I suggest the title be changed to remove “Father of Web”. “Tim Berners-Lee says…” is better.
Make that "Sir Tim Berners-Lee" and I agree.
Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up
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Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up
#12I 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?
I think the problem is not with smart phones, but with the ecosystem around them. Eg, Apple, and iTunes. Android, and google docs
Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up
#13Tim, 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?
He's actually been working on solving that exact problem: https://www.fastcompany.com/90243936/exclusive-tim-berners-l...
Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up
#14> “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.
There is no barrier. There are OSS alternatives that are just as good as the real thing which you can spin up on an AWS instance in like 15 minutes. The cost to entry is $10 for a domain and a $1 credit card authorization to get started with AWS.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up
#15> “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.
Aren't there already some competing social media platforms out there? Twitter, facebook(Whatsapp and Instagram too), Snapchat, G+ used to be a thing. You may say they do not compete head on to each other, but which one of them was immune to this problem? The fact that any internet based social platform will have a very large connectivity and will provide people a very easy way to communicate to an exponential amount of other people, that fact won't change by lowering barriers. The fact that all the people reading something online neither have the time nor the patience to research everything is not going to change.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up
#16"But social media, Berners-Lee said, was still being used to propagate hate."
This is one of the side effects of an open web, and one I feel we should live with in the interests of freedom. The only alternative of which I am aware is to police speech through some kind of authority. I'm not sure that there is an authority in existence that I would trust with that level of power.
In a perfect world, we would be able to de-platform those that incite violence against others (for any reason), but we can't even come to an agreement on what that means. Some people argue that criticizing a marginalized group is hate speech and further argue that hate speech is violence. Should some people be shielded from valid criticism because they identify as a certain group?
It sounds like a simple concept, but the more you explore it, the less simple it becomes.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up
#17> “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?
It won't. But it will limit effects of bad actors, give users a bit more control over their environment and probably stop some emergent behaviors.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up
#18> “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.
The size of the barrier is unrelated to anonymous human nature, which is what I read is the unfixable problem.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up
#19He also said:
“Before breaking them up, we should see whether they are not just disrupted by a
small player beating them out of the market, but by the market shifting,
by the interest going somewhere else,”
Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up
#20I am not sure, but sometimes I think splitting the companies is not even what we need. Instead, companies with > $1 billion annual revenue should be bound by law to built federated platforms and provide the software to participate in such a network.
I mean, you could split up Google into Search, Youtube, and Mail. But in the end, Youtube would still use Analytics and provide Search with all the data they need for their Ad business and Mail would use the Ad tech from Search. With Facebook, it is mostly the same story.
Federated Systems, on the other hand, let you build a distributed network of providers where no provider has all the data in one place, and you can choose which provider you want to trust (or if you want to be provider yourself).