used in creating projects.

FlipHTML5 understands how important a strong online presence is to the success of any business venture. The companys goal is to ensure that its clients have proper techniques that will help them fulfill their objectives. The free version of flipbook maker is the ideal tool that can enable them achieve better results in the digital realm. With this software, users can customize their flipbooks to fit the requirements of target audiences and markets.

The free flipbook creator gives users full control over their flipbooks. They can modify, adjust, edit, or add elements such as output settings, page-flipping styles and more to flipbooks before they are published. The software also comes with search functionalities that can be embedded into flipbooks to enable readers to search for content or products they need from the flipbooks.

We are happy to be able to help our clients realize their dreams through our flipbook software, said Anna Lee, Designer of FlipHTML5. Our team of experts strives to empower our clients with tools and knowledge to better understand and design winning flipbooks. Our free software offers the best designing and publishing experience possible. We intend to continue working with them, so they unleash their full potential. We want them to access free resources to build their portfolio online and improve their outcomes.

There is a lot to learn and do on the FlipHTML5 platform. The free features and functionalities provided not only help to design interactive flipbooks but also give readers instant overviews of the flipbooks through thumbnails. They can also bookmark pages for later referencing or print part or whole editions to read later at their convenience. The zoom function gives them the convenience to navigate through flipbooks.

Apart from providing the free version of flipbook creator, FlipHTML5 also allows users to publish their projects on their cloud-based platform at no cost. This makes it easy for them to share their flipbooks flexibly with many people on any device and social networks. The flipbooks can also be created in outputs that are downloadable for offline reading. The FlipHTML5 flipbook creator has a lot to offer to clients who want to take digital publishing to the next level.

For more information, please visit fliphtml5.com/

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Continued here:
FlipHTML5 Flipbook Creator Offers a Free Version with Plenty of Features - WhaTech - WhaTech

ELMO share price on watch after Hero Brands investment – Yahoo Finance

The ELMO Software Ltd (ASX: ELO) share price will be one to watch on Monday following a promising investment announcement.

This morning the leading cloud-based HR and payroll solutions provider announced an investment in Hero Brands Pty Limited.

According to the release, Hero Brands is a software development house headquartered in Melbourne with offshore operations based in Eastern Europe. Over the last 12 months the company has generated revenues of $3 million and is EBITDA neutral.

ELMOs investment consists of a $1.18 million capital injection in exchange for 50% equity ownership. In addition to this, ELMO has agreed a contingent payment of $0.5 million payable subject to Hero Brands meeting performance hurdles.

Management explained that the investment provides ELMO with an increased research and development capability. It also gives the company access to Hero Brands high calibre software engineers.

ELMOs chief executive officer, Danny Lessem, was very pleased with the investment in Hero Brands.

Mr Lessem explained: We are delighted to invest and partner with Hero Brands. I have previously worked with the Vendor and know them well. Expanding our development capacity and capability will assist in delivering our long-term growth strategy.

Last week ELMO held its annual general meeting and reminded shareholders of its long-term opportunity.

Having recently entered into the payroll and rostering/time & attendance market, management estimates that it has a total addressable market worth $2.4 billion per annum.

Mr Lessem appears confident that the company was well-placed to win a growing slice of this market.

He said: The outlook for FY20 is exciting and builds on our FY19 investments and success. We will continue to target further investment to deliver long-term, sustainable growth. We expect to increase headcount and capabilities across research and development, sales and marketing and client services while also actively seeking strategic investment opportunities for complementary, adjacent technology or customer lists that provide cross-sell opportunities.

We are confident these investments will generate strong, long-term returns for shareholders as we take full advantage of the expanded view we now have of the market, he concluded.

The post ELMO share price on watch after Hero Brands investment appeared first on Motley Fool Australia.

NEW. Five Cheap and Good Stocks to Buy in 2020.

Our Motley Fool experts have just released a brand new FREE report, detailing 5 dirt cheap shares that you can buy today.

