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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

#231

Post by featherverse »

prewett wrote: post #15
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.

Regulation, e.g. of utilities, in the in U.S. is sort of a form of nationalization. Technically they are not nationalized, but since they have all kinds of requirements, including needing to apply for rate changes, they aren't exactly normal, either. And if you don't have control of your prices, do you really have a capitalistic business? But aside from that, 3 people at Google get to effectively dictate what the wor…

> Regulation, e.g. of utilities, in the in U.S. is sort of a form of nationalization.

That's the example I had in mind when writing my comment. The utilities WERE nationalized, however they were de-regulated in recent years, and the market has not really recovered from when they were handed government endorsed monopolies.

Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon

#232

Post by featherverse »

jhasse wrote: post #38
kayman wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed 100%. Does this mean if you ever built a company, and it gets too big, it will get nationalized? And what will keep the law from evolving to nationalizing slightly smaller businesses as time goes.

> Does this mean if you ever built a company, and it gets too big, it will get nationalized? Why not? I guess it also has to provide some important infrastructure for other companies. > And what will keep the law from evolving to nationalizing slightly smaller businesses as time goes. That's a slippery slope argument. Do you want to nationalize nothing ?

> Why not? I guess it also has to provide some important infrastructure for other companies.

there are so many reasons it would literally fill hours of political philosophy and economics debate.

and has. These debates have been had. At length, and for many years.

Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon

#233

Post by featherverse »

yahna wrote: post #24
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.

> First of all, "Nationalizing" corporations is not something that free societies do. Sure it is. America does not hold a monopoly on freedom.

> America does not hold a monopoly on freedom.

If you spend any real time exploring the concept of freedom and how to measure it, America is in fact the most free nation in the world.

That doesn't mean America holds a monopoly on freedom, it means America is setting the example that others follow, and will continue to until another nation offers it's citizens quantifiably more freedom than America does. And examining the current geo-political climates, that isn't going to happen anytime soon.

Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon

#234

Post by rphlx »

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…

I agree with your broader point but The Guardian is a consistently far-left, pro-large(r)-government publication, so it actually doesn't take much for them to publish something like this; the suggestion is right up their alley.

Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon

#235

Post by diggan »

hnlmorg wrote: post #204
amelius wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I agree that content silos are a problem. But with IPFS, [1], (which is a federated protocol) you can "host" a HTML file or video or any content without any difficulty yourself. I'm not sure if it would be suitable for the functionality in Facebook though (sharing stuff with friends only), sending messages, so that's part of the reason why we need more research. The network effect of Facebook can be mitigated by…

You could host HTML files et al without any difficulty long before IPFS came along. There are plenty of easy to use web hosts out there aimed at the layman for more than 2 decades. I mean that literally as I have none-IT friends that had sites up on Geocities (and it's equivalent) back in the 90s. However as much as we could argue the differences between IPFS and the plethora of other hosted solutions all day and nig…

> it is still only a platform for serving static content

The name might be slightly misleading (InterPlanetary FileSystem) but IPFS has more functionality that just hosting files. Two that comes to mind is pubsub which enables you to have a distributed publish/subscribe network to send messages globally and "dialing directly to nodes" which enables you to send/receive messages directly to peers without having to use location-based addressing.

While the primitives in IPFS are simple, they enable you to build powerful architectures, such as CRDTs. So it wouldn't be impossible to re-implement something like a social network on top of IPFS.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers working on IPFS

Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon

#236

Post by surge »

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…

Post on another site then, or post it on your site.

But it doesn't have the audience you'd argue, well that's how new sites gain popularity, because things are seen/said there that exist no where else. And as far as audience goes, the controlled content argument is not new, we've had that for years with TV networks/channels in terms of who had a platform and what entertainment you had to select from.

To take it further, something like YouTube was just cable public access television taken to an extreme. Now YouTube wants to be mainstreamish, so they're largely doing what MTV, or History Channel did in the late 90's, taking off or downplaying the unique niche content that got them noticed and people originally went there for and promoting the mainstream "reality" shows, etc.

Yes, this is the case, yes, this is the natural progression of things when sites become more mainstream, corporate, and focused on revenue (especially advertiser revenue). But this also leaves an opening for someone else to provide a platform for what is lost to go to. YouTube funny enough replaced MTV as the go to to watch music videos, so in a way I guess it was good MTV had a bunch of high rating low common denominator appeal reality shows to lean on when that happened.

The beauty of the Internet is that there will always be the sub-communities and places for people to go to who have other non-mainstream interests or views. FB, Google, etc are now mainstream, but largely that's because they're replacing the media people used to consume over legacy platforms like TV and Radio.

Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon

#237

Post by yahna »

featherverse wrote: post #233
yahna wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First of all, "Nationalizing" corporations is not something that free societies do. Sure it is. America does not hold a monopoly on freedom.

> America does not hold a monopoly on freedom. If you spend any real time exploring the concept of freedom and how to measure it, America is in fact the most free nation in the world. That doesn't mean America holds a monopoly on freedom, it means America is setting the example that others follow, and will continue to until another nation offers it's citizens quantifiably more freedom than America does. And examining…

Well you guys are certainly number 1 in arrogance.
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