Copying and pasting something I said elsewhere just the other day, because it fits:
However, I do think it’s also cultural in the tech companies. The modern tech culture was borne from an attitude that was 100% rooted in “well the law says we can’t do this, so we’ll do this instead, which is different on a technical and legal level, but achieves the same end-result.”
This was heavily evident in early piracy, which went from centralized servers of Napster and Kazaa to the decentralized nature of Bittorrent entirely in response to civil suits for piracy. It was an arms race. Soon enough the copyright holders responded by hiring third parties to hide in torrent swarms to be able to log IPs and hit people “associated” with those IPs with suits for sharing trivial amounts of copyrighted data with the third party. That was responded to with private trackers, and eventually, streaming.
Each step was a technical response to an attempt by society to legally regulate them. Just find a new technical way that’s not regulated yet!
The modern tech companies never lost that ethos of giving technical responses to route around new legal regulation. Which, in itself, is further enabled by capitalism, as you astutely pointed out.
This isn’t meant to be an indictment against regular ass people and internet piracy, but it’s more about pointing out the leaders in the tech industry at large have always had a similar mindset to the pirates. That their response to attempted regulation of their industry has always been to ignore the spirit of the regulation and attempt to achieve the same result through technically wonkery as opposed to legal wonkery.
I mean, you don’t have to look farther than Sean Parker from Napster. Guy still has oodles of money and connections from running what amounted to an illegal business model at the time. He’s still heavily involved in lots of major tech groups with oodles of money.
You’re just not dealing with rational or good faith actors if their response to any attempt to reign them in is to avoid the attempt to be reigned in by changing how the tech works.