Netflix wants to chop down your family tree
Netflix has unveiled the details of its new anti-password-sharing policy, detailing a suite of complex gymnastics that customers will be expected to undergo if their living arrangements trigger Netflixâs automated enforcement mechanisms:
https://thestreamable.com/news/confirmed-netflix-unveils-first-details-of-new-anti-password-sharing-measures
If youâd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, hereâs a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes
Netflix says that its new policy allows members of the same âhouseholdâ to share an account. This policy comes with an assumption: that there is a commonly understood, universal meaning of âhousehold,â and that software can determine who is and is not a member of your household.
This is a very old corporate delusion in the world of technology. In the early 2000s, I spent years trying to bring some balance to an effort at DVB, whose digital television standards are used in most of the world (but not the USA) when they rolled out CPCM, a DRM system that was supposed to limit video-sharing to a single household.
Their term of art for this was the âauthorized domainâ: a software-defined family unit whose borders were privately negotiated by corporate executives from media companies, broadcasters, tech and consumer electronics companies in closed-door sessions all around the world, with no public minutes or proceedings.
https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-heist-part-iii-8561f6d5a4dc
These guys (they were nearly all guys) were proud of how much âflexibilityâ theyâd built into their definition of âhousehold.â For example, if you owned a houseboat, or a luxury car with seatback displays, or a summer villa in another country, the Authorized Domain would be able to figure out how to get the video onto all those screens.
But what about other kinds of families? I suggested that one of our test cases should be a family based in Manila: where the dad travels to remote provinces to do agricultural labor; the daughter is a nanny in California; and the son is doing construction work in the UAE. This suggestion was roundly rejected as an âedge case.â
Of course, this isnât an edge case. There are orders of magnitude more people whose family looks like this than there are people whose family owns a villa in another country. Owning a houseboat or a luxury car makes you an outlier. Having an itinerant agricultural breadwinner in your family does not.
But everyone who is in the room when a cartel draws up a standard definition of what constitutes a household is almost certainly drawn from a pool that is more likely to have a summer villa than a child doing domestic work or construction labor half a world away. These weirdos, so dissimilar from the global majority, get to define the boxes that computers will shove the rest of the world into. If your family doesnât look like their family, thatâs tough: âComputer says no.â
One day at a CPCM meeting, we got to talking about the problem of âcontent launderingâ and how the way to prevent it would be to put limits on how often someone could leave a household and join another one. No one, they argued, would ever have to change households every week.
I put my hand up and said, âWhat about a child whose divorced parents share custody of her? Sheâs absolutely going to change households every week.â They thought about it for a moment, then the rep from a giant IT company that had recently been convicted of criminal antitrust violations said, âOh, we can solve that: weâll give her a toll-free number to call when she gets locked out of her account.â
That was the solution they went with. If you are a child coping with the dissolution of your parentsâ marriage, you will have the obligation to call up a media company every monthâââor more oftenâââand explain that Mummy and Daddy donât love each other any more, but can I please have my TV back?
I never forgot that day. I even wrote a science fiction story about it called (what else?) âAuthorized Domainâ:
https://craphound.com/news/2011/10/31/authorised-domain/
I think everyone understood that this was an absurd âsolution,â but they had already decided that they were going to complete the seemingly straightforward business of defining a category like âhouseholdâ using software, and once that train left the station, nothing was going to stop it.
This is a recurring form of techno-hubris: the idea that baseline concepts like âfamilyâ have crisp definitions and that any exceptions are outliers that would never swallow the rule. Itâs such a common misstep that thereâs a whole enre* called âFalsehoods Programmers Believe About ______â:
https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
In that list: names, time, currency, birthdays, timezones, email addresses, national borders, nations, biometrics, gender, language, alphabets, phone numbers, addresses, systems of measurement, and, of course, families. These categories are touchstones in our everyday life, and we think we know what they meanâââbut then we try to define them, and the list of exceptions spirals out into a hairy, fractal infinity.
Historically, these fuzzy categorical edges didnât matter so much, because they were usually interpreted by humans using common sense. My grandfather was born âAvrom Doctorovitchâ (or at least, thatâs one way to transliterate his name, which was spelled in a different alphabet, but which was also transliterating his first name from yet another alphabet). When he came to Canada as a refugee, his surname was anglicized to âDoctorow.â Other cousins are âDoctorov,â âDoctoroff,â and âDoktorovitch.â
Naturally, his first name could have been âAbrahamâ or âAbe,â but his first employer (a fellow Eastern European emigre) decided that was too ethnic and in sincere effort to help him fit in, he called my grandfather âBill.â When my grandfather attained citizenship, his papers read âAbraham William Doctorow.â He went by âAbe,â âBilly,â âBill,â âWilliam,â âAbrahamâ and âAvrom.â
Practically, it didnât matter that variations on all of these appeared on various forms of ID, contracts, and paperwork. His reparations check from the German government had a different variation from the name on the papers he used to open his bank account, but the bank still let him deposit it.
All of my relatives from his generation have more than one name. Another grandfather of mine was born âAleksander,â and called âSashaâ by friends, but had his name changed to âSeymourâ when he got to Canada. His ID was also a mismatched grab-bag of variations on that theme.
