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We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon

theguardian.com

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Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon

#221

Post by zild3d »

majewsky wrote: post #157
dragonwriter wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same reason the postal service does. They still have to pay the bills.

I could see Facebook and Google move to a subscription-style model. People would easily pay, say, 3$ per month for Facebook and 5$ per month for Google if it was the only option. (Prices should be lower in less developed regions, of course.) Once freed from the prime directive of collecting increasing amounts of data to improve ad tracking, operating and development costs should be much lower than they are now, too.

> People would easily pay, say, 3$ per month for Facebook and 5$ per month for Google if it was the only option

If people had to pay a monthly fee for search or social media, it would very quickly not be the only option anymore

Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon

#222

Post by bpodgursky »

sctb wrote: post #212
bpodgursky wrote: post #80

I don't know where they dredge up chimpanzees who can look at the glorious history of nationalization in Venezuela et all and say "yeah that really worked out well" It's pretty pathetic how the internet scum found a startup-oriented board and infested it with articles about nationalizing the tech startups the board was about founding. Congratulations, you found a thing someone else built and trashed it. Fittingly, no…

Maybe what's needed is just some cooling off, but it should be clear that you're not welcome to continue to violate the guidelines like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

No, I just don't care anymore about my karma here. I was careful when the comments here were full of thoughtful people and interesting discussion, but I can't pretend to respect the current Zeitgeist.

It's fine, I'm done here. Hopefully you can still get some kind of satisfaction here, but I'm going to look elsewhere.

Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon

#223

Post by peoplewindow »

maym86 wrote: post #217
peoplewindow wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opinions they publish are fantastically extreme and often deeply offensive. The Guardian constantly pumps out honest to god racism, sexism and other deplorable viewpoints. The only reason you don't believe it's comparable to Breitbart is you haven't sat down and done an honest comparison. My post simply lists out Guardian headlines for all to see. It originally had something like +15 points and now it's sitting a…

Care to go through each headline and explain your issues with each? I don't see any extreme or unreasonable views in the list you've posted.

Seriously? I really shouldn't have to explain this. If you don't see any extreme or unreasonable views there, I hate to tell you this, but you're probably unreasonable and extreme yourself, without even realising it.

Just try a simple thought experiment: invert the genders or skin colours in the headlines and see how they sound.

"The Blackness Project will make you wince. Because black people can be really awful"

Does that not sound extremely racist to you?

"Why the mediocre woman's days may be numbered"

It's a statement of pure sexism. The article, in case you care, is about how much men suck. Try publishing the same article with men and women swapped around and see what your progressive Facebook friends think.

"The country is screwed, the electorate is evil, but here are nine reasons to be cheerful"

I don't think it is possible to make a more extreme statement than this. You can't go bigger than the entire country (short of going to the entire world I guess), and you can't go worse than "evil". So describing the entire voting population of an entire country as evil is pretty much the definition of extreme.

Note that thinking democracy is awful and ordinary people around you are evil has a historical correlation with murderous extremism. It's like the classical warning sign that someone may be about to do something really bad.

Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon

#225

Post by tzury »

659087 wrote: post #167
tzury wrote: post #115

"We need" - Who are WE ? As far as I know, Google and Facebook helped and helping people in places where almost everything is nationalized - by providing alternative to local gov-controlled media by making the information and data available to anyone with internet connection. As far as I know, users are sharing and storing their data and trusting those organizations, rather than their governments. The problem starts…

> The internet is good as is, and improved every day, and will continue improving You consider mass centralization and being almost exclusively under the control of a few massive companies an "improvement"?

This will evolve and changed over time I believe. But, we are certainly in a far better place than we were 2 decades ago regarding freedom of speech and information availability, aren't we?

Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon

#226

Post by bsder »

jpttsn wrote: post #207
kiliantics wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is undeniably important to people. And mainly because they've squeezed themselves into every part of our online lives. Facebook is less so, though it has become a platform that many businesses rely on.

It becomes less clearly undeniable once we separate Google into its constituent parts, though. Is search a utility? How about email? Webmaster tools for SEM? WiFi thermostats? It seems unfair to blanket classify Google's offerings as utilities, if many of their products and services are just also-rans. Again, the concentration of power and the strong competitive position of Google can be problems in themselves, wheth…

For certain pieces I certainly can make really good arguments.

For example, I can certainly argue that YouTube is a problem.

Google effectively uses search to subsidize YouTube. This chokes off any competitor to YouTube as they simply cannot afford the bandwidth costs (YouTube was hemorrhaging money when Google bought it).

If you forced YouTube to stand on its own, you might actually get some competition to it.

Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon

#227

Post by dgudkov »

Nationalization is probably too much, but indeed, these mega corporations lack accountability. Maybe we need a new kind of corporation, where users are voting stakeholders. It seems to me we, as users, gave up our personal information for too cheap. We underestimated (and still are underestimating) how much control over our lives we've given up in exchange for "free" services.

Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon

#228

Post by cgmg »

autokad wrote: post #199
bem94 wrote: post #18

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. 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…

Amazon sells products at a loss in order to put competitors out of business. Google disables accounts, with no notification / justification, if someone's opinion offends them. Again with no justification / warning, they alter search traffic to/away form companies, with the ability to choose winners and looser in the 'free' market. I dont know how true it is, but I heard they were suppressing positive search results a…

> Amazon sells products at a loss in order to put competitors out of business.

Lower prices are good for consumers.

Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon

#229

Post by rrdharan »

sharemywin wrote: post #193
ckastner wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think they need to be forced to integrate with open standards and open contracts. 1. identity management 2. data storage & privacy individual, group, and public level. 3. Data graphs 4. open standards for apis with an api broker 5.

Here's a nice writeup on Stratechery advocating reasonably for #2 and #3 in the context of Facebook. I thought it was a good read:

https://stratechery.com/2017/manifestos-and-monopolies/

> Secondly, all social networks should be required to enable social graph portability — the ability to export your lists of friends from one network to another. Again Instagram is the perfect example: the one-time photo-filtering app launched its network off the back of Twitter by enabling the wholesale import of your Twitter social graph. And, after it was acquired by Facebook, Instagram has only accelerated its growth by continually importing your Facebook network. Today all social networks have long since made this impossible, making it that much more difficult for competitors to arise.

Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon

#230

Post by featherverse »

kagamine wrote: post #14
featherverse wrote: post #6

That's the _worst_ idea I've heard this week. First of all, "Nationalizing" corporations is not something that free societies do. Second, the effect of this would be to further stifle competition from smaller businesses. Which is also not something that free societies do. I question the motives of the author.

You keep saying "not something that free societies do" as though that phrase in itself has meaning, but fail to explain why. From a socialist's pov putting a profitable industry in the domain of _everyone_ and sharing the profits is freeing capital from the few and providing an (more)equal share to all. It's not capitalism but that does not mean it isn't "freedom". What is "freedom"? Market competition The way Amazon…

> You keep saying "not something that free societies do" as though that phrase in itself has meaning, but fail to explain why.

Uh... no offense intended, that's a failure of your comprehension abilities, and not my responsibility to satisfy. Your confusion amounts to "why is the sky blue?"

Because it's blue, Billy. Because it's blue.

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