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

reuters.com

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

#131

Post by dgudkov »

gambler wrote: post #24
choko wrote: post #16

"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…

>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 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…

>Algorithms chose for you, and they chose badly.

The algorithms don't choose badly. They actually choose very well. It's just their optimization function is different -- their optimization goal is more clicks and more ad revenue, not the society's good.

Click-based revenue model encourages pretty dark sides of humanity.

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

#132

Post by francisofascii »

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 about a time limit on how long they can have exclusive rights to the network? Like a patent.

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

#133

Post by cambaceres »

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.

Big companies add huge value to all our wellbeing. 1000 companies with a revenue of ten million dollars can afford to spend little to nothing on research, while one company with a revenue of ten billion dollars can spend a lot. How many startups comes up with new medicines, for example?

Furthermore, you are implying that all that people do has to be done with the societal value in mind. What about the value for individuals? Look at yourself for example. Do you do everything you do for the societal value or to pursue your own separate interests?

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

#134

Post by admay »

arendtio wrote: post #88
WC3w6pXxgGd wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you trust governments so much?

Where did I say something about 'trust' and 'government'? Seriously, I don't get the connection.

Your suggestion that large companies ought to be "bound by law" implies regulations by the government. Whether or not that is your intention is still up in the air. However, if the government owns the regulation then they get to set the standards of what a big company is on a per criteria basis.

If the government is being attacked by a specific 'group', the government will then have the power to impose specific, targeted regulations on that group's web presence. Without the legislation, this is a matter of freedom of speech and is quickly resolved by the first amendment. It would be incredibly difficult to fight that off.

However, with legislation in place that affords the government the power to impose such regulations, they can quickly and most importantly (read terrifyingly) silence people on the web.

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

#135

Post by stupidbird »

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?

at a certain rate of adoption doesn't that kind of become like "stop using email"

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

#136

Post by WAthrowaway »

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.

Or just a couple of smart, dedicated people in a garage

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

#137

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

criddell wrote: post #76
WC3w6pXxgGd wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For what it's worth there are some corporations I'd trust a lot more than the government.

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

#138

Post by CalRobert »

RickS wrote: post #119
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…

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…

"like how the hell do you make money "

Well, you could charge for it. But of course you wouldn't be able to compete with free - you'd have to have competitors who needed to charge too.

They do exist but are pretty niche. The WELL comes to mind. www.well.com

If it's any help I applaud every newspaper that puts up a paywall, and more are doing it. It only came about when the industry was (is) about to be completely wiped out and there weren't really alternatives though. But if you're not paying your journalists, someone else is paying them to tell you what to think.

I miss the old internet too :-( . It had so much promise.

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

#139

Post by rusk »

RickS wrote: post #119
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…

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…

I can't help but feel that the Internet is hamstrung by overreliance on advertising as a revenue model ...

All of the opposing forces you describe simply evaporate if you charge a fee for access to the API.

Something small and unobtrusive but which would at twitter scale add up to an awful lot of moolah.

Because you're not trying to monetise your users beyond that it doesn't really matter if loads of people stop using because the network effect isn't important.

But at the end of the day it's all about monitoring the activities of mass populations as much as it is about direct advertising revenue, and that's too priceless for the big corps to let go of.

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

#140

Post by celticninja »

stupidbird wrote: post #135
foolfoolz wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or just stop using twitter?

at a certain rate of adoption doesn't that kind of become like "stop using email"

I don't use Facebook, I presume thats the level of adoption you are talking about.
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