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Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful?

nytimes.com

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Re: Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful?

#51

Post by wilsonnb2 »

hexadecimal7e wrote: post #12

The problems with tech companies are not that they are big, but people follow them blindly. These companies only work for making money and are not around to help people. This other day a journalist asked a big computer game producing company why they are selling in-game stuff to kids (like Overwatch). They refused to answer. They are not around to help people. A hospital in Tanzania was in dire need for an upgrade of…

In 2016, Google donated $167 million in cash and $1 billion in their own products to charitable causes.

Microsoft - $135 million in cash, $922 million in product

Cisco - $41 million in cash, $245 million in product

AT&T - $112 million in cash, $7 million in product

Verizon - $56 million in cash, $32 million in product

While these companies are around primarily to make a profit, I'm sure that their $460 million dollars in cash donations sure helped a lot of people. Not to mention all the jobs they create (also helping people), the wealth they generate for their shareholders (also helping people), and the individual charitable donations of those shareholders.

http://www.businessinsider.com/most-generous-companies-in-am...

Re: Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful?

#52

Post by wolfgke »

hexadecimal7e wrote: post #12

The problems with tech companies are not that they are big, but people follow them blindly. These companies only work for making money and are not around to help people. This other day a journalist asked a big computer game producing company why they are selling in-game stuff to kids (like Overwatch). They refused to answer. They are not around to help people. A hospital in Tanzania was in dire need for an upgrade of…

> These companies only work for making money and are not around to help people.

This has nothing to do with tech companies.

Re: Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful?

#53

Post by wolfgke »

confounded wrote: post #9

Unless you work for one, or have founded a company purpose-built for acquisition, I don’t see how the answer can be ‘No’. For entrepreneurs, the monopolistic stranglehold these companies have, make them impossible to beat with a better product. The best possible outcome is acquisition. You may join, but never beat them. For Free Software hackers, the giants turning away from open standards, and towards DRM and abuse…

> For Free Software hackers, the giants turning away from open standards, and towards DRM and abuse of the CFAA, is chilling.

Every DRM needs two sides: A company implementing it and a mass of customers willing to tolerate it.

The serious problem that I see is not the DRM itself, but the laws that prohibit people to develop and distribute cracks for the DRM.

Re: Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful?

#54

Post by wilsonnb2 »

mattlondon wrote: post #35
dingo_bat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> America ... doesn't hold a monopoly on tech Certainly seems that way.

Perhaps it only seems that way for household names like apple, Facebook and google. There are a lot of less well known technology giants elsewhere in the world. E.g. ARM from the UK (now owned by Japanese giant SoftBank) has pretty much total domination on the smartphone CPU market (licensing anyway - lots of manufacturing is done by e.g. Samsung of Korea) My mum will have heard of Facebook and Google, but I guarante…

What's another example? This one strikes me as unique because ARM just sells their IP.

Sure, our mothers probably haven't heard of ARM but that's more like saying they haven't heard of x86. Our mothers have almost definitely heard of Samsung and Apple, both of whom manufacture a large number of ARM chips.

There's even a decent chance they've heard of a company like Qualcomm that's not as well known as Apple or Samsung.

Re: Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful?

#55

Post by neospice »

confounded wrote: post #9

Unless you work for one, or have founded a company purpose-built for acquisition, I don’t see how the answer can be ‘No’. For entrepreneurs, the monopolistic stranglehold these companies have, make them impossible to beat with a better product. The best possible outcome is acquisition. You may join, but never beat them. For Free Software hackers, the giants turning away from open standards, and towards DRM and abuse…

As an entrepreneur, I feel that its not always the problem that they can't be beat at the product game- but that the product doesn't really matter.

Often people don't look at the product, but the marketing. E.G. It's not a problem that SquareSpaces has an awesome site-builder, but it is a problem that they can afford to use [Keanu Reaves](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqnhN2Rzaqc) as their mascot.

Re: Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful?

#56

Post by wilsonnb2 »

Y_Y wrote: post #24
flukus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or have willfully rejected the responsibility attached to it. There is no responsibility attached to it, at least not legal responsibility. Even that isn't enough for anyone that gets to powerful and beyond enforcement. The truly sad thing is that you expect them to act responsibly. Companies will (and have) work children to death if it helps maximize output, if you expect them to act benevolently then prepare for…

This is one of the central questions of our age. In an ideal capitalist free market companies are almost necessarily amoral (Friedmann doctrine ), they can only make choices based on profit. In real life you have barriers to entry and PR concerns that let companies at least pretend to waste some profit-making opportunities on doing good. I don't know if the right answer is consumer unions, or benevolent government re…

It seems obvious that government regulation is the answer to me. That's how we got rid of child labor, created a minimum wage, and enshrined the 40 hour work week as standard in the US.

