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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

#181

Post by _cs2017_ »

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…

This assumes that someone creates a free and easy to use front end that has these filters. I can believe that.

This also assumes that a large fraction of Twitter users would use such filters. What makes you think they will?

The reason I have doubts is that people who tend to be influenced by evil Twitter posts are not the type of people who are amazingly self aware and look for ways to reduce that influence.

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

#182

Post by onion2k »

arendtio wrote: post #20

I am not sure, but sometimes I think splitting the companies is not even what we need. Instead, companies with > $1 billion annual revenue should be bound by law to built federated platforms and provide the software to participate in such a network. I mean, you could split up Google into Search, Youtube, and Mail. But in the end, Youtube would still use Analytics and provide Search with all the data they need for the…

Instead, companies with > $1 billion annual revenue...

That would just turn the issue in to an accounting problem. Facebook would license their logo from Facebook Logo Inc, the like button from Thumbs Up Ltd, their servers from Facebook Servers PLC, and so on. Every one of the companies would make, at most, $999,999,999 in revenue.

A much simpler and easier legal solution would be to tax companies based on the number of users (based on an independent audit). For example, the first ten million are free (yay startups!) and then the company has to start paying $1 per user for the next 100 million, $5 each for the next 500 million, and $10 each user for the rest. Companies would be encouraged to actively limit the size of their platform by ejecting users and bots who don't make them any money, or to charge users for access.

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

#183

Post by nine_k »

stupidbird wrote: post #157
celticninja wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah precisely, we need some middle ground between "don't use it at all" or "have 0 control over your data"

Federated systems, like Mastodon (or, well, email), offer a rather reasonable balance, I suppose.

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

#184

Post by dragonwriter »

almost_usual wrote: post #128
xoa wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_…

> FAANG companies are incredibly bad at detecting bots. It’s not how they make money

Providing confidence to advertisers that the ads they pay for reach particular humans (which requires providing at least as much confidence that they reach actual humans) is exactly how the F and the G, but not the AAN in between, make money; detecting bots (or, perhaps more precisely, detecting humans and excluding bots) is obviously part of that.

G is somewhat well-known for it's tools for this, including at least one that is widely used by lots of other actors on the web.

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

#185

Post by Sileni »

nine_k wrote: post #170
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…

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 outra…

I think the comment you're replying to is trying to strengthen that ability. Now you don't have to convince some critical mass of your friends to switch over; you just switch over to the new platform, which everyone is connected to via some open source API/protocol, or the company running the data service is not running a front end to present the data. You continue to get the data from your friends and family while using a front end that you feel safer in.

It would require regulating the companies who hold personal data and divorcing them from the entities that tailor feeds and provide a user experience for the data. I don't think it's that ridiculous of an idea, really.

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

#186

Post by PurpleBoxDragon »

choko wrote: post #52
PurpleBoxDragon wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In a perfect world, we would be able to de-platform those that incite violence against others (for any reason) Should we really do it for any reason? Are there not some groups of which a certain level of violence (enforced by the state) is good? I can think of many groups of people who engage in actions which we agree it is good to respond with some violence to enslave them in cages. Well, that is one interpretation…

I believe that inciting violence against others is wrong, but at no point did I argue that we shouldn't have laws against aggressive behavior. Those are two different concepts.

I think laws are a subset of inciting violence against others. It is more controlled than random mob violence, but it is still violence. For example, some extreme groups support adding laws that will require minorities to leave the country or be imprisoned. That they argue for doing this through the legal framework instead of random mob violence doesn't excuse it in any fashion.

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

#188

Post by freehunter »

sunshinelackof wrote: post #127
Kaveren wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. The existence of ubiquitous dial-up does not mean that Comcast doesn't have a monopoly on Internet connections in my area. As long as Comcast is offering 100Mbps and dial-up is 56k, the choice is obvious. As long as Twitter has 336,000,000 users and Gab has 400,000, Twitter is going to win.

Can you imagine Twitter's hosting provider taking them offline because they have objectionable content? Can you imagine their registrar revoking their domain name? It would be unheard of. It would be a catastrophe. They're too big to fail in the way Gab failed.

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

#189

Post by criddell »

choko wrote: post #163
criddell wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends on how technically savvy you are. You may be able to post a video to your server and have a script automatically email all your relatives.

Less technical people will record a video, choose the share action to post it online, then all the people that are following will see it in their feed.

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

#190

Post by _cs2017_ »

rusk wrote: post #139
RickS wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 usin…

Why would network effect not be important? Even without the advertising model, your profits would still depend on user count, no?
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