What are “Artificial and Arbitrary Limitations” (AALs) and which limits does not count.

Shift, the boy

In the upcoming weeks, we will discuss a key and emerging issue on digital rights, that we internally refer to as Artificial and Arbitary Limitations (AALs).

Since this word is relatively new for most people, we’re just going to give real case studies of AALs enacted in today’s digital rights issues, mostly without additional commentary. Instead we’d want to hear your opinions and justifications on such limitations.

AAL Case 1: Paid subscription requirements for a physically-installed seat heating module in car vehicles.

In 2020, BMW and Tesla decided to built a seat heating feature for car owners. However, car owners cannot activate it without signing in to the car manufacturers’ paid subscription service even though:

  1. They already bought the expensive car,
  2. The physical heating features are already within the car (no further installation/retrofitting needed), and
  3. Any utility (fuel, electricity) costs incurred by the use of the heated seats feature are already in the expense of the customers, not the car manufacturers.

Wait, is this real? Yes, you can check out some news here:

In the Consumer Rights Wiki, this case is classified as an “Automotive DRM” concern (consumerrights.wiki).

AAL Case 2: Hiding “advanced features” for a QR code app within a paywall.

Many QR Code Generator and QR Code Reader apps or websites trick users to put some “advanced features” including:

  • Generating QR Codes that are not related to URLs or website links (yes, the QR Code spec allows arbitrary plaintext content to be shared)
  • Changing the color of the QR Code
  • Adding some image within the QR Code
  • Export the generated QR Code image on different image formats and sizes
  • Remove the application watermark within the QR Code

as their own reasons to offer paid “value-added” services, while these are technically trivial and possible to implement without costing both the users and app developers.

  1. Almost all these apps and websites do not own the real QR Code® specification. QR Code® is a registered trademark of DENSO WAVE, Inc. in Japan and other countries. Those paywall-enabled apps do not have the legal ownership rights to the specification. This really matters because DENSO WAVE themselves do not have the current intention to place some specialized features of the common (royalty-waived) QR Code® under their paywalls or royalties. Note that this does not apply to some later specifications of the QR Code®, including Micro QR Code® (qrcode.com).

  2. Some QR Code feature requests can be performed without constant on-line connection. For example, I want to save the QR code on a PNG image on a different size than 1000×1000 pixels. That is technically possible with client-side program code to cater most users’ use cases. But the-qrcode-generator.com says no that you have to subscribe at least USD $5 per month, billed yearly (www.the-qrcode-generator.com). Which means a minimum commitment of USD $60 (excluding VAT if applicable).

  3. There are already existing software libraries that are free for app developers to use to process QR Code®. This includes Google’s ZXing project (github.com) and qrcode.js (github.com), which are ironically being freely used by many of these apps just to give you their paywall.

AAL Case 3: Limiting sharing of digital content by request of a specific government under “misinformation” concerns.

In 2019, the Indonesian government specifically requested WhatsApp to limit forwarding any message to more than 5 contacts, citing concerns of misinformation and disinformation amidst the public riots over the 2019 Presidential Election.

Read the official announcements here:

And in 2022, Apple decided to change the AirDrop settings from “Everyone” to “Everyone for 10 minutes” starting on iOS. Mainstream media quickly pointed out this change is likely caused by the former feature being (ab)used within the then-recent Hong Kong protests to efficiently share content between protesters.

Note that unlike Indonesia, there were no public statements made by either People’s Republic of China, or Hong Kong, SAR governments that mentions their specific intent to request Apple to limit such feature within AirDrop. However, it is known that this limitation were quickly published for Chinese users before the rest of the world.

As you can see, it feels very easy to just nominate corporate greed, grifters, and political propaganda as the causes behind most, if not all of these cases of Artificial and Arbitrary Limitations.

That is exactly the challenge we would like to address, how to define AALs without overlooking greed, grift, and propaganda?

