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Tech giants are hijacking the internet

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Re: Tech giants are hijacking the internet

#12

Thought experiment: Online advertising is regulated. How do so-called "tech" companies respond. Do they have a plan. Even if they continued to sell surveillance and data services, they would shrink in size. There are various ways ads could be regulated and historical precedents. Regardless of whether this ever happens, currently, online advertising is highly centralised and under increasing scrutiny. This centralisat…

There's a solution that's far less invasive. The article offered it, and I've also repeatedly espoused it: "Enforcing open standards to enable users to share videos, images and texts across platforms is paramount."

The reason there are tech monopolies is because of the network effect. It's not practical to expect healthy competition in domains where your product's quality is primarily driven by the number of users you have, and they start with billions, and you start with zero.

Enforce open standards, prevent companies from coercing users to sign away their rights to content they generate, and you will have rich competition because you effectively eliminate the network effect.

Re: Tech giants are hijacking the internet

#13

Big tech is big because they built sustainable products that appeal to billions of people. There was no hijacking. Anyone can still make their own site and become popular. TikTok was able to become the number one site despite not being from big tech.

Railroad tycoons have also built a good sustainable product that appealed to billions, yet they leveraged their position of power, monopoly.

https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/rise-of-the-ro...

Just because someone creates a good product does not allow them to be free from scrutiny.

Certainly if whole traffic goes from the Internet to Facebook, Amazon, and other you may say that the traffic has been hijacked.

Re: Tech giants are hijacking the internet

#14

Thought experiment: Online advertising is regulated. How do so-called "tech" companies respond. Do they have a plan. Even if they continued to sell surveillance and data services, they would shrink in size. There are various ways ads could be regulated and historical precedents. Regardless of whether this ever happens, currently, online advertising is highly centralised and under increasing scrutiny. This centralisat…

There's a solution that's far less invasive. The article offered it, and I've also repeatedly espoused it: "Enforcing open standards to enable users to share videos, images and texts across platforms is paramount." The reason there are tech monopolies is because of the network effect. It's not practical to expect healthy competition in domains where your product's quality is primarily driven by the number of users yo…

[deleted]

Re: Tech giants are hijacking the internet

#15

Thought experiment: Online advertising is regulated. How do so-called "tech" companies respond. Do they have a plan. Even if they continued to sell surveillance and data services, they would shrink in size. There are various ways ads could be regulated and historical precedents. Regardless of whether this ever happens, currently, online advertising is highly centralised and under increasing scrutiny. This centralisat…

There's a solution that's far less invasive. The article offered it, and I've also repeatedly espoused it: "Enforcing open standards to enable users to share videos, images and texts across platforms is paramount." The reason there are tech monopolies is because of the network effect. It's not practical to expect healthy competition in domains where your product's quality is primarily driven by the number of users yo…

No, the problem is no one is willing to pay for any of these services.

How many people are paying for their news? For something like YouTube? That stuff costs mega $$$

Back in the day, you were forced to pay for things. You wanted news? You had to put in some coins for a newspaper.

Now you sign on and you get news and YouTube seemingly for free… open standards or not, someone has to pay for it one way or another.

Re: Tech giants are hijacking the internet

#16
These are the symptoms.

The diseases are centrally controlled IP, DNS and root certificates.

The removal attempt of HTTP/1.1 is the biggest censorship in history.

The only way to fight back is to self host DNS, HTTP and SMTP at home.

Re: Tech giants are hijacking the internet

#18
You could rely on government to try to rein them in — good luck. Didn’t work with Ma Bell, the pieces still charged $3 a minute.

Or you could contribute to open protocols, and do to the tech giants what:

  The Web did to AOL, MSN, etc.
  VoIP did to AT&T, Sprint, etc.
  Wikipedia did to Britannica
  OpenStreetMap will do to Google Maps
   etc.
Open, permissionless networks beat closed, proprietary ones once they are good enough.

I spent 10 years and over $1 million from my company’s revenues to build an open source social operating system to power pretty much all the applications you’d want:

https://qbix.com

Hope it helps! About to release v2.0 on GitHub

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

(And 5 years ago spun off https://intercoin.org/applications — we are still in the development stage on that one).

Re: Tech giants are hijacking the internet

#19

Banks did that to our money and everyone's fine with that. Although banks are slow and stupid af, unlike big tech who offer high quality services.

Banks had hundrets of years to become "slow and stupid af". Seems like big tech needs less then a decade for that.

Re: Tech giants are hijacking the internet

#20

Thought experiment: Online advertising is regulated. How do so-called "tech" companies respond. Do they have a plan. Even if they continued to sell surveillance and data services, they would shrink in size. There are various ways ads could be regulated and historical precedents. Regardless of whether this ever happens, currently, online advertising is highly centralised and under increasing scrutiny. This centralisat…

There's a solution that's far less invasive. The article offered it, and I've also repeatedly espoused it: "Enforcing open standards to enable users to share videos, images and texts across platforms is paramount." The reason there are tech monopolies is because of the network effect. It's not practical to expect healthy competition in domains where your product's quality is primarily driven by the number of users yo…

I fear it is too easy to erode open standards the way microsoft is infamous for. There is power in babel attacks (babylon languages).
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