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

reuters.com

101–110 of 375 posts

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

#101
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?

Suppose tech companies were no longer legally allowed to use the network effect (i.e. they had to provide open-access to their public data via API).

Then this would enable alternative front-ends on twitter.

This would then enable me to filter messages by positivity, or whichever criteria I choose (e.g. non-Russian-bots, non-shills).

This is turn would then change the whole ecosystem. It would remove the perverse incentives of outrage-attention machine.

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

#102
post #62
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a good example is cars. Imagine having a Ford car that you could only get repaired at Ford dealerships, that only took Ford bumper stickers or other accessories, and only could get filled up with Ford gas at Ford gas stations. I think most people would agree that would be a problem, and we are getting dangerously close to that with smart phones.

What do you think of Tesla as a business and car company?

I'm not super keen on it, though I like Electric cars. I think that they will, or at least should, transition to being more open as electric cars become more common and in a larger variety.

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

#103
post #94
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silicon Valley is responsible for most of the world's innovation, so as a consumer I'd rather we not dictate where firms wanted to set up shop.

Silicon Valley was essentially funded by the US state, and particularly the military. GPS, ARPANET, computers, microwaves, networking, radio transmissions, all of this has been invented for the military, financed and pushed ahead by them. SV isn't a libertarian paradise. Read the series https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

Which doesn't change my statement in the least. In the internet era, Silicon Valley has been the crown jewel.

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

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps what we are seeing is not a problem with technology but a problem with the human condition?

It's perfectly both. Hatred is basic - complex emotions break down to something more direct and blunt when your message gets boiled down to X number of characters. Then take interpretations of that message in mass, again each one distilled to simpler tones: most will mirror or concentrate the negativity.

Still, rickjr85 is right.

Even in your response you implicitly concede that the root problem is human nature. You're implying that if we get rid of Google, or Twitter, that there is some kind of alternative technological method, (which you haven't elucidated on), by which we can mitigate the effects of the root problem.

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

#105
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A bunch of small companies invented the smartphone. Who do you think invented it?

I’d say a bunch of companies tried to invent the smartphone...but Apple actually did

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

#106
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?

Yeah, a dedicated actor can trivially just make meta-posting frameworks and tools for any number of services. It's not as if any of them are magic, at the end of the day it still all boils down to https/POST/GET and such, even if no official API is provided. The exact same message could be posted to as many places as desired for the same amount of effort. Bots will be able to function just as easily. If anything one would expect reduced scale would increase the difficulty of handling a very large scale adversary like a state actor. It would only seem to disadvantage smaller players.

And the article also lumps together wildly divergent companies in the same bucket while ignoring where scale is necessary. If you're talking about Apple for example that necessarily means talking hardware since they're primarily a hardware company, but hardware capex is getting ever higher. What's the plan for getting technologies to market where combined upfront expenditures are in the many billions of dollars? Fabricators and state of the art SOC design aren't getting cheaper. Neither are blue sky but critical next generation technologies like future display improvements (microled, direct retinal projection, or whatever).

I mean, a lot of this can be argued as a failure of government. Ideally there would be way more basic R&D happening there with way less red tape with the results then available for all. Government (at least in a democracy) is the natural place to be doing public service security help, and to handle authentication services when two strangers want to have a trusted identity foundation between them. But in reality government is not doing a great job of any of this, nor does it seem set to do in the near future, but we need it anyway. I don't even think giant scale corps have actually been all bad by any means for things like privacy vis-a-vis government, because while sometimes they can cooperate they can also oppose and be impossible to trivially knock down. Would a bunch of tiny random generi-phone corps really have been more effective then Apple at opposing the FBI for example?

Our system is very, very far from perfect. But it's also got us some frankly amazing and wonderful stuff. I think everybody should be instantly and inherently suspicious of "revolution" type change proposals. There is a real risk of tossing the good with the bad and unintended consequences and even opening the door for something way worse. Incremental, focused changes with clear specific goals in mind and then seeing how they work (auto sunset would be nice to see more) normally seem like the more effective way to go.

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

#107
post #74
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the reason why breaking them up will help.

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

#109

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'…

> What would you break Apple up into? Apple the device manufacturer and iTunes (or whatever) the streaming content service provider. > Or Facebook? Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. > I guess you could break up Google Alphabet makes this easy. YouTube, Cloud Compute and the other things. > it's basically a natural monopoly Natural monopolies don’t have to acquire potential competitors to protect their flanks. Facebook m…

Why not break them up with identical tech stack to start off with. So you could have 10 Google Search engines. Then let them inovate from there.

With Apple it would be the same. You would have several platforms competing with IOS. Eventually they will start to doffer on thier offerings.

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

#110
When he talks about maybe waiting to see if things change and another company comes along to disrupt the big boys, I feel this has pretty much already been proven impossible. The big boys will just buy you. YouTube, Android, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. all represented serious potential challenges to Google and FB, and they were just acquired.
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