Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by JumpCrisscross » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 3:13 PM UTC

uxhack wrote: post #109

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Why not break them up with identical tech stack to start off with

Now we’re arbitrarily drawing lines. Platform-service separation, on the other hand, has precedent. (As does gobbling up up-and-coming competitors, as Facebook did with Instagram and WhatsApp.)

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

#112

Post by maxxxxx » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 3:13 PM UTC

rock_hard wrote: post #105

maxxxxx wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's nonsense. Apple looked at what everybody else was doing and packaged it very well.

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

#113

Post by foolfoolz » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 3:13 PM UTC

zug_zug wrote: post #101

asaph wrote: 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 ince…

or just stop using twitter?

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

#114

Post by ngngngng » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 3:13 PM UTC

rock_hard wrote: post #105

maxxxxx wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Apples stock price is over 16x higher today than it was when the iphone was released. By todays metrics, I might call 2007 apple a small company.

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

#115

Post by bilbo0s » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 3:15 PM UTC

Kaveren wrote: post #96

throwaway5752 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, just look at how well this worked out with Gab.

Gab is such a great example of this. You have a new player in social media (yet we apparently need to break up the big tech companies because you can't enter the market anymore). It operates in a successful niche. And it also is home to many far-right actors who hate Jews and minorities. Yet the claim is that breaking up the tech companies would help stop hate. Tim Berners Lee has no salient point here whatsoever, an…

>Not to mention he's calling for government regulation of tech companies at least partially to cut down on hateful speech...

This is the most troubling aspect of his call. "There's too much hate speech, so let's take action against platforms until it goes away."

I'm tired of all the terrorist attacks too, but to my mind, you handle that by having your counter-terror people do what they do. It's not like the terrorists would go away if you break up Twitter.

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

#116

Post by Apocryphon » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 3:15 PM UTC

rock_hard wrote: post #105

maxxxxx wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Apple was not nearly the giant it is now when it invented the smartphone. What revolutionary ground-breaking products has that company produced now that it has become a giant?

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

#117

Post by benbenolson » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 3:16 PM UTC

zug_zug wrote: post #101

asaph wrote: 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 ince…

How would providing open access to their public data disallow them from using the network effect to their advantage? I'm not really following.

I get how it would enable alternative front-ends, but just looking at other platforms, these clients don't get used nearly as often as the official clients, so their existence wouldn't have much of an effect on the overall system. Look at Discord, Telegram, etc.; only a tiny percentage uses anything but the default client.

Plus, you can already filter messages like that, but in a much simpler manner: just follow people that feed into the "outrage-attention machine." If you get upset when you read a certain person's tweets, just unfollow them, and only try to follow people that you either personally know or really respect.

One of the things that I've realized is that I become more unhappy when constantly buffetted with bad news that I can't change. Things like country- or international-level news, international forums that feed off of negativity, etc; they all feed off of a number of views, or upvotes, or replies, or whatever, so they constantly have negative news. And because I can do nothing personally about the vast majority of these news stories, they simply make me frustrated or unhappy for no reason.

TL;DR following less people (or not having an account at all) fixes Twitter, not access to a public API.

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

#118

Post by jcadam » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 3:16 PM UTC

noetic_techy wrote: post #82

growtofill wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with smartphones?

You only have 2 choices for mobile OS, dominated by Apple and Google.

I'm willing to admit now that I actually liked Windows Phone and wish it had become a viable platform.

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

#119

Post by RickS » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 3:16 PM UTC

zug_zug wrote: post #101

asaph wrote: 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 ince…

There's so much right with your take here, IMO.

It flies in the face of so much opposition from reality – much of it credible – like how the hell do you make money when you eschew walled gardens, engagement boosters, and adtech friendly practices? Do people even want to make the tradeoffs they'd have to? Is regulation too heavyhanded?

Will it be that for as long as these systems can be turned into money machines, old money will use them to print new money? Perhaps.

But the mentality of "open at all costs, profits be damned" feels like one we in the tech industry have gradually let slip from our ethos, and it's so core to the old web. I miss it.

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

#120

Post by pnloyd » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 3:17 PM UTC

foolfoolz wrote: post #113

zug_zug wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ince…

or just stop using twitter?

I've used this strategy consistently for things I don't like, works great! Don't understand why more people don't consider it.