#sideloading

If we accept that this is how contracts work, then this should be perfectly valid, right?

By reading these words, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. This indemnity will survive the termination of your relationship with your employer.

I mean, why not? What principle – other than "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect" – makes terms of service valid, and this invalid?

Then there's binding arbitration. Corporations routinely bind their workers and customers to terms that force them to surrender their right to sue, no matter how badly they are injured through malice or gross negligence. This practice used to be illegal, until Antonin Scalia opened the hellmouth and unleashed binding arbitration on the world:

https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1443&&context=blr

There's a pretty clever hack around binding arbitration: mass arbitration, whereby lots of wronged people coordinate to file claims, which can cost a dirty corporation more than a plain old class-action suit:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#petard

Of course, Wilhoit's Law provides corporations with a way around this: they can reserve the right not to arbitrate and to force you into a class action suit if that's advantageous to them:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-and-all-NON-NEGOTIATED-agreements

Heads they win, tails you lose.

Or take the nature of property rights themselves. Conservatives say they revere property rights above all else, claiming that every other human right stems from the vigorous enforcement of property relations. What is private property? For that, we turn to the key grifter thinkfluencer Sir William Blackstone, and his 1768 "Commentaries on the Laws of England":

That sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.

https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/blackstone-on-property-1753

Corporations love the idea of their property rights, but they're not so keen on your property rights. Think of the practice of locking down digital devices – from phones to cars to tractors – so that they can't be repaired by third parties, use generic ink or parts, or load third-party apps except via an "app store":

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

A device you own, but can only use in ways that its manufacturer approves of, sure doesn't sound like "sole and despotic dominion" to me.

Some corporations (and their weird apologists) like to claim that, by buying their product, you've agreed not to use it except in ways that benefit their shareholders, even when that is to your own detriment:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Apple will say, "We've been selling iPhones for nearly 20 years now. It can't possibly come as a surprise to you that you're not allowed to install apps that we haven't approved. If that's important to you, you shouldn't have bought an iPhone."

But the obvious rejoinder to this is, "People have been given sole and despotic dominion over the things they purchased since time immemorial. If the thought of your customers using their property in ways that displease you causes you to become emotionally disregulated, perhaps you shouldn't have gotten into the manufacturing business."

But as indefensibly wilhoitian as Apple's behavior might be, Google has just achieved new depths of wilhoitian depravity, with a rule that says that starting soon, you will no longer be able to install apps of your choosing on your Android device unless Google first approves of them:

https://9to5google.com/2025/08/25/android-apps-developer-verification/

Like Apple, Google says that this is to prevent you from accidentally installing malicious software. Like Apple, Google does put a lot of effort into preventing its customers from being remotely attacked. And, like Apple, Google will not protect you from itself:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

When it comes to vetoing your decisions about which programs your Android device can run, Google has an irreconcilable conflict of interest. Google, after all, is a thrice-convicted monopolist who have an interest in blocking you from installing programs that interfere with its profits, under the pretense of preventing you from coming to harm.

And – like Apple – Google has a track record of selling its users out to oppressive governments. Apple blocked all working privacy tools for its Chinese users at the behest of the Chinese government, while Google secretly planned to release a version of its search engine that would enforce Chinese censorship edicts and help the Chinese government spy on its people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)

Google's CEO Sundar Pichai, personally gave one million dollars to Donald Trump for a seat on the dais at this year's inauguration (so did Apple CEO Tim Cook). Both men are in a position to help the self-described dictator make good on his promise to spy on and arrest Americans who disagree with his totalitarian edicts.

All of this makes Google's announcement extraordinarily reckless, but also very, very wilhoitian. After all, Google jealously guards its property rights from you, but insists that your property rights need to be subordinated to its corporate priorities: "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

We can see this at work in the way that Google treats open source software and free software. Google's software is "open source" – for us. We have the right to look at the code and do free work for Google to identify and fix bugs in the code. But only Google gets a say in how that code is deployed on its cloud servers. They have software freedom, while we merely have software transparency:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/14/pole-star/#gnus-not-utilitarian

Big companies love to both assert their own property rights while denying you yours. Take the music industry: they are required to pay different royalties to musicians depending on whether they're "selling" music, or "licensing" music. Sales pay a fraction of the royalties of a licensing deal, so it's far better for musicians when their label licenses their music than when they sell it.

When you or I click the "buy" button in an online music store, we are confronted with a "licensing agreement," that limits what we may do with our digital purchase. Things that you get automatically when you buy music in physical form – on a CD, say – are withheld through these agreements. You can't re-sell your digital purchases as used goods. You can't give them away. You can't lend them out. You can't divide them up in a divorce. You can't leave them to your kids in your will. It's not a sale, so the file isn't your property.