One stock is an Australian internet darling with a rock solid reputation and an exciting new business line that promises years (or even decades) of growth while trading at an ultra-low price

Another is a diversified conglomerate trading near a 52-week low all while offering a 2.8% fully franked yield...

Plus 3 more cheap bets that could position you to profit over the next 12 months!

See for yourself now. Simply click the link below to scoop up your FREE copy and discover all 5 shares. But you will want to hurry this free report is available for a brief time only.

CLICK HERE FOR YOUR FREE REPORT!

More reading

James Mickleboro has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool Australia's parent company Motley Fool Holdings Inc. owns shares of and recommends Elmo Software. The Motley Fool Australia has recommended Elmo Software. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. This article contains general investment advice only (under AFSL 400691). Authorised by Scott Phillips.

The Motley Fool's purpose is to help the world invest, better. Click here now for your free subscription to Take Stock, The Motley Fool's free investing newsletter. Packed with stock ideas and investing advice, it is essential reading for anyone looking to build and grow their wealth in the years ahead. This article contains general investment advice only (under AFSL 400691). Authorised by Bruce Jackson. 2019

Read this article:
ELMO share price on watch after Hero Brands investment - Yahoo Finance

How Ree Drummond Turned Her Blog Into An Empire – Forbes

In 2006 Ree Drummonds husband announced that he was taking all four of their children, ranging in ages from one to six, to work with him. For the first time in a long time Drummond, who was homeschooling her children, discovered something that she often didnt have: hours of uninterrupted time alone.

Ree Drummond

I had the whole house to myself and thought, I'm going to start one of those blog things, she says.

At that point she had read only one blog about a fellow homeschooling mom who was a single mother of triplets. Drummond had gone from being a black-pumps-wearing city slicker living in Los Angeles to being a wife and mom of four living a ranch near Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Having grown up on a golf course, I had no notion of what "working cattle" entailed. But heck, I was game. If my man was involved, I was game for anything, she wrote in an early blog about joining him to live and work on his family ranch.

Drummond saw her blog as an opportunity to stay connected with her mother and chronicle her life. I thought my mom, who lived in Tennessee, would enjoy it, says Drummond. I never thought of it as something that anyone would read except people who knew me. Using free software, she created her own thepioneerwoman.com domain. I wrote one post and then another, she says of the site that was initially called Confessions of a Pioneer Woman.

Word of The Pioneer Woman began to spread as Drummond connected with her readers in a relatable, funny, self deprecating and sincere way. Someone read it, told their mom and that mom told her friends, says Drummond. And it grew incredibly organically.

And how it grew. In 2009, TimeMagazine named Confessions of a Pioneer Woman one of the top 25 blogs in the world. The Pioneer Woman also had a food component. A year after starting the blog her first recipe was How to Cook a Steak. She wrote her first book, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl, which became an instant bestseller. By 2011, The Pioneer Woman had 23.3 million page views per month, she had a meaty profile in The New Yorker andThe Pioneer Woman TV show debuted on The Food Network.

Drummond says that her secret sauce has been extreme joy for all she does. I wrote about and cooked things for which I had a great passion, she shares. When you remain passionate about what you're doing, it definitely shows in the finished product. Most recently she collaborated with Kraft Heinz on a new frozen food line. The dishes include sides, appetizers, breakfast offerings and casseroles like goat cheese bites, cowgirl quiche, chorizo egg bites, green bean casserole, mac and cheese, sweet potato and kale casserole and more.

Kraft Heinz and I had a very similar vision about wanting to really recreate my favorite family recipes. The side dishes are really close to my heart because they feel and taste like they are homemade, says Drummond. There aren't a lot of frozen options that are side casseroles like that. You can get lasagna and and main dish casseroles. But to get beautiful sides in casserole form was a very exciting proposition.

