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Ask HN: When will big tech be taken down a notch?

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Re: Ask HN: When will big tech be taken down a notch?

#11

Post by Fradow »

One possible future is that the increasing pressure to have data out of reach of the US under the Patriot Act will lead to powerful competitors outside the US, starting from domestic market and then expanding internationally.

It's already well under way in China, where US big tech isn't as prevalent and one big example of this is Aliexpress, which is known outside of China borders. Russia is known for having local competitors as well.

The biggest push though is currently the GDPR, which makes it illegal to handle EU citizens data in a way that allows the US to access it. While enforcement is super slow and non-compliance very very high, it's slowly having an impact, where EU businesses now try harder to choose EU providers to avoid that non-compliance.

While I don't know of a specific success-story to point out right now, I think there are good odds there will be some in the long term.

Note that I only talk about GDPR because I'm European, but there are similar initiatives in other countries around the world. I heard about Brazil LGPD for example.

Re: Ask HN: When will big tech be taken down a notch?

#12

Post by mtberatwork »

GianFabien wrote: post #5

I'm not an economist, just some random techie. I don't think you can lump all of GAMA together. I think that Meta and Twitter which rely almost entirely on advertising revenue are the most vulnerable. Google with some products and Apple with several products should be less vulnerable. Amazon covers several niches: distributor, advertiser, web services, so they are probably facing numerous challenges in the future. If…

What headwinds? The Western world is a consumption driven society (with the US being an extreme version I would say), so I don't think advertising/PR spending will be reduced, just transferred from one focus to another. The businesses that are driven by ad revenues will pivot to wherever the ad dollars go.

Re: Ask HN: When will big tech be taken down a notch?

#13

Post by mixedCase »

mikewarot wrote: post #2

Nobody has yet implemented the Memex proposed by Bush in 1945.[1] In it, hyperlinked documents were stored in a massive LOCAL library, and could be shared in context at will. Local storage of data removes the tracking information you supply to enable advertising, and give them profits at your expense. It would drive the copyright rentier class (Disney et al) nuts, but could also be quite handy to have in the coming w…

So... IPFS, Torrents, eDonkey/Kad, Tor, I2P, what is missing between those?

Re: Ask HN: When will big tech be taken down a notch?

#15

Post by cruano »

mikewarot wrote: post #10
afarrell wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who will be willing to pay for it?

It's just a program, there's no real cost to manufacture and distribute software. As for how would development be funded, a group effort, open source.

> there's no real cost to manufacture and distribute software

Do you know where you are writing this? God, even if you managed to find people that are willing to sacrifice their >$100K/year for a good cause, "local storage" has both a start and a maintenance cost, especially "massive" ones.

And copyright is a legal issue, not a technological one

Re: Ask HN: When will big tech be taken down a notch?

#16

Post by mikewarot »

mixedCase wrote: post #13
mikewarot wrote: post #2

Nobody has yet implemented the Memex proposed by Bush in 1945.[1] In it, hyperlinked documents were stored in a massive LOCAL library, and could be shared in context at will. Local storage of data removes the tracking information you supply to enable advertising, and give them profits at your expense. It would drive the copyright rentier class (Disney et al) nuts, but could also be quite handy to have in the coming w…

So... IPFS, Torrents, eDonkey/Kad, Tor, I2P, what is missing between those?

Local storage of everything. A language for the markup of hypertext documents (no, HTML doesn't do that). A strategy for recording an annotative trail.

Re: Ask HN: When will big tech be taken down a notch?

#17

Post by mikewarot »

cruano wrote: post #15
mikewarot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a program, there's no real cost to manufacture and distribute software. As for how would development be funded, a group effort, open source.

> there's no real cost to manufacture and distribute software Do you know where you are writing this? God, even if you managed to find people that are willing to sacrifice their >$100K/year for a good cause, "local storage" has both a start and a maintenance cost, especially "massive" ones. And copyright is a legal issue, not a technological one

>Do you know where you are writing this?

Yes, in a community of people with a bent towards making things to scratch an itch. Some of them are highly in favor of monetizing those things, but yet not all, and we have been known to favor open source projects from time to time.

Re: Ask HN: When will big tech be taken down a notch?

#18

Post by crazygringo »

I would say not likely. As industries mature, incumbents acquire enough of an advantage that they don't get outcompeted, you just want until the market for their product disappears.

It's like asking if Coca-Cola, Nabisco, or Unilever are going to get "taken down a notch". No, not really. Also "take down a notch" is some pretty judgmental phrasing, as if it implies they're bigger than they deserve to be, as if they're doing something wrong.

Google owns search, Amazon owns retailing, Microsoft owns enterprise, and Apple owns hardware. Every market has a runner-up as well in terms of profitability (arguably Bing, Wal-Mart, Google Cloud, Dell respectively), but that's in the same way Pepsi is the eternal runner-up to Coca-Cola.

These markets are pretty mature now, in ways that they weren't in the days of Yahoo and AOL. In contrast, IBM was dominant for decades and only declined as eventually consumer PC's disrupted mainframes. So really you'd have to ask, what could ever fundamentally disrupt/replace search, online shopping, office software suites, or phones/laptops? It's pretty hard to imagine until something like generalized artificial intelligence comes along.

Re: Ask HN: When will big tech be taken down a notch?

#19

Post by tmpz22 »

crazygringo wrote: post #18

I would say not likely. As industries mature, incumbents acquire enough of an advantage that they don't get outcompeted, you just want until the market for their product disappears. It's like asking if Coca-Cola, Nabisco, or Unilever are going to get "taken down a notch". No, not really. Also "take down a notch" is some pretty judgmental phrasing, as if it implies they're bigger than they deserve to be, as if they're…

> Google owns search,

And Youtube and Chrome and Android and Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning via their massive data hoard

> Amazon owns retailing

And Cloud and Whole Foods and more

> Microsoft owns enterprise

And Github and VSCode and EA, Bethesda/Zenimax/Xbox game studios (Obsidian etc), and Blizzard/Activision

> Apple owns hardware

And is making a huge push into Ads, and Music, they also control their hardware at an extreme level via iOS, the App Store, etc.

---

These are mega-corporations that are expanding to the overall detriment of society.

Re: Ask HN: When will big tech be taken down a notch?

#20

Post by pdimitar »

mixedCase wrote: post #13
mikewarot wrote: post #2

Nobody has yet implemented the Memex proposed by Bush in 1945.[1] In it, hyperlinked documents were stored in a massive LOCAL library, and could be shared in context at will. Local storage of data removes the tracking information you supply to enable advertising, and give them profits at your expense. It would drive the copyright rentier class (Disney et al) nuts, but could also be quite handy to have in the coming w…

So... IPFS, Torrents, eDonkey/Kad, Tor, I2P, what is missing between those?

The ability to trace back is way too easy to achieve for bullies (publisher mafia, copyright holders, state agencies with geopolitical interests etc).

Stuff like NNCP might help.

The complete lack of interest in developing a truly anonymous internet is worrying.

Another thing that is sorely missing is the ease of use of the web-of-trust networks. Me and a friend on the other side of the globe meet up physically, exchange keys, then put them in our routers / home servers and suddenly we have access to each other's NAS and local networks, for example.

For now, nobody is working seriously on nothing like that. That's not good at all.

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