But when the label accounts for that licensing deal to a musician, the transaction is booked as a sale, which entitles the creative worker to a fraction of the royalties that they'd get from a license. Somehow, digital media exists in quantum superposition: it is a licensing deal when we click the buy button, but it is a sale when it shows up on a royalty statement. It's Schroedinger's download:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/21/early-adopters/#heads-i-win

Now, a class action suit against Amazon over this very issue has been given leave to progress to trial:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/prime-video-lawsuit-movie-license-ownership-1236353127/

The plaintiffs insist that because Amazon showed them a button that said, "Buy this video" but then slapped it with licensing conditions that take away all kinds of rights (Amazon can even remotely delete your videos after you "buy" them) that they have been ripped off in a bait-and-switch.

Amazon's defense is amazing. They've done what any ill-prepared fifth grader would do when called on the carpet; they quoted Webster's:

Quoting Webster’s Dictionary, it said that the term means “rights to the use or services of payment” rather than perpetual ownership and that its disclosures properly warn people that they may lose access.

People are increasingly pissed off with this bullshit, whereby things that you "buy" are not yours, and your access to them can be terminated at any time. The Stop Killing Games campaign is pushing for the rights of gamers to own the games they buy forever, even if the company decides to shut down its servers:

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

I've been pissed off about this bullshit since forever. It's one of the main reasons I convinced my publishers to let me sell my own ebooks and audiobooks, out of my own digital storefront. All of those books are sold, not licensed, and come without any terms or conditions:

https://craphound.com/shop/

The ability to change the terms after the sale is a major source of enshittification. I call it the "Darth Vader MBA," as in "I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Naturally the ebooks and audiobooks in the Kickstarter for pre-sales of my next book, Enshittification are also sold without any terms and conditions:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook/

Look, I don't think that personal consumption choices can fix systemic problems. You're not going to fix enshittification – let alone tyranny – by shopping, even if you're very careful:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

But that doesn't mean that there isn't a connection between the unfair bullshit that monopolies cram down our throat and the rise of fascism. It's not just that the worst enshittifiers also the biggest Trump donors, it's that Wilhoit's Law powers enshittification.

Wiloitism is shot through the Maga movement. The Flu Klux Klan wants to ban you from wearing a mask for health reasons, but they will defend to the death the right of ICE brownshirts to run around in gaiters and Oakleys as they kidnap our neighbors off the streets.

Conservative bedwetters will donate six figures to a Givesendgo set up by some crybaby with a viral Rumble video about getting 86'ed from a restaurant for wearing a Maga hat, but they literally want to imprison trans people for wearing clothes that don't conform to their assigned-at-birth genders.

They'll piss and moan about being "canceled" because of hecklers at the speeches they give for the campus chapter of the Hitler Youth, but they experience life-threatening priapism when students who object to the Israeli genocide of Palestinians are expelled, arrested and deported.

Then there's their abortion policies, which hold that personhood begins at conception, but ends at birth, and can only be re-established by forming an LLC.

It's "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect" all the way down.

I'm not saying that bullshit terms of service, wage theft, binding arbitration gotchas, or victim complexes about your kids going no-contact because you won't shut the fuck up about "the illegals" at Thanksgiving are the same as the actual fascist dictatorship being born around us right now or the genocide taking place in Gaza.

But I am saying that they come from the same place. The ideology of "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect" underpins the whole ugly mess.

After we defeat these fucking fascists, after the next installment of the Nuremburg trials, after these eichmenn and eichwomenn get their turns in the dock, we're going to have to figure out how to keep them firmly stuck to the scrapheap of history.

For this, I propose a form of broken windows policing; zero-tolerance for any activity or conduct that implies that there are "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

We should treat every attempt to pull any of these scams as an inch (or a yard, or a mile) down the road to fascist collapse.

We shouldn't suffer practitioners of this ideology to be in our company, to run our institutions, or to work alongside of us. We should recognize them for the monsters they are.

Click here to pre-order my next book, ENSHITTIFICATION: WHY EVERYTHING SUDDENLY GOT WORSE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

Tech bosses are fundamentally at war with the idea that our digital devices contain "general purpose computers." The general-purposeness of computers – the fact that they are all Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machines – has created tech bosses' fortunes, but now that these fortunes have been attained, the tech sector would like to abolish that general-purposeness; specifically, they would like to make it impossible to run programs that erode their profits or frustrate their attempts at rent-seeking.