Plus Kraft Heinz let her keep tweaking the recipes until she felt they were just right. They sent me as many versions as I needed to before I they had my seal of approval, she says. I could request the smallest thing and they were on it.

When asked to offer guidance to those, especially bloggers, who are staring out, Drummond takes a pragmatic approach. Just do it. Start writing, start cooking. Get a camera and take pictures, or whatever it is you want to do, she says. I was a terrible photographer when I started my blogI know nothing about photography. But whole recent cookbook was shot by me. And that's because I've taken a lot of really bad pictures through the years. But then I got better and better.

Whenever possible she advises to keep self-doubt at bay. Dont get paralysis by analysis, adds Drummond. Just jump in and you'll know soon enough if it is something you want to keep doing.

Even with all she has accomplished on her own terms Drummond says that she has a hard time reflecting on her success because she is so focused on the next blog post or what is coming next. There is no way I could have planned any of this.I just followed one step which led to the next. And I kept taking the steps, she says about her journey. I'm glad I did. It's been a great adventure, one I could never imagine.

The Pioneer Woman Sweet Potato & Kale Casserole

Excerpt from:
How Ree Drummond Turned Her Blog Into An Empire - Forbes

A Socialist Plan to Fix the Internet – Jacobin magazine

What should we do about Google, Facebook, and Amazon? So far, however, relatively few answers have come from the socialist left. At least in the United States, the cutting edge of the platform regulation conversation is dominated by liberal antitrust advocates, perhaps best represented by the Open Markets Institute.

They have some good ideas, and theyre serious about confronting corporate power. But they come from the Brandeisian reform tradition. Their horizon is a less consolidated capitalism: more competitive markets, smaller firms, and widely dispersed property ownership.

For those of us with our eye on a different horizon, one beyond capitalism, this approach isnt particularly satisfying. There are elements of the antitrust toolkit that can be very constructively applied to the task of reducing the power of Big Tech and restoring a degree of democratic control over our digital infrastructures. But the antitrusters want to make markets work better. By contrast, a left tech policy should aim to make markets control less of our lives to make them less central to our survival and flourishing.

This is typically referred to as decommodification, and its closely related to another core principle, democratization. Capitalism is driven by continuous accumulation, and continuous accumulation requires the commodification of as many things and activities as possible. Decommodification tries to roll this process back, by taking certain things and activities off the market.

This lets us do two things: the first is to give everybody the resources (material and otherwise) that they need to survive and to flourish as a matter of right, not as a commodity. People get what they need, not just what they can afford. The second is to give everybody the power to participate in the decisions that impact them. When we remove certain spheres of life from the market, we can come up with different ways to determine how the resources associated with them are allocated.

These principles offer a useful starting point for thinking about a left tech policy. Still, theyre pretty abstract. What might they look like in practice?

First, the easy part.

A portion of the internet is devoted to shuttling packets of data from one place to another. It consists of a lot of physical stuff: fiber optic cables, switches, routers, internet exchange points, and so on. It also consists of firms large and small (mostly large) who manage all this stuff, from the broadband providers that sell you your home internet service to the backbone providers who handle the internets deeper plumbing.

This entire system is a good candidate for public ownership. Depending on the circumstance, it might make sense to have a different kind ofpublic entity own different pieces of the system: municipally owned broadband in coordination with a nationally owned backbone, for instance.

But the pipes of the internet should be fairly straightforward to run as a publicly owned utility, since the basic mechanics arent all that different from gas or water. This was one of the points I made in a recent piece for Tribune about the Labour Partys newly announced plan to roll out a publicly owned network and offer free broadband to everybody in the UK. Its good politics and, even better, it works.

Publicly owned networks can provide better service at a lower cost. They can also prioritize social imperatives, like improving service for underconnected poor and rural communities. For a deep dive into one of the more successful experiments in municipal broadband in the United States, I highly recommend Evan Malmgrens piece The New Sewer Socialists from Logic.

