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We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon
141–150 of 237 posts
Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon
#142Guardian just went full communist. Never go full communist.
Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon
#143What a terrible idea.
It's also a terrible article, since the conclusion isn't supported by the rest of the article. It gets in to some things about these new large companies that have problematical aspects but just grazes by on what those problems are. I guess the evil can just be assumed?
Since the main problems haven't been clarified there's no way to argue about if or how nationalizing would help solve them.
Meanwhile nationalizing has some huge issues of its own which aren't even hinted at here... (1) do we want the government controlling the platforms for our scocial interactions, purchases, and information retrieval? (2) these are global companies so you'd have to break both the company and the platforms they run by political boundary. How is that not nonsensical? There are other issues, but I'll leave it at two fatal flaws for now.
As an alternative, why not regulate the problematical aspects of these companies? Let's figure out each one and determine a regulatory framework that lets us get to the root of the problem without stifling, and develop the regulations to drive it.
Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon
#144No, I don't want the people who are responsible for all of my data to also have the authority to put me in jail.
Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon
#145Actually, I think behind the nationalisation idea, which doesn't seem workable given the circumstances, there's an interesting thought: these companies are sitting on basic infrastructure so instead of treating them like other companies, perhaps we should treat them like utilities. Note that this piece appears in The Guardian. I don't know how it works in the US, but I'm of the impression that in many European countr…
Good luck with the legal work required to patch up Google's physical infrastructure than spans, literally, worldwide. For example, if it owns a cable (or just wavelengths) that connect Asia to Europe, how would you handle that ? It certainly doesn't comply to US territory regulations. Unless of course I'm mistaken which is very likely.
Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon
#146I think a lot of the "oh my gosh nationalisation is such an awful idea" / "not in my free society" comments are missing the point. I too believe nationalisation is a bad idea in this case , but given the enormous reaction it would bring, can you imagine how awful the situation appears to be from the authors (any many other non-tech-bubble) peoples perspective to even contemplate such a thing? Let alone write an opini…
> I think a lot of the "oh my gosh nationalisation is such an awful idea" / "not in my free society" comments are missing the point. They really aren't. Far larger, more entrenched monopolies have existed before; when they needed to be resolved, they were simply broken up. Suggesting to nationalize them is not only entirely unnecessary, it contradicts decades of experience in dealing with monopolies. IMHO, nationaliz…
> They really aren't
They really are? The back and forth is tedious.
The questions I have are,
1. What is the issue? (if multiple issues, start over one at a time please) 2. Once you decide the role of Government (which is still in flux), can it even apply to this issue? 3. Does it serve the public interest to nationalize this company to address that issue?
So the answer is no. We don't have a working definition of the role of government in the US, so there's no point continuing. It's rather simple to me, but I'm conservative (you don't disrupt livelihoods aimlessly in hopes it all works out).
The idea that you would break up a company to address an information aggregation problem is idiotic. I can see how this pans out....now we have N companies with the information. Some of the issues can't be addressed with brute solutions from the past...or it wouldn't be something to talk about at all.
Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon
#147I doubt that it is possible to nationalize Facebook since it means that you no longer have a global user-base and creating inter-op between such complex systems is all but impossible especially when we have hundreds of countries. This means that any free actor with one system for the entire world will always provide a better experience, so as soon as you nationalize a service most users will migrate away from it making the whole thing moot.
Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon
#148Never reading a Guardian story again, crypto-communists - no other word for them, pretty much every day some kind of idiotic leftist agenda is being pushed.
Steve Bannon proposed a fairly similar idea: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/07/28/report-steve-bannon...
Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon
#149I think a lot of the "oh my gosh nationalisation is such an awful idea" / "not in my free society" comments are missing the point. I too believe nationalisation is a bad idea in this case , but given the enormous reaction it would bring, can you imagine how awful the situation appears to be from the authors (any many other non-tech-bubble) peoples perspective to even contemplate such a thing? Let alone write an opini…
Things are awful because someone wrote an opinion piece in the newspaper? I heartily disagree that anyone should "detect a consensus" from leftists preaching expropriation. That's just an ordinary activity for them. Nick Srnicek may be shouting a bit louder than most from his pulpit in The Guardian, but that has as little to do with truth as his article has to do with reason. Google, Facebook, and Amazon are just fas…
> I heartily disagree that anyone should "detect a consensus" from leftists preaching expropriation. That's just an ordinary activity for them.
Have you missed the conservatives who both argue against net neutrality while claiming that Google (and others) are censoring content because they're too big to be just considered one actor (of many)?
Nationalizing a company would definitely be a left-wing endeavor, but to claim that "leftists" are the ones preaching about Googles unchallenged dominance is just misleading.
Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would also make me a lot happier about sharing info with said companies. Right now I avoid their products (the non-open source ones) because they just have too much market share and power, but if a site like Facebook turned non-profit I'd be much happier to use it. It just sounds like a great idea all around.
Honestly I'd be more worried about nation states having access to the information held on Facebook and Google than I would private corporations.
That's why we need universities and government agencies to work on federated protocols, just like they did with email in the old days.