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

reuters.com

231–240 of 375 posts

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

#231
it's silly to try to split up tech companies. look at AT&T; it was tried, now it's basically un-split up. they exist in natural monopolies and their service benefits from monopoly anyway.

it's also silly to try to regulate them. they have a fundamental incentive and nearly unlimited resources to do bad things, such as profiting from spreading hate via advertising, but also protecting their ability to do things like that by capturing regulatory agencies. look at attempts to regulate banking and how that has worked.

services like web search, email, internet access, and social media are clearly valuable and important, arguably necessary. they also get massively distorted and damaged in private markets. these are not lemonade stands; capitalism is an extremely bad model for natural monopolies. they should be publicly owned, run, and developed, in the federated, open model suggested elsewhere. anything else is fooling yourself about what is possible or beneficial.

as an addendum: yes this would require a massive renewal of democratic control over everything involved in this in order to make it work. unfortunately there aren't other good solutions.

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

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 wip…

>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. Are you sure about that? Twitter's annual revenue is 2.4 billion dollars, and they have 300 million users. $0.55/month per user is all it would take to match their current revenue. Sure, when a service is getting up off the ground, you can't beat free, but for one that's e…

This assumes that all Twitter users are actual people and that one person doesn't have multiple accounts all over the place. I would imagine that, although still not a major issue, the cost would be a bit higher for users and that's only factoring in users that find enough utility in Twitter to think that it's worth paying for.

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

#233
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…

"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 wip…

I just had this same conversation with a colleague. The old internet was really the civilized wild west. All the idealogical virtue of sharing and learning was plentiful and you had to have some basic technical skill to contribute or be involved enough to learn how to do it. Now, any curmudgeon can post whatever brain farts pop out with a frequency that only rivals that of their actual mouths.

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

#234
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Network effects are valuable to users too. Are we sure we want to stifle them?

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

#235
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is the part that I don't understand. Facebook, in the grand scheme of things, is still an incredibly new development for people. Most users (at least those who abide by the age limit) have spent most of their lives not being on Facebook. What grand utility does Facebook provide that makes it so difficult to stop using it? I cancelled my Facebook account a few years ago and the only time I ever even thought about…

Facebook (along with Google, Amazon, EBay, AirBnB, Stripe, etc.) get their strength from the long tail. I had deleted it off my phone and logged out on desktop, but then I heard (via email from my sister, who heard it on Facebook) that my aunt was in a coma and my cousin was posting updates on Facebook. That was enough to bring me back. And my cousin posts updates on FB because it's by far the easiest way to distribute news to everyone who cares without worrying if you're forgetting someone.

I'd assume a lot of casual FB usage is similar. There's 90% outrage posts, political stuff, memes, ads, chain letters, people sharing glamor shots of their vacations - and 10% pics of the grandkids, reconnecting with long-lost friends, networking into chance opportunities, and birth/wedding/death announcements that you wouldn't otherwise see. Missing out on the good 10% is a sufficiently large incentive that people put up with the bad 90%.

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

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Society overall gets varying amounts of utility from companies. Mostly they exist to help their owners harness the wealth creating power of workers. By some methods of accounting, many of them are a drain on society; they centralize wealth and create much bigger external costs (resource depletion, pollution) than they create value (engineered obsolescence, disposable crap, useless products & services or ones that serve artificially created demand)

Car dealers, patent trolls, for-profit health insurers, security-theatrics firms, content-distribution conglomerates (ISPs in the US) all are exploiting regulation or lack thereof to profit at societies expense. A lot of finance industry behavior is about unproductively extracting money from other participants. (for example 401k holders)

It's my opinion we should aggressively curb all counterproductive business models, but they tend to be good at protecting themselves. They either win over the masses through PR and deceit, or use more direct corruption of regulators.

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

#237
I wish it could be made more apparent to people that Twitter and FB are not mediums for communication, but mediums for marketing broadcasts.

Everyone with a significant following (let's say 100,000) is selling something. Software, home goods, consultants with online courses, meme pages angling for a TV deal, something.

Yes, you can still use it to communicate with a core group of people whose tweets you enjoy. You can also do that on Slack, Discord, even phpBB forums, all of which grant the user more permissions to use the tool as they like.

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

#238
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, that's not the network effect I'm thinking of.

To wit: The value intrinsic in the relationships between your users ("The Network") - to the point that you want all users whether paying or not.

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

#239
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I respectfully disagree that advocating for changes in the legal framework constitutes inciting violence, unless you use the most broad and generic definition of advocating violence. Thanks for the civil discourse though.

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

#240
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 looks a bit optimistic or underestimating real life tradeoffs.

There can be an API, yes. But if you want to filter by positivity, you have to expect the company to actually implement that in the API. Otherwise, do you expect to get all billions of tweets over an API and then add positivity on top?

You can't have sustainability, performance and "open for everything" on one single API, there are tradeoffs and constraints involved. Even GraphQL needs certain fields to be filterable even before the API call returns, otherwise one can't just loop over all commits in GitHub universe without exhausting both consumer and provider systems!

Atleast that's what I think. Would be happy to be proven wrong.

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