Further up the stack are the so-called platforms. This is where most of the power is, and where most of the public discussion is centered. Its also where we run into the most difficulty when thinking about how to decommodify and democratize.

Part of the problem is the name: platform. None of our metaphors are perfect, but I think it might be time to give this one up. Its not only self-serving it enables a service like Facebook to project a misleading impression of openness and neutrality, as Tarleton Gillespie argues its imprecise. There is no meaningful single thing called a platform. We cant figure out what to do about the platforms because platforms dont exist.

Before we can begin toput together a left tech policy, then, we need to come up with a better taxonomy for the things were trying to decommodify and democratize. We might start by analyzing some of the services that are currently called platforms and trying to discern the principal features that distinguish them from one another:

One could think of more types of platforms. And I might quibble with some of Srniceks category choices do Uber and Airbnb really belong in the same bucket? But if were looking to differentiate services by function, this list is a good place to start.

We could spend a lot more time tweaking our taxonomy. But lets leave it there, and return to the question of how we might decommodify and democratize our digital infrastructures. Given the wide range of services were talking about, it follows thatthe methods we use to decommodify and democratize them will also vary. The purpose of developing a reasonably accurate taxonomy is to help inform which methods we might use for each kind of service.

This is the logic behind Jason Prados argument in the latest edition of his Venture Commune newsletter, Taxonomizing Platforms to Scale Regulation. Prado argues that we should be differentiating services by the number of users they have, and then implementing different regulations at different sizes. At 05 million users, for instance, a service should only be subject to basic privacy regulations. At 2050 million, they should be required to publish transparency reports about what data is collected and exactly how it is used. At 100+ million, a service becomes indistinguishable from the state and therefore needs to be democratically governed, perhaps by a governing board made up of owners, elected officials, platform developers/workers, and users.

I like this basic approach, but I would expand it. Size is an important consideration, but not the only one. The services function and the kind ofpower it exercises are also significant factors. We could map each feature (size, function, and kind of power) to an axis x, y, and z and then plot each service as a point somewhere along those three axes. Then, depending on where the service sits in our three-dimensional space (or n-dimensional, if we refine our taxonomy by increasing our number of features), we could select a method of decommodification and democratization that is particularly well suited to the service.

What are some of those possiblemethods? Here are four:

In this case, a state entity takes responsibility for operating a service. These entities can be structured in all sorts of ways, and exist at different levels, from the municipal to the national. Services that exercise transmission power (Rahman) or those that involve the cloud (Srnicek) are especially good candidates for such an approach. Along these lines, Jimi Cullen wrote an interesting proposal for a publicly owned cloud provider last year calledWe Need a State-Owned Platform for the Modern Internet. Public ownership is also probably best suited for services of a certain scale. At the largest size, however, governance can no longer be achieved at the level of the nation-state at which point we need to think about transnational forms of public ownership.

Public entities can also be in the business of managing assets rather than operating a service. For example, they might take the form of data trusts or data commons, holding a particular pool of data and enforcing certain terms of access when other entities want to process that data: mandating privacy rules, say, or charging a fee. Rosie Collington has written an interesting report about how such an arrangement might work for data already held by the public sector called Digital Public Assets: Rethinking Value, Access, and Control of Public Sector Data in the Platform Age.

This involves running services on a cooperative basis, owned and operated by some combination of workers and users. The platform cooperativism community has been conducting experiments in this vein for years, with some interesting results.

What Srnicek calls lean services would lend themselves to cooperativization. A worker-owned Uber would be very feasible, for example. And there are all sorts of policy instruments that governments could use to encourage the formation of such cooperatives: grants, loans, public contracts, preferential tax treatment, municipal regulatory codes that only permit ride-sharing by worker-owned firms. Its possible that cooperatives work best at a smaller scale, however you might want a bunch of city-specific Ubers rather than a national Uber in which case the antitrust toolkit might come in handy, since we would need to break up a big firm before cooperativizing its constituent parts.

