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Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

reuters.com

1–10 of 375 posts

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#3
> “If you put a drop of love into Twitter it seems to decay but if you put in a drop of hatred you feel it actually propagates much more strongly. And you wonder: ‘Well is that because of the way that Twitter as a medium has been built?’”

How exactly is breaking up the tech giants going to solve this problem?

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#4
I agree. Having trillion dollar valuation companies dominate the internet is akin to letting Standard Oil dominate a resource, or monopolies dominate the emergence of railroads. You have to recognize these technological emergence's when they occur, because typically they will be unlike anything we've seen before. I would argue Social Media is one of those emergence's. Smartphones arguably another.

Ideally, I would like to see tech giants split into 3 companies, with 2/3 residing outside of SV so as not to be subject to the group-think of that region. This coming from someone who grew up in the heart of SV, got into tech, and eventually left.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#5
post #2

I suggest the title be changed to remove “Father of Web”. “Tim Berners-Lee says…” is better.

Yeah. Honestly after his advocacy for the EME/DRM stuff it's hard for me not to be skeptical out-of-hand to any of his suggestions.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#6

I agree. Having trillion dollar valuation companies dominate the internet is akin to letting Standard Oil dominate a resource, or monopolies dominate the emergence of railroads. You have to recognize these technological emergence's when they occur, because typically they will be unlike anything we've seen before. I would argue Social Media is one of those emergence's. Smartphones arguably another. Ideally, I would li…

What's wrong with smartphones?

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#7
post #3

> “If you put a drop of love into Twitter it seems to decay but if you put in a drop of hatred you feel it actually propagates much more strongly. And you wonder: ‘Well is that because of the way that Twitter as a medium has been built?’” How exactly is breaking up the tech giants going to solve this problem?

lower the barriers of entry for competition.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#8

I agree. Having trillion dollar valuation companies dominate the internet is akin to letting Standard Oil dominate a resource, or monopolies dominate the emergence of railroads. You have to recognize these technological emergence's when they occur, because typically they will be unlike anything we've seen before. I would argue Social Media is one of those emergence's. Smartphones arguably another. Ideally, I would li…

I think we generally should discourage growth of any company beyond a certain size. I don't see any societal value in these large companies but a lot of disadvantages.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#9
Tim, you made the web fundamentally client-server. Servers have urls, can be indexed, have centralising power. Clients do all the work: run the code, render the page, be subservient. Clients do not have urls, cannot be indexed and cannot communicate among each other (gRPC excepted). Don't you agree this design has massive centralisation as a side-effect, and how can we fix the design?

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#10
They really don’t.

They don’t have monopolies on anything and there is no high barrier to entry to compete, they are just really popular. Facebook is far more akin to Kim Kardashian than Ma Bell or Standard Oil.

You don’t need Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or any of that other crap. In fact, it turns out if you stop using them nothing bad happens to you at all. I’m many cases your life is better and you actually end up more connected to your friends and family.

Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon however… now those are some real problem companies that pose real dangers.

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