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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?

#91

Post by dalbasal »

This article is a bit meandering. Most of these are not really scale-specific issues, or are but in a roundabout way.

Here's (imo) the most obvious reasons.

Political Power- We used to complain about Rupert Murdoch's power. Media and journalism are a leg of democracy, so having a corporate oligopoly controlling it was worrying. Zuck's influence is way bigger. There have already been a handful of revolutions that started on FB, a dozen attempts at revolutions, full scale coups and thousands of elections where fb played a bigger role than any past media company. They didn't even notice this until it was Trump and/or stuff FB-ers cared about personally.

(1) This is too much power. (2) FB are pretending this has nothing to do with them. They don't care about journalistic integrity, or feel it applies to them. They let anyone with a credit card sign up and run political ads. extremely irresponsible, at best.

Monopoly - Thiel put it best, startups are about monopoly-or-bust. Uber wants to be the only ride app. YouTube the only free video site. FB the only networking app.

The pattern is often: Innovate. Win. Then milk it with ads and spying and/or stop innovating. YouTube for example, it's nowhere near as good as it could be, but why bother.

Data - data gets different qualities as it grows. A lot of the creepiness of targeted ads have more to do with how many people's data they have, not how much data they have about you. It locks in monopolies. It's also the newest category of "IP," which is (imo, but not gonna support it here) a current and future driver of wealth disparity.

We're now (definitely in Europe) in a period where the public/legislators are very keen on regulating. This will likely lock these monopolies further into place. 4 out of 5 times, regulation is incumbent friendly.

Re: Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful?

#92

Post by fjsolwmv »

tomjen3 wrote: post #79
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…

That has been true ever since "I supply the pictures, you supply the war"; "if it leads it bleeds" and lets not forget the main. The only reason people are talking about it now is that newspapers are no longer in a position to dictatate terms and that, gasp, ugly discusting nerds have finally gotten a say. Of course there are problems with the current crop of corporations in charge (and it is going to get worse, sinc…

Newspapers were run by the OG ugly disgusting nerds.

Re: Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful?

#93

Post by wilsonnb2 »

hanshan wrote: post #83
wilsonnb2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's a lot like saying FB and GOOG are charitable because they give their products away for "free". How much money/data are those product donations extracting from the people they donated to?

It's not like saying that. This is literally Google donating money to charity. That's the definition of being charitable.

Even so, many would agree that Facebook and Google are charitable for giving their products away for free even if they extract value from them in other ways.

Re: Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful?

#94

Post by fjsolwmv »

bobbygoodlatte wrote: post #80
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #71

I'm probably in the minority, but the negatives don't seem that bad when compared to the benefits we get from the tech companies: free email, free or cheap access to information on almost anything you could be interested in, junk entertainment that people seem to enjoy. The negatives are less tangible: giving up your personal data (this is complicated by the fact that the data didn't exist until you used their servic…

I agree, except for one potentially huge negative: they might be eroding our ability to have functional democracies. The tech giants' business models strongly incentivize maximizing the time a user spends within their app. To do that, their algorithms try to find the most engaging content to show you. The most engaging political content is often hyper-partisan, outrage-driven, and unconcerned with truth. These algori…

Look up the history of "political machines", "yellow journalism", "fascism". Democracy has always been corrupted because people are inherently not very good.

Re: Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful?

#95

Post by nine_k »

Confiks wrote: post #65
nine_k wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy this argument. The internet providers are de facto pretty close to the common carrier status (except maybe in cases of huge scale, like Netflix or google, where explicit net neutrality might be desirable). There are no huge technical or financial barriers to entry if you want to build a platform for communication over the internet, nothing comparable to e.g. telecom networks (either in 1950s or now). The…

> Would you like newspapers (e.g. that very NYT) be governmentally regulated because they are "too important for society"? It's dangerously close to the late Soviet Union. I can agree with the first part of your argument, but you're going overboard here by declaring any form of regulation to be totalitarian in nature. Considerations on the interests of companies versus the interests of society as a whole can be made…

Not any form, but this particular form, that is, regulating the forms and contents of communication, is what moves a society closer to totalitarianism. The more regulated newspapers are, the harder it is to publish a fringe opinion, the less free a society is.

If we replace newspapers with other media, especially more peer-to-peer media like Facebook or Twitter, the effect only gets more pronounced. Look at Turkey or Russia for examples.

Re: Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful?

#96

Post by hanshan »

wilsonnb2 wrote: post #93
hanshan wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a lot like saying FB and GOOG are charitable because they give their products away for "free". How much money/data are those product donations extracting from the people they donated to?

It's not like saying that. This is literally Google donating money to charity. That's the definition of being charitable. Even so, many would agree that Facebook and Google are charitable for giving their products away for free even if they extract value from them in other ways.

>This is literally Google donating money to charity.

I specifically said "product" donations.

>Even so, many would agree that Facebook and Google are charitable for giving their products away for free

And they would be ignorant of the value of their information, attention spans, and technology in general. Many such people would also agree that "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about"

Re: Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful?

#97

Post by fjsolwmv »

hanshan wrote: post #81
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #71

I'm probably in the minority, but the negatives don't seem that bad when compared to the benefits we get from the tech companies: free email, free or cheap access to information on almost anything you could be interested in, junk entertainment that people seem to enjoy. The negatives are less tangible: giving up your personal data (this is complicated by the fact that the data didn't exist until you used their servic…

>The negatives are less tangible: giving up your personal data (this is complicated by the fact that the data didn't exist until you used their services), targeted advertising, I'm not sure what else there is. You forgot about the elephant in the room: the imminent danger of cyberwarfare. The reason the Holocaust was so efficient at mass murder was because of "giving up your personal data". https://en.m.wikipedia.org…

Holocaust only needed personal data because of the weird racism. You don't need personal data if you want to just invent "communist" or "counter-revolutionary" victims to persecute or to murder everyone with a different nose shape from the group in power.

Re: Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful?

#98

Post by fjsolwmv »

ascendantlogic wrote: post #84

As someone old enough to remember when IBM seemed too huge to ever lose in the market, along came Microsoft. Then when Microsoft felt like it was unstoppable, along came Google and Amazon. Now those companies are reaching the same terminal velocity and a new breed of companies will rise up and dethrone them.

AT&T still dominates telephone service. Most phone companies are renamed Baby Bells.

Facebook has the analytics information and wealth to buy any competitor.

IBM gave itself away to Microsoft when an exec handed Bill Gates a sweetheart deal for DOS.

Microsoft is still the dominant force in its original industry (desktop computing) which is still significant.

The Internet disrupted companies that weren't ready for it. Do you think something new is coming alomg to replace the Internet?

Even so, when one giant replaces another, so what? What problem does that solve? "When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers."

Re: Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful?

#99

Post by super-serial »

The ISPs and mobile carriers are too powerful. At least Google/Facebook have to innovate, or buy companies like Instagram or Whatsapp that innovate. ISPs get their billions in revenue from monopoly. All they have to do is buy off politicans and put people like Ajit Pai in power. Now that they've started to acquire tech companies like Yahoo, no one can stop them from giving preferential treatment to their content and streaming services eventually threatening the ability for tech startups to compete through innovation.

Re: Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful?

#100

Post by andy_boot »

wilsonnb2 wrote: post #54
mattlondon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Samsun…

Foxconn, SAP ? These are good examples aren't they.

Edit: Not nvidia. Realised OP was asking for None-US companies

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