That said, decades of social pressure led up to those laws being passed. It's not enough to sit idly by and let Congress solve these problems on their own.

Re: Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful?

#57

Post by wilsonnb2 »

confounded wrote: post #9

Unless you work for one, or have founded a company purpose-built for acquisition, I don’t see how the answer can be ‘No’. For entrepreneurs, the monopolistic stranglehold these companies have, make them impossible to beat with a better product. The best possible outcome is acquisition. You may join, but never beat them. For Free Software hackers, the giants turning away from open standards, and towards DRM and abuse…

> For entrepreneurs, the monopolistic stranglehold these companies have, make them impossible to beat with a better product. The best possible outcome is acquisition. You may join, but never beat them.

Isn't this exactly what everyone said about IBM until Microsoft came along, and then what everyone said about Microsoft until Google/Apple/Facebook/Amazon came along?

Why is this time different?

Re: Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful?

#59

Post by fredley »

wilsonnb2 wrote: post #51
hexadecimal7e wrote: post #12

The problems with tech companies are not that they are big, but people follow them blindly. These companies only work for making money and are not around to help people. This other day a journalist asked a big computer game producing company why they are selling in-game stuff to kids (like Overwatch). They refused to answer. They are not around to help people. A hospital in Tanzania was in dire need for an upgrade of…

In 2016, Google donated $167 million in cash and $1 billion in their own products to charitable causes. Microsoft - $135 million in cash, $922 million in product Cisco - $41 million in cash, $245 million in product AT&T - $112 million in cash, $7 million in product Verizon - $56 million in cash, $32 million in product While these companies are around primarily to make a profit, I'm sure that their $460 million dollar…

A viewpoint: charity is power. These companies have control over where this money goes, and are likely to spend more on things that make them look good, or provide long term benefit to the company over things that don't.

Another approach might be to take the charity money away from the companies, and have those funds distributed to worthy causes by a democratically appointed body instead: giving the money to causes that benefit everyone, not just the company's PR department. You could call this system 'taxation'.

A case study: Flint water. Nobody's done anything about it for years. Now there's a PR opportunity so Elon's going to fix it. The people of Flint will get drinkable water (hopefully) and Elon will get another PR lift. This problem could have been fixed years ago (and perhaps should never even have happened), but the people who decide when these big social problems get fixed is no longer the people (almost all of whom think it's an unacceptable travesty, especially in a rich, developed nation), but the billionaire class, who require something back in return.

Re: Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful?

#60

Post by CPLX »

snarf21 wrote: post #36
white-flame wrote: post #26

The "tech giants" are creating and controlling core forms of communication, both interpersonal and broadcast/public. That's too important and fundamental to the health of society to allow it to be arbitrarily engineered, filtered, and slanted for maximizing profit. If they were acting like common carriers, it would be a completely different issue. But they're not; they have business models that necessitate the manipu…

I agree that they are getting too powerful but the main issue is that the FTC keeps allowing all these mega mergers and consolidations. I also find it ironic that this is from the NYTimes when one could argue that 60 years ago that they were the too powerful one. The easiest source of information is always going to have an unfair advantage and drive the narrative. The only thing that has changed is that this is cheap…

> I also find it ironic that this is from the NYTimes when one could argue that 60 years ago that they were the too powerful one.

That's really a stretch. In 1968 there's no question the NYT was among the top 3-4 national newspapers, but it's not even a remotely close comparison.

First of all you're still talking about a rather bulky collection of papers that had to be distributed daily in order to have any persuasive ability. The NYT never had daily sway over the residents of Colorado Springs or Salt Lake City, and as a practical matter pretty much every American had never picked up an issue.

Their reach internationally was minimal at best, and even within NYC they had half a dozen very serious competitors. And of course the three major broadcast networks (both radio and TV) were of equal or higher reach as well.

Comparing their reach 60 years ago to Facebook today is actually incredibly instructive, but not at all in the way you're implying.

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