21–30 of 375 posts
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 e…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> “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?
The implication is that maybe some of the tech giants will one day fall due to their own Achilles Heel. For example, Twitter's case that you cited.
"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…
I strongly believe this is nor correct. You can mitigate a lot of this stuff through better design, without censorship. Most important point: Open Web is the idea that people can find info they're looking for, not that anyone on the web can bombard everyone else with information. Modern social media is optimized for the latter. Algorithms chose for you, and they chose badly, and you have no control over it.
Jaron Lanier has a lot of talks about incentives and why current social media is bad for you. His hypotheses seem plausible.
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?
He's actually been working on solving that exact problem: https://www.fastcompany.com/90243936/exclusive-tim-berners-l...
As a disclaimer, I am not advocating the policing of speech in any way and am against that concept.
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 e…
AT&T is a tech giant in precisely the same sense that Google is.
Google has a monopoly on search, but that’s about it. There are alternatives though, some of which are as good or better in many ways.
How long do you wait to see if this happens?
E.g. MySpace was the social network back in the day. When was the last time you even heard/thought about MySpace let alone even visited the site? Did we wait long enough for MySpce to die on its own, or should we have acted sooner? Does it matter either way? We've had a couple of recent examples too, like Snap that looked like the unasailable Neu-Facebook a year or two ago, but now is crumbling and losing users rapidly - should we have broken up Facebook before that happened to Snap? Does it matter either way? Facebook is now losing users in western countries too - should we act now to break it up, or wait to see if it is "doing a snap" and will die on its own?
The point I am trying to make is that competitors come and go on the incredibly open and incredibly egalitarian internet that Berners-Lee helped to popularise with WWW. Making arbitrary decisions about when to break up a company without relying on anything apart from hand-wringing "think of the children!"-ism seems unlikely. What would the metric be? Revenue? DAUs? I cant think of a meaningful way to measure when a company is too big and is not going to be disrupted apart from hand-waving and sensationalism-based approaches.
Facebook has no control of the internet as such. Sure they are pervasive but if people stop visiting Facebook, the money dries up. They can profile as much as they like but if there are no eye balls viewing those perfectly targetted ads then there is no money coming in - Facebook cant use their "control" of the intenet to force you to go view their ads no more than Google can use its "control" of the internet to force you to view their ads. You have choices on what to visit. Just like no one chooses to go to MySpace any more.
The solution - as always - has been an ad blocker, rejecting 3rd party cookies, signing out of facebook & google, switching from Google/Facebook services to alternatives (e.g. DuckDuckGo is a good and viable replacement to Google Search; Firefox is a good and viable replacement to Google Chrome, talking to people is a good and viable replacement to Facebook).
> “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.
Short of search becoming a lot less important soon... we had the baby bells, we'll have the baby Googles. The same goes for Facebook.
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 e…
You didn't need Microsoft products in the 90s. Except you did if you wanted to do serious work. That's why they were targeted by antitrust regulation. Exactly the same situation here, except Facebook and co have much more control over their product and can directly influence public opinion, not just software.
> “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?