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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

#141

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

gist wrote: post #69
zackkatz wrote: post #2

I suggest the title be changed to remove “Father of Web”. “Tim Berners-Lee says…” is better.

I actually have a big issue when the news runs stories like this to begin with. They would do the same btw if Woz said it or any other well known person. Sure the fact they can tag on 'father of the web' gives a strong pull but that is part of the problem. His thoughts on this aren't any more important than thousands of others that nobody has ever heard of. This is a total 'news as entertainment' story. And this has…

I agree that his opinion should have no bearing on the way that the modern WWW is run - but considering he invented the platform I think his opinion is interesting and well worth hearing when it didn't turn out the way he originally envisaged.

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

#142

Post by CalRobert »

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…

One thing that could help is more client-side tools to enable this. It's remarkable what you can get away with individually that would be blocked en masse.

Social fixer, for FB years ago, made the feed much better and was purely client side. Personally, I got sick of the real estate websites where I live and just made my own frontend for them, crawling with Scrapy. I haven't gotten a 403 yet.

Not sure how to make money off of it, though - short of selling people software in exchange for money.

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

#143

Post by maxxxxx »

Apocryphon wrote: post #116
rock_hard wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Exactly. they are kind of coasting on previous innovations made a long time ago. Same for Google: Since search, Gmail, Android and Maps I don't see much innovation coming from there either.

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

#144

Post by PurpleRamen »

rickjr85 wrote: post #31
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?

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

In this case technology allows those human conditions to breed. Because they remove many restrictions which are pushing people toward sanity.

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

#145

Post by rusk »

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"

Nobody uses email any more ...

I mean they use it but it's not a high-engagement medium. I'd guess nearly 90% of emails never get read.

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

#146

Post by arminiusreturns »

They shouldn't have been allowed to get as big as they are in the first place. Where has the DoJ been on anti-trust/anti-monopoly laws? I'm guessing going through the revolving door. That's why those laws are there, because busting up a monopoly after the fact is much harder than preventing it from merger and acquisitioning it's way to that monopoly in the first place.

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

#147

Post by john37386 »

Maybe these social networks could be manage by the community. A bit like HN. Here if you post crap, people can downvote your crap to the bottom so that no one can see it.

If you want to be seen and red, you need to post quality and gain reputation. People with bad reputation will slowly lose visibility.

It might not work, but clearly it seems that quality is a prime factor on HN and it's one of the reason why I trust more HN than any other social network.

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

#149

Post by maxxxxx »

cambaceres wrote: post #133
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.

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 indiv…

Companies benefit from protections given to them by society. E.g. limited liability, copyright, patents and lots of others. So I think it's prudent to ask ourselves as a society from time to time if these privileges are still useful or maybe should be modified or revoked.

I agree that for a lot of research you need to be of a certain size but I don't think you need to be a multi-hundred-billion dollar company. Apple was pretty innovative in the 2000s when they were much smaller. From casual observation it looks to me that they are doing less innovation now than they did back then.

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

#150

Post by rusk »

batmanbury wrote: post #122
bilbo0s wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> in the way that a single point can occupy one side of a Venn diagram

I'd say you're a hoot at parties.

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