Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 375 posts

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

#71

Post by jimmaswell »

maxxxxx wrote: post #8
noetic_techy wrote: post #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 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.

Would a bunch of small companies have invented the smartphone? I feel like you often need to have concentrations of a lot of capital at once for big things to happen.

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

#72

Post by gagege »

edejong wrote: post #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?

With content addresses instead of location based IP addresses.

https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://datproject.org/ https://libp2p.io/

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

#73

Post by AlexandrB »

whatshisface wrote: post #37
gambler wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You don’t need Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or any of that other crap. 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.

> Except you did if you wanted to do serious work. What am I missing out on by avoiding social media entirely?

> What am I missing out on by avoiding social media entirely?

If you're a company looking to advertise your product or service: the largest audience in the world.

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

#74

Post by learc83 »

ekianjo wrote: post #57
supercanuck wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lower the barriers of entry for competition.

Network effects are hard to tackle when there are established players. The easiest thing is to wait until Twitter and Facebook lose the coolness factor and the next generation is hungry for something else.

The problem is that if Facebook and Twitter are large enough, they can buy the next thing that becomes cool before it has time to beat them--like Facebook did with Instagram and WhatsApp.

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

#75

Post by balozi »

majani wrote: post #39

I think the main issue that has allowed the likes of Google and Facebook to grow to a dangerous size is the ability to scale globally with minimal resistance from other countries. As time goes by, I start to realize that China's great firewall may have had some visionary thinking behind it, and other countries may follow suit in future to enable their citizens to take part in the digital revolution.

I'm sorry, but yours is supremely paternalistic analysis borne of a believe that your fellow citizens are too stupid to have agency or act in their own interests.

And there is nothing visionary about China's great firewall since aristocrats have been trying to control the surfs since time immemorial by controlling communication. There is a reason antebellum slave owners did not want their slaves to learn how to read.

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

#76

Post by criddell »

WC3w6pXxgGd wrote: post #55
arendtio wrote: post #20

I 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 the…

Why do you trust governments so much?

You don't have to have a lot of trust in the government, just more than you do in corporations. That's not a terribly high bar.

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

#77

Post by macintux »

whatshisface wrote: post #37
gambler wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You don’t need Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or any of that other crap. 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.

> Except you did if you wanted to do serious work. What am I missing out on by avoiding social media entirely?

> What am I missing out on by avoiding social media entirely?

Accidental discovery of things important to you.

I'm no fan of Facebook, but shortly after I signed up I found out that my sister, who was fighting cancer, was in the hospital again. I went to see her, and we had the best 1:1 talk we'd ever had.

She passed away a few months later.

Yes, in an ideal world I would have been in proactive contact with everyone and might have found out independently of Facebook, but maybe not: she was only there for a couple of days.

Anyway, there is something to be said for a central clearinghouse of information relevant to your interests, your family, your friends. There are many problems with social media, but there are many positives as well.

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

#78

Post by purple_ducks »

jimmaswell wrote: post #71
maxxxxx wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would a bunch of small companies have invented the smartphone? I feel like you often need to have concentrations of a lot of capital at once for big things to happen.

What 1 big company do you think invented the smartphone?

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

#79

Post by mattmaroon »

I don't think you could break them up in any meaningful way. What would you break Apple up into? The company that makes iPhones and the company that makes iPads?

Or Facebook? Two social networks that get half of the population each?

Breakups only make sense for vertically integrated companies. I guess you could break up Google (it's already done so itself to some extent with the Alphabet reorg) but not in a way that's meaningful, other than maybe requiring advertising to be its own company.

Also it neglects the fact that their biggest asset is their domain name. Google.com might be worth literally trillions of dollars. How do you break that up?

If anything, I'd argue the government could regulate Facebook since it's basically a natural monopoly, much the way it does the NFL or basic utilities.

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

#80

Post by AlexandrB »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #32
stochastic_monk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AT&T is a tech giant in precisely the same sense that Google is.

Some people have no choice but to use ATT, it's the only way to get internet into their home. I can do everything I need to without Google, but not ATT.

> I can do everything I need to without Google, but not ATT.

I'm betting that you actually cannot. If you blacklisted Google's domains many sites would be inaccessible or broken due to reCaptcha, Google-hosted fonts/scripts, or ad-blocker blockers.

Post reply on HN