We could also think of data trusts or data commons as being cooperatively owned rather than publicly owned. This is what Evan Malmgren recommends in his piece Socialized Media: a cooperatively owned data trust that issues voting shares to its members, who in turn elect a leadership that is empowered to negotiate over the terms of data use with other entities.

In some cases, services dont have to be owned at all. Rather, their functions can be performed by free and open-source software.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of open source as an ideology Wendy Lius Freedom Isnt Free is essential reading on this front but free software does have decommodifying potential, even if that potential is suppressed at present by its near-complete capture by corporate interests.

This is another realm in which the antitrust toolkit could be helpful. In 1949, the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against AT&T. As part of the settlement seven years later, the firm was forced to open up its patent vault and license its patents to all interested parties. We could imagine doing something similar with tech giants, making them open-source their code so people can develop free alternatives to their services. Prado suggests that a services code repositories should be forced open within six months of hitting 50100 million users.

In addition to bigger services, Id also argue that services whose business model is advertising (Srnicek) and those that exercise gatekeeping power (Rahman) would make good candidates for open-sourcing. One could imagine free and open-source alternatives to Google Search, for instance, or existing social media services.

Another useful idea drawn from the antitrust toolkit that could help promote open-sourcing is enforced interoperability. Matt Stoller and Barry Lynn from the Open Markets Institute have called for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to make Facebook adopt open and transparent standards. This would make it possible for open-source alternatives to work interoperably with Facebook. It doesnt get our data off of Facebooks servers, but it starts to erode the companys power by giving people various (ad-free) clients that can access that data and present it differently. If these interfaces caught on, Facebook would no longer be able to sell ads and its business would eventually collapse. At which point it could be refashioned into a publicly owned or cooperatively owned data trust that furnishes data to a variety of open-source social media services, themselves perhaps federated on the model of Mastodon.

Certain services shouldnt be decommodified and democratized, but abolished altogether.

Governments deploy a range of automated systems for the purposes of social control. These include carceral technologies like predictive policing algorithms that intensify policing of working-class communities of color. (This is also an example of what Rahman calls scoring power.) Scholars like Ruha Benjamin and community organizations like the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition are applying the abolitionist framework to these kinds of technologies, calling for their outright elimination: in her new book Race After Technology, Benjamin talks about the need to develop abolitionist tools for the New Jim Code.

Another set of systems worthy of elimination are the forms of algorithmic austerity documented by Virginia Eubanks in her book Automating Inequality. In the United States and around the world, public officials are using software to shrink the welfare state. This deprives people of dignity and self-determination in a way thats fundamentally incompatible with democratic values.

Theres also facial recognition, which can be deployed by public or private entities. The growing movement to ban facial recognition, a demand advanced by a range of organizations and now embraced by Bernie Sanders, is a good example of abolition in action.

One final note worth mentioning: while the goal of a left tech policy should be to strike at the root of private power by transforming how our digital infrastructures are owned, we will also need legislative and administrative rulemaking to govern how those infrastructures are allowed to operate. This might take the form of General Data Protection Regulationstyle restrictions on data collection and processing, measures aimed at reducing right-wing radicalization, or various algorithmic accountability mandates. These rules should apply across the board, no matter how the entity is owned and organized.

The above is a provisional sketch. It has lots of holes and rough edges. Plotting all the major services along three axes according to their features may ultimately be impossible and even if it can be done, it runs the risk of locking us into an excessively rigid model for making policy. More broadly, there are severe limits to this sort ofprogrammatic thinking, which can too easily tilt in a technocratic direction.

Still, I hope these thoughts can help develop a left tech policy that takes the basic principles of decommodification and democratization and tries to apply them to our actuallyexisting digital sphere. At the moment, there is relatively little political space for such an agenda in the United States, but there may come a time when more space is available. It would be good to be ready.

View original post here:
A Socialist Plan to Fix the Internet - Jacobin magazine