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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

#161

Post by avaika »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #146

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.

How do you imagine companies shouldn't be allowed to grow? "Oh, you already have X customers, you can't get X+1. That would be a monopoly"?

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

#162

Post by OrderlyTiamat »

whatshisface wrote: post #37
gambler wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You don’t need Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or any of that other crap. You didn't need Microsoft products in the 90s. Except you did if you wanted to do serious work. That's why they were targeted by antitrust regulation. Exactly the same situation here, except Facebook and co have much more control over their product and can directly influence public opinion, not just software.

> Except you did if you wanted to do serious work. What am I missing out on by avoiding social media entirely?

You're missing out on networking, an important part in getting business.

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

#163

Post by choko »

criddell wrote: post #153
choko wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people don't use social media and don't miss their nephew's piano recitals. You have many other options for communicating with friends and family that aren't social media. That means the true value of social media is as a channel for advertising?

Why call somebody on the phone when you can write them a letter? > the true value of social media is as a channel for advertising? That's probably too narrow. The value for me would be as a channel of communication.

Social media isn't faster or more efficient than email though. In fact it might be slower due to the amount of clutter and ads encountered when using facebook. The comparison between phones and post doesn't really hold up.

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

#164

Post by dragonwriter »

TimJYoung wrote: post #160

I think the solution may lie with changes to, or removal of, Section 230 of the CDA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati... I suspect that forcing those that host 3rd party content/discussion to actually moderate and control the discussion will keep the size of such online communities smaller, which is good. Or, they will simply need increase revenue so that they can properly moderate them. E…

> I think the solution may lie with changes to, or removal of, Section 230 of the CDA

[...]

> I suspect that forcing those that host 3rd party content/discussion to actually moderate and control the discussion [...]

CDA Section 230 was largely adopted to encourage active moderation, since without it active moderation made a host a “publisher” rather than a mere “distributor”, which triggers strict liability for a number of violations for which a distributor would only have knowledge-based liability.

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

#165

Post by throwaway2048 »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #137
criddell wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See how stable that remains over time however, your data is out there forever, even when $CORP turns evil.

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

#166

Post by mishac »

OrderlyTiamat wrote: post #152
celticninja wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Many people don't use facebook. I thinks WhatsApp is a better example, it's even more ubiquitous, though I'm sure there are still people who don't use it. Heck, I'm personally thinking of stopping, it's just that everyone is there. Two of my recent orders were negotiated by WhatsApp. It's used almost universally.

I think that depends on what country you're in. The only people I know who are on whatsapp are immigrants who use it to talk to family in the old country.

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

#167

Post by cambaceres »

maxxxxx wrote: post #149
cambaceres wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, you don't think the society benefits from the companies? Where else would you get all the stuff we use for everything? Where do you get the factories? Where do you get the machines? Where do you get the software?

If you don't think companies bring societal value, ask yourself what the alternatives are. There were a bunch of attempts in the 20th century, however it never ended good for the population.

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

#169

Post by solarkraft »

ekianjo wrote: post #57
supercanuck wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lower the barriers of entry for competition.

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.

Network effects could maybe be fought via regulation. Force the companies to let others participate in the networks.

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

#170

Post by nine_k »

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…

I think that people have an (almost) unalienable power, very strong, and pretty underused.

It's the power of walking away.

If you find an environment toxic, leave it, and ask your friends to leave it, too. Yes, you have to research alternatives first, and make compromises, at least temporarily.

Lately this somehow worked for Facebook. I bet they are going to see that on their bottom line.

So, if you dislike the outrage machine, leave it. Consciously ignore it. Do not retweet, do not link to tweets (instead, quote worthy tweets, they are short).

If enough people did that, and migrated elsewhere, that would be noted. Speak to companies in the language they understand, that is, the language of money. Their money comes from your attention spent on their property. Vote with your dollar — the dollar not spent by online advertisers for your eyeballs that are not there.

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