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

reuters.com

121–130 of 375 posts

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

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

violence is a part of human nature, too, but the technology of the atom bomb multiplies the danger for us all. So too with these newsfeed algorithms, which favor engagement above everything else, no matter how base and degraded the content is.

I've been thinking a lot about this interview with Jaron Lanier, and I'll just share an excerpt because I think it provides some insight: "The problem, however, is that behind the scenes there are these manipulation, behavior modification, and addiction algorithms that are running. And these addiction algorithms are blind. They’re just dumb algorithms. What they want to do is take whatever input people put into the system and find a way to turn it into the most engagement possible. And the most engagement comes from the startle emotions, like fear and anger and jealousy, because they tend to rise the fastest and then subside the slowest in people, and the algorithms are measuring people very rapidly, so they tend to pick up and amplify startle emotions over slower emotions like the building of trust or affection." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/delete-your-account-a-co...!

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, rickjr85 is right, in the way that a single point can occupy one side of a Venn diagram.

What's funny to me is that even your response I read as very negatively conveyed. But just reading it word-for-word, there's really no sort of animosity whatsoever.

But to the main point, I didn't mean to imply a side to the argument the article makes. I didn't even read it. It was meant to be isolated to the context of the parent comment. Yes I know that's nonsensical given we're all commenting ABOUT this article.

We should never do something so stupid as to get rid of Google or Twitter. Forces will act as they must to create these technologies. People will run them as they will, and they'll be influenced by other people, which may direct the impact of the technology in question.

That's a long-winded way of saying next to nothing. Rather than there being some kind of alternative technological method, it would go farther to address the issue if people just all implicitly understood that free speech is built into all technology, and built under the constraints of law.

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

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

AT&T controls infrastructure and has a monopoly in certain geographic areas. Google does not. 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.

Google dominates search, but also dominates e-mail, mobile devices (less so, but still a major player), and is heavily involved in many other tech verticals. That they dominate isn't the problem.

That they are leveraging their hegemony across all of these verticals to drive their main source of revenue, advertising, is where the concern comes. The fact is it is nearly impossible for a non-entrenched player to enter into the market without either being drowned our or bought-up by one of the big players is where the monopolistic concerns arise.

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

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's true, but it feels different than owning the only telecommunications cable going into homes. I would actually classify wired and wireless internet providers as utilities since the capital costs are so enormous it's impossible for a new supplier to enter the market, but that may apply to Google too.

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

#125
post #96

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…

Gab (and Voat, and, er, Hatreon) were open attempts to create far-right versions of existing websites. I don't think they're good examples of the inevitability of hatred.

I'd hazard a guess that many more people are angry about hate speech on Reddit than about hate speech over email. The difference is that one is a company and the other is a federated standard. If I've understood Tim Berners-Lee correctly, he wants to replace Twitter with a million Mastodon instances rather than a hundred different versions of "Twitter, but for the far-right/far-left/radical-centrists".

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

#126

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.

No buying companies once you're above a certain size.

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

#127
post #96

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…

> 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).

The existence of competition doesn't mean they're within the spirit of anti-trust regulations. Twitter using their network to eclipse other markets would be the concern.

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

#128
post #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…

>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.

FAANG companies are incredibly bad at detecting bots. It’s not how they make money so they don’t invest much in it.

There are companies that specialize in this that are used _everywhere_ behind the scenes and are growing quickly.

You’re not going to see that kind of development in house. You’ll see a new market for protection which actually already exists.

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

#129
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.

Did you seriously just praise the authoritarian control of information in China?

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