This has been a growing trend in computing since the mid-2000s, when tech bosses realized that the "digital rights management" that the entertainment industry had fallen in love with could provide even bigger dividends for tech companies themselves.

Since the Napster era, media companies have demanded that tech platforms figure out how to limit the use and copying of media files after they were delivered to our computers. They believed that there was some practical way to make a computer that would refuse to take orders from its owner, such that you could (for example) "stream" a movie to a user without that being a "download." The truth, of course is that all streams are downloads, because the only way to cause my screen to display a video file that is on your server is for your server to send that file to my computer.

"Streaming" is a consensus hallucination, and when a company claims to be giving you a "stream" that's not a "download," they really mean that they believe that the program that's rendering the file on your screen doesn't have a "save as" button.

But of course, even if the program doesn't have a "save as" button, someone could easily make a "save as" plugin that adds that functionality to your streaming program. So "streaming" isn't just "a video playback program without a 'save as' button," it's also "a video playback program that no one can add a 'save as' button to."

At the turn of the millennium, tech companies selling this stuff hoodwinked media companies by claiming that they used technical means to prevent someone from adding the "save as" button after the fact. But tech companies knew that there was no technical means to prevent this, because computers are general purpose, and can run every program, which means that every 10-foot fence you build around a program immediately summons up an 11-foot ladder.

When a tech company says "it's impossible to change the programs and devices we ship to our users," they mean, "it's illegal to change the programs and devices we ship to our users." That's thanks to a cluster of laws we colloquially call "IP law"; a label we apply to any law that lets a firm exert control on the conduct of users, critics and competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Law, not technology, is the true battlefield in the War on General Purpose Computing, a subject I've been raising the alarm about for decades now:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

When I say that this is a legal fight and not a technical one, I mean that, but for the legal restrictions on reverse-engineering and "adversarial interoperability," none of these extractive tactics would be viable. Every time a company enshittified its products, it would create an opportunity for a rival to swoop in, disenshittify the enshittification, and steal your customers out from under you.

The fact that there's no technical way to enforce these restrictions means that the companies that benefit from them have to pitch their arguments to lawmakers, not customers. If you have something that works, you use it in your sales pitch, like Signal, whose actual, working security is a big part of its appeal to users.

If you have something that doesn't work, you use it in your lobbying pitch, like Apple, who justify their 30% ripoff app tax – which they can only charge because it's a felony to reverse-engineer your iPhone so you can use a different app store – by telling lawmakers that locking down their platform is essential to the security and privacy of iPhone owners:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Apple and Google have a dupology over mobile computing. Both companies use legal tactics to lock users into getting their apps from the companies' own app stores, where they take 30 cents out of every dollar you spend, and where it's against the rules to include any payment methods other than Google/Apple's own payment systems.

This is a massive racket. It lets the companies extract hundreds of billions of dollars in rents. This drives up costs for their users and drives down profits for their suppliers. It lets the duoply structure the entire mobile economy, acting as de facto market regulators. For example, the fact that Apple/Google exempt Uber and Lyft from the 30% app tax means that they – and they alone – can provide competitive ride-hailing services.

But though both companies extract the 30% app tax, they use very different mechanisms to maintain their lock on their users and on app makers. Apple uses digital locks, which lets it invoke IP law to criminalize anyone who reverse-engineers its systems and provides an easy way to install a better app store.

Google, on the other hand, uses a wide variety of contractual tactics to maintain its control, arm-twisting Android device makers and carriers into bundling its app store with every device, often with a locked bootloader that prevents users from adding new app stores after they pay for their devices.

But despite this, Google has always claimed that Android is the "open" alternative to the Apple "ecosystem," principally on the strength that you can "sideload" an app. "Sideload" is a weird euphemism that the mobile duopoly came up with; it means "installing software without our permission," which we used to just call "installing software" (because you don't need a manufacturer's permission to install software on your computer).

Now, Google has pulled a Darth Vader, changing the deal after the fact. They've announced that henceforth, you will only be able to sideload apps that come from developers who pay to be validated by Google and certified as good eggs. This has got people really angry, and justifiably so.

Last week, the repair hero Louis Rossmann posted a scorching video excoriating Google for the change:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBEKlIV_70E

In the video, Rossmann – who is now running an anti-enshittification group called Fulu – reminds us that our mobile devices aren't phones, they're computers and urges us not to use the term "sideloading," because that's conceding that there's something about the fact that this computer can fit in your pocket that means that you shouldn't be able to, you know, just install software.

Rossmann thinks that this is a cash grab, and he's right – partially. He thinks that this is a way for Google to make money from forcing developers to join its certification program.