What if some of limitations were required to support legitimate causes of businesses?

What does NOT count as an “Artificial and Arbitrary Limitation”

We currently settled on this definition for an AAL:

An Artificial and Arbitrary Limitation (AAL) is a form of limitation that is primarily enforced to endorse valuable incentives towards certain behavior, such as paying for value-added services, instead of sustaining the direct economic constraints of the technical resource being used.

In other words, anything that directly deals with the economical constraints of a resource is mostly considered not an AAL.

Non-AAL Case 1: The lift with an 8-person limit.

A newly installed elevator on a city park has markings indicating that this facility may only be used up to 8 people, or 1,000 kilograms at a time.

This is NOT a AAL because the given constraint is primarily based on the resource qualitative capacity of many of the lift components (gears, motors, wires, etc.). The currently installed elevator is intended to serve a small number of people for a small number of floors, and considering the case of a city park as the venue, it may not be frequently used except for weekends and certain special events.

Even though each person might not weigh exactly 125 Kg, (125 × 8 = 1,000 Kg) the lift dimensions might also be more likely to fit enough for 8 average adults, and overfit for more adults.

If you demand the city government to allow this lift to serve more number of weights and people, the lift’s dimensions might have to be larger, and the overall costs to build the lift could be prohibitively expensive.

Non-AAL Case 2: YouTube Ads and YouTube Premium.

Well, I know much of the hatred people give to ads within YouTube and the YouTube Premium subscription itself. To us, this is the classic example of moral practice issues in the digital world, where countless people think that everything in the digital world should be instant and freely accessible.

As a result, companies have decided to exploit freeloaders with free stuff until their cloud computing bills hit them hard.

While many of you still access YouTube for free, YouTube is still running on paid web servers that deal with many things at ones:

  • Storing thousands of new videos per second
  • Reformatting videos for efficient streaming
  • Managing traffic from all around the world
  • Dealing with music rights publishers, like the Universal Music Group, on copyrighted music content negotiations
  • Investing in algorithmic detection of abuse material and dealing with countless government requests to take down videos deemed harmful or illegal in certain jurisdictions

And the website must not experience significant errors 24/7. Or else, reputation comes down, and people who pay for YouTube will eventually leave YouTube apart.

This is NOT an AAL for the above business and economical reasons, but to justify whether some advertising tactics are considered “greed”, we believe we should justify YouTube’s own operational costs.

In fact, if YouTube is a paid website since its beginnings, much of these economical problems might have been solved without having more advertisements that just annoys everyone.

Non-AAL Case 3: Monthly paid subscription requirement (Meta Verified) to access the same WhatsApp account in more than 5 devices.

WhatsApp currently allows you to link your account from a Primary Device to up to 4 Companion Device (smartwatch, tablet, PC, etc.)—unless if you have a WhatsApp Business account and subscribed to Meta Verified.

But you can still link more than 4 devices in, let’s say, Telegram, for free!

This is NOT an AAL in respect to how WhatsApp internally handles multiple-device account connections under their new (2021) architecture. And this architecture is significantly different than other chat apps including Telegram.

Summarizing from the referenced blog post, if Alice and Bob have arbitrarily high numbers of connected WhatsApp clients, Meta/Facebook would have to address the computational costs within WhatsApp servers to process arbitrarily high numbers of generated encrypted messages—even though they actually contain the exact same message!

If Alice (sender) has X devicesIf Bob (receiver) has Y devicesAlice’s device must send N encrypted messages for 1 single message
11(1 + 1) - 1 (the sending device) = 1 (the receiving device)
15(1 + 5) - 1 = 4
51(5 + 1) - 1 = 4
55(5 + 5) - 1 = 9
16567(165 + 67) - 1 = 231

In short, the 4-device limit and the Meta Verified business model is properly justified to offset significant technical and operational costs from having to send too many encrypted messages between each of the sender’s devices and each of receiver’s devices.

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Shift, the boy

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