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Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

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Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#171

Post by 659087 »

gigatexal wrote: post #162
659087 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's a "next Zuckerberg" out there, letting them go hungry would probably be the best course of action. It seriously concerns me that people aspire to be like someone who stole an idea then turned it into a global mass surveillance, manipulation, speech supression and propaganda machine.

Read that out loud and tell me you really think you'd rather someone starve than create a social network for mass surveillance when it's use is entirely optional whereas NSA surveillance is not.

Only if starvation is the only option to prevent it from happening.

Inclusion in Facebook's data collection is no longer realistically optional, thanks to their collection of data about non-users from friends/family, public records, data brokers, web trackers, etc.

Being subjected to the effects of Facebook on society is also not something you can opt out of.

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#172

Post by omegaham »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #104
jondubois wrote: post #14

I agree they should be regulated. The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies. These big companies turn regular people into corporate livestock to serve the wealthy. If you were to analyze Facebook as if it were a country, the wealth gap among employees would be atrocious - The top 1% would own maybe 99% of the wealth of the country and everyone else would earn a minuscule fraction of the total value t…

Disclaimer: I work at Google > The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies. [citation needed] A lot of things Google does -- a lot of the things people actually like about Google -- are possible only because it's a huge monolith. Divorce the ad-making money machine, and say goodbye to all the services consumers like that are nowhere near as profitable: gmail, maps, photos, chrome, android, translate, y…

Even in the uber technerd sphere, a huge amount of the services that we take for granted are done by large companies. For example, Steam is the entire reason why gaming is becoming viable on Linux. Sure, a lot of work (by large companies) has gone into the backend to make it easier to write games for more libraries, but that work wouldn't have happened if there wasn't an enormous distribution platform that sells games for Linux.

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#173

Post by oneshot908 »

jondubois wrote: post #14

I agree they should be regulated. The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies. These big companies turn regular people into corporate livestock to serve the wealthy. If you were to analyze Facebook as if it were a country, the wealth gap among employees would be atrocious - The top 1% would own maybe 99% of the wealth of the country and everyone else would earn a minuscule fraction of the total value t…

IMO breaking up Google or Amazon makes as much sense as breaking up a tumor in the body without removing any of its cells and declaring victory. Go ahead, make some arbitrary cuts between Amazon, Lab 126 and AWS. Or go split Google into Android, Search and Cloud. That's a huge buying opportunity in both cases IMO. But if you really want to talk about a current monopoly in the valley, look no further than NVIDIA's 100% ownership of the DL/ML processor space.

Even then, I consider the election of Donald Trump and the existence of his base a far greater threat to freedom than the worst of Google, Amazon, and Facebook combined.

All of these companies could be disrupted just like Google disrupted Microsoft 20 years ago and Facebook half-disrupted Google. And I have worked for multiple big corporations, I have found their culture in general to be far less "suppressing" than the startups I worked at once money got tight.

You wanna join the evil 1% in the valley? That's relatively easy. Learn how to code and ship working systems, especially big data and machine learning systems. That ability alone is worth high six-figures income to Google and Facebook (cue people insisting that's not the case because they don't make that kind of money). If you establish a reputation, you can then double or quadruple upon that. Public evidence below or just who do you think is buying all those $3-5M houses in Palo Alto and SF?

http://www.businessinsider.com/a-google-programmer-blew-off-...

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#174

Post by acdha »

paulsutter wrote: post #168
jfoutz wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite sure i follow. Do you mean like self driving cars, neural networks, mapping the human genome, or perhaps the internet? I guess IC's might be a good example, but the air force was really the only buyer that could afford them. I dunno, maybe we're moving to a new model. the 20th century way seemed to be to pour massive amounts of money into research at universities, then commercialize whatever whatever happen…

Google is making tremendous strides in AI research, they're betting the company on it.

This is the same Google which was started to commercialize the NSF-sponsored work that Larry Page and Sergei Brin did? The same one which hired many of the DARPA grand challenge winners to work on self-driving cars? The one whose AI efforts are being performed by a number of prominent researchers whose work and training was significantly supported by federal research grants?

Google is great but I see them as an example of the public / private pairing working out well and generating far more new economic value than went into that foundational spending.

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#175

Post by FullMtlAlcoholc »

petra wrote: post #63
l5870uoo9y wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The capital requirements are generally low in the tech sector compared to traditional industry.

Not really. Search engines, Warehousing infra-structure, operating systems, compute clouds, marketing to achieve critical mass are pretty expensive.

Typically, isnt the largest expense for a tech company payroll? Companies like the big 5 may be anomalies because they operate a number of their own data centers

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#176

Post by nine_k »

codefined wrote: post #2

It does concern me when people say that the internet should be unregulated, especially given the recent vote in the US and the likely upcoming votes in the UK. Monopolies are very easy to form on the internet, and in the interest of improving everyone's use, we need to try to avoid them. Walled gardens currently trap people into one service and limit the ability to swap between them, similar to "forcing" you to use j…

China, Turkey, Russia, etc control the way the internet is seen by their populaces.

Would you enjoy your internet being controlled the same way?

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#177

Post by jfoutz »

polishTar wrote: post #151
jfoutz wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite sure i follow. Do you mean like self driving cars, neural networks, mapping the human genome, or perhaps the internet? I guess IC's might be a good example, but the air force was really the only buyer that could afford them. I dunno, maybe we're moving to a new model. the 20th century way seemed to be to pour massive amounts of money into research at universities, then commercialize whatever whatever happen…

> Corporations do interesting work, but they're sooooo resistant to change, it seems like their inventions always die on the vine. Some do, others have been able to remain relevant for a very long time. Thankfully we have a societal mechanism to prune unproductive companies, it's called bankruptcy. > Are you thinking google would be willing to risk their ad revenue for a cool new tech? Or microsoft their os/office mo…

24 billion in the bank (cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities), revenue up 2 billion ~10% from 2008. So brave [1]

And they of course started the project by hiring the DARPA grand challenge winners. Which, yes, corporations can refine original research, but it's very rare they try something new. And if they do try something new, it's incredibly vulnerable to being defunded. Google is exceptional, kinda. I hope they'll get more milage out of their special project than bell labs did.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312510...

edit

And more to the point, the kodak example is key. Kodak made money selling film. Digital cameras were a direct threat to selling film. Google can do some interesting things, but if anything useful is a direct threat to ad revenue, it'll be killed.

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#178

Post by devuo »

anigbrowl wrote: post #157
devuo wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then what does? Most of the innovation we have witnessed and enjoy in our society for the past 20-30 years has not been driven by governmental money or agencies but by private money.

Go read The Dictator's Handbook .

Will do, thanks for the recommendation.

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#179

Post by TulliusCicero »

43224gg252 wrote: post #129
TulliusCicero wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work at Google > The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies. [citation needed] A lot of things Google does -- a lot of the things people actually like about Google -- are possible only because it's a huge monolith. Divorce the ad-making money machine, and say goodbye to all the services consumers like that are nowhere near as profitable: gmail, maps, photos, chrome, android, translate, y…

>gmail, maps, photos, chrome, android, translate, youtube, drive, waze I think there are alternatives for all of those, many open source.

Yeah and they're less popular largely because they suck for the average consumer.

I used to work on photos. Nothing right now is as good overall -- free autobackup, search, auto creations/assistant, general usability -- and it's not really close.

Open source is particularly weak here, you think the average person wants to manage their own photo/video server? In fact just in general OSS seems to usually be weak at services because contributions aren't just fire and forget.

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