But that's just small potatoes. The real cash grab is the hundreds of billions of dollars that Google stands to lose if we switch to third-party app stores and choke off the app tax.

That is an issue that is very much on Google's mind right now, because Google lost a brutal antitrust case brought by Epic Games, makers of Fortnite:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/#hugger-mugger

Epic's suit contended that Google had violated antitrust law by creating exclusivity deal with carriers and device makers that locked Android users into Google's app store, which meant that Epic had to surrender 30% of its mobile earnings to Google.

Google lost that case – badly. It turns out that judges don't like it when you deliberately destroy evidence:

https://www.legaldive.com/news/deleted-messages-google-antitrust-case-epic-games-deliberate-spoliation-donato/702306/

They say that when you find yourself in a hole, you should stop digging, but Google can't put down the shovel. After the court ordered Google to open up its app store, the company just ignored the order, which is a thing that judges hate even more than destroying evidence:

https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/epic-games-inc-v-google-llc

So it was that last month, Google found itself with just two weeks to comply with the open app store order, or else:

https://www.theverge.com/news/717440/google-epic-open-play-store-emergency-stay

Google was ordered to make it possible to install new app stores as apps, so you could go into Google Play, search for a different app store, and, with a single click, install it on your phone, and switch to getting your apps from that store, rather than Google's.

That's what's behind Google's new ban on "sideloading": this is a form of malicious compliance with the court orders stemming from its losses to Epic Games. In fact, it's not even malicious compliance – it's malicious noncompliance, a move that so obviously fails to satisfy the court order that I think it's only a matter of time until Google gets hit with fines so large that they'll actually affect Google's operations.

In the meantime, Google's story that this move is motivated by security it obviously bullshit. First of all, the argument that preventing users from installing software of their choosing is the only way to safeguard their privacy and security is bullshit when Apple uses it, and it's bullshit when Google trots it out:

https://www.eff.org/document/letter-bruce-schneier-senate-judiciary-regarding-app-store-security

But even if you stipulate that Google is doing this to keep you safe, the story falls apart. After all, Google isn't certifying apps, they're certifying developers. This implies that the company can somehow predict whether a developer will do something malicious in the future.

This is obviously wrong. Indeed, Google itself is proof that this doesn't work: the fact that a company has a "don't be evil" motto at its outset is no guarantee that it won't turn evil in the future.

There's a long track record of merchants behaving in innocuous and beneficial ways to amass reputation capital, before blitzing the people who trust them with depraved criminality. This is a well-understood problem with reputation scores, dating back to the early days of eBay, when crooked sellers invented the tactic of listing and delivering a series of low-value items in order to amass a high reputation score, only to post a bunch of high-ticket scams, like dozens laptops at $1,000 each, which are never delivered, even as the seller walks away with tens of thousands of dollars.

More recently, we've seen this in supply chain attacks on open source software, where malicious actors spend a long time serving as helpful contributors, pushing out a string of minor, high-quality patches before one day pushing a backdoor or a ransomware package into widely used code:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/07/open-source-repositories-are-seeing-a-rash-of-supply-chain-attacks/

So the idea that Google can improve Android's safety by certifying developers, rather than code, is obvious bullshit. No, this is just a pretext, a way to avoid complying with the court order in Epic and milking a few more billions of dollars in app taxes.

Google is no friend of the general purpose computer. They keep coming up with ways to invoke the law to punish people who install code that makes their Android devices serve their owners' interests, at the expense of Google's shareholders. It was just a couple years ago that we had to bully Google out of a plan to lock down browsers so they'd be as enshittified as apps, something Google sold as "feature parity":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/

Epic Games didn't just sue Google, either. They also sued Apple – but Apple won, because it didn't destroy evidence and make the judge angry at it. But Apple didn't walk away unscathed – they were also ordered to loosen up control over their App Store, and they also failed to do so, with the effect that last spring, a federal judge threatened to imprison Apple executives:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup

Neither Apple nor Google would exist without the modern miracle that is the general purpose computer. Both companies want to make sure no one else ever reaps the benefit of the Turing complete, universal von Neumann machine. Both companies are capable of coming up with endless narratives about how Turing completeness is incompatible with your privacy and security.

But it's Google and Apple that stand in the way of our security and privacy. Though they may sometimes protects us against external threats, neither Google nor Apple will ever protect us from their own predatory instincts.

Click here to pre-order my next book, ENSHITTIFICATION: WHY EVERYTHING SUDDENLY GOT WORSE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/01/fulu/#i-am-altering-the-deal

Image: Ashwin Kumar (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Samsung_Galaxy_S2_shattered_screen.jpg