None of this mattered to him, either. Airlines would sell him tickets and border guards would stamp his passport and rental agencies would let him drive away in cars despite the minor variations on all his ID.
But after 9/11, all that changed, for everyone who had blithely trundled along with semi-matching names across their official papers and database entries. Suddenly, it was âcomputer says noâ everywhere you turned, unless everything matched perfectly. There was a global rush for legal name-changes after 9/11ââânot because people changed their names, but because people needed to perform the bureaucratic ritual necessary to have the name theyâd used all along be recognized in these new, brittle, ambiguity-incinerating machines.
For important categories, ambiguity is a feature, not a bug. The fact that you can write anything on an envelope (including a direction to deliver the letter to the granny flat over the garage, not the front door) means that we donât have to define âaddressââââwe can leave it usefully hairy around the edges.
Once the database schema is formalized, then âaddressâ gets defined tooâââthe number of lines it can have, the number of characters each line can have, the kinds of characters and even words (woe betide anyone who lives in Scunthorpe).
If you have a ârealâ address, a ârealâ name, a ârealâ date of birth, all of this might seem distant to you. These âedgeâ casesâââseasonal agricultural workers, refugees with randomly assigned âEnglishâ namesâââare very far from your experience.
Thatâs trueâââfor now (but not forever). The âShitty Technology Adoption Curveâ describes the process by which abusive technologies work their way up the privilege gradient. Every bad technological idea is first rolled out on poor people, refugees, prisoners, kids, mental patients and other people who canât push back.
Their bodies are used to sand the rough edges and sharp corners off the technology, to normalize it so that it can climb up through the social ranks, imposed on people with more and more power and influence. 20 years ago, if you ate your dinner under an always-on #CCTV, it was because you were in a supermax prison. Today, itâs because you bought a premium home surveillance system from Google, Amazon or Apple.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#arise-ye-prisoners
The Netflix anti-sharing tools are designed for rich people. If you travel for business and stay in the kind of hotel where the TV has its own Netflix client that you can plug your username and password into, Netflix will give you a seven-day temporary code to use.
But for the most hardcore road-warriors, Netflix has thin gruel. Unless you connect to your home wifi network every 31 days and stream a show, Netflix will lock out your devices. Once blocked, you have to âcontact Netflixâ (laughs in Big Tech customer service).
Why is Netflix putting the screws to its customers? Itâs part of the enshittification cycle, where platform companies first allocate surpluses to their customers, luring them in and using them as bait for business customers. Once they turn up, the companies reallocate surpluses to businesses, lavishing them with low commissions and lots of revenue opportunities. And once theyâre locked in, the company starts to claw back the surpluses for itself.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Remember when Netflix was in the business of mailing red envelopes full of DVDs around the country? That was allocating surpluses to users. The movie companies hated this, viewed it as theftâââa proposition that was at least as valid as Netflixâs complaints about password sharing, but every pirate wants to be an admiral, and when Netflix did it to the studios, that was âprogress,â but when you do it to Netflix, thatâs theft.
Then, once Netflix had users locked in and migrated to the web (and later, apps), it shifted surpluses to studios, paying fat licensing fees to stream their movies and connect them to a huge audience.
Finally, once the studios were locked in, Netflix started to harvest the surplus for its shareholders: raising prices, lowering streaming rates, knocking off other studiosâ best performing shows with in-house clones, etc. Usersâ surpluses are also on the menu: the password âsharingâ that let you define a household according to your familyâs own idiosyncratic contours is unilaterally abolished in a quest to punish feckless Gen Z kids for buying avocado toast instead of their own Netflix subscriptions.
Netflix was able to ignore the studiosâ outraged howls when it built a business by nonconsenually distributing their products in red envelopes. But now that Netflix has come for your family, donât even think about giving Netfix some of what it gave to the MPAA.
As a technical matter, itâs not really that hard to modify Netflixâs app so that every stream you pull seems to come from your house, no matter where you are. But doing so would require reverse-engineering Netflixâs app, and that would violate Section 1201 of the DMCA, the CFAA, and eleventy-seven other horrible laws. Netflixâs lawyers would nuke you until the rubble bounced.
When Netflix was getting started, it could freely interoperate with the DVDs that the studios had put on the market. It could repurpose those DVDs in ways that the studios strenuously objected to. In other words, Netfix used adversarial interoperability (AKA Competitive Compatibility or ComCom) to launch its business:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability
Today, Netflix is on the vanguard of the war to abolish adversarial interop. They helped lead the charge to pervert W3C web-standards, creating a DRM video standard called EME that made it a crime to build a full-featured browser without getting permission from media companies and restricting its functionality to their specifications:
https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-browsers/
When they used adversarial interoperability to build a multi-billion-dollar global company using the movie studiosâ products in ways the studios hated, that was progress. When you define âfamilyâ in ways that makes Netflix less money, thatâs felony contempt of business model.
[Image ID: A Victorian family tree template populated by tintypes of old-timey people. In the foreground stands a menacing, chainsaw-wielding figure, his face obscured by a hoodie. The blade of the chainsaw is poised to chop down the family tree. A Netflix 'N' logo has been superimposed over the man's face.]
