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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

#261

Post by davemp »

ilovecaching wrote: post #247

> “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?’” No, it's human nature. Stop blaming companies for the imperfections of the human race. If you put us into large groups, we will inevitably gossip, bicker, argue, and kill each other…

This is incredibly fatalistic.

Why can't technology be created with human nature in mind? Forms of democracy with checks and balances became so dominant because it acknowledged the deficiencies in human nature.

We can certainly blame companies for producing bad/harmful technology just like we can blame forms of government for producing bad outcomes for its citizens.

---

On a side note, based on influence and entrenchment, comparing FAANG companies to governments actually seems more appropriate that I initially thought.

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

#262

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mattmaroon wrote: post #254
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would you break Apple up into? Apple the device manufacturer and iTunes (or whatever) the streaming content service provider. > Or Facebook? Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. > I guess you could break up Google Alphabet makes this easy. YouTube, Cloud Compute and the other things. > it's basically a natural monopoly Natural monopolies don’t have to acquire potential competitors to protect their flanks. Facebook m…

Neither do the people above. Apple isn't acquiring any other phone makers. Google isn't acquiring any other search engines. The breakups you suggested would make them slightly smaller companies but wouldn't solve any of the problems. the problem with Google if there is one is that it's the only search engine anybody uses. It's 90% of the market. Taking away YouTube doesn't change that. Instagram isn't really a compet…

> Instagram isn't really a competitor with Facebook

Of course it is. Facebook is losing certain demographics to Instagram. If they were separate companies, Facebook would be under far greater shareholder pressure.

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

#263

Post by paulddraper »

strken wrote: post #125
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…

Gab (and Voat, and, er, Hatreon) were open attempts to create far-right versions of existing websites. I don't think they're good examples of the inevitability of hatred. I'd hazard a guess that many more people are angry about hate speech on Reddit than about hate speech over email. The difference is that one is a company and the other is a federated standard. If I've understood Tim Berners-Lee correctly, he wants t…

They were created to be uncensored versions of existing websites. (I don't think there're any examples of Gab limiting left views.)

It happened that the existing websites were censoring far-right viewpoints.

So...by default the predominant users were far right.

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

#264

Post by Apocryphon »

nostrademons wrote: post #243
sumeno wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo wasn't bought

It was, actually, from the guy who then tried to sell the tech to Uber and created this massive lawsuit: https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/t...

Even Android was bought, when you think about it.

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

#265

Post by paulddraper »

bepotts wrote: post #61
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…

Silicon Valley is responsible for most of the world's innovation, so as a consumer I'd rather we not dictate where firms wanted to set up shop.

Facebook is responsible for most of the world's social networking, so as a consumer, I'd rather not dictate how it wants to run its shop.

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

#266

Post by mulmen »

ams6110 wrote: post #200
rusk wrote: 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…

It matters if loads of people stop using it to the point that you can't keep the lights on. I'd suspect that "loads," in fact the majority, of twitter users would not pay anything out of their own pocket to use it.

Sounds like it isn’t very valuable then.

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

#267

Post by nostrademons »

philote wrote: post #251
nostrademons wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 distribu…

I'd argue that communication via email can work just as well as FB. It's a little harder to "opt in" to updates, but with spam filters and other email features, it seems like it can be a lot less noise to have to filter through. But this is coming from someone who doesn't use FB.

It works on a small scale with a group of people who regularly communicate with each other. That's how I organize most of my social events - e-mail a bunch of friends and say "Hey, wanna get together on Saturday?"

It fails when groups are larger or more loosely attached. In my cousin's case - my dad was one of 10 brothers and sisters (many with their own spouses), I have 16 cousins on that side (again with spouses), 3 half-cousins, 10 cousins-once-removed, 1 cousin-twice-removed, and there's a tendency for at least one person to feel offended if they don't get the news when everybody else gets the news. It's somewhat understandable that my cousin would want a broadcast medium rather than trying to remember all that.

Or as another example - a friend of mine died recently, and I found out through FB. I hadn't been in touch with her for several years, since before she got married, I'd never met her husband, and he certainly didn't have my e-mail. Still, I appreciated knowing, and passed on that info to other mutual friends, who also appreciated knowing. That's the long-tail; in my parents' generation, they might've found out at some reunion 30 years in the future, long after the funeral has passed and people are done sharing memories & photos.

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

#268

Post by sonnyblarney »

themagician wrote: post #10

They really don’t. They don’t have monopolies on anything and there is no high barrier to entry to compete, they are just really popular. Facebook is far more akin to Kim Kardashian than Ma Bell or Standard Oil. You don’t need Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or any of that other crap. In fact, it turns out if you stop using them nothing bad happens to you at all. I’m many cases your life is better and you actually e…

"and there is no high barrier to entry to compete"

My gosh.

Facebook and Google are printing billions - don't you think that there would be massive money pouring in to take a slice of that pie if it were possible?

Google has a scale that makes them essentially unassailable.

Even Microsoft can hardly make a dent.

Facebook, a little different due to network externalizations.

They are not like traditional monopolies, but they are de-facto monopolies.

Google can bias search outcomes to favour any of their businesses, and this is a problem. Essentially, they shouldn't be allowed to verticals into any of it - in much the same way carriers shouldn't be allowed to own cable or entertainment business.

They can be owned by the same parent, but they can't be in the same business.

Facebook is a less essential resource and so many already do without it, it's likely on the decline I don't think we need to touch that one.

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

#269

Post by MattGrommes »

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?

A lot of people don't really have this option since their audience is on twitter. Many artists would lose basically their entire livelihood if they just stopped using twitter and stopped being able to communicate about their work. You may have this option but it's not true for everybody.

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

#270

Post by mulmen »

rusk wrote: post #145
stupidbird wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The only people who don’t use email are products.
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