31–40 of 161 posts
I'm OK with giant tech companies. America isn't the only place in the world and doesn't hold a monopoly on tech. If it's not American tech giants, it'll be Chinese or some other countries tech giants.
> America ... doesn't hold a monopoly on tech Certainly seems that way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> or have willfully rejected the responsibility attached to it. There is no responsibility attached to it, at least not legal responsibility. Even that isn't enough for anyone that gets to powerful and beyond enforcement. The truly sad thing is that you expect them to act responsibly. Companies will (and have) work children to death if it helps maximize output, if you expect them to act benevolently then prepare for…
This is one of the central questions of our age. In an ideal capitalist free market companies are almost necessarily amoral (Friedmann doctrine ), they can only make choices based on profit. In real life you have barriers to entry and PR concerns that let companies at least pretend to waste some profit-making opportunities on doing good. I don't know if the right answer is consumer unions, or benevolent government re…
I think the question is what to do about it, not whether it's happening. We have reams of evidence that it's happening, and "doing good" for PR reasons is just more of the same - it's more important to look good than to be good, and looking good without being good is more profitable and thus more desirable.
Unfortunately, because so much of our media runs in the same system, it can be difficult to have a clear conversation on the topic.
The problem isn’t that they’ve grown too powerful, it’s that they either haven’t recognized their own power or have willfully rejected the responsibility attached to it.
I'm OK with giant tech companies. America isn't the only place in the world and doesn't hold a monopoly on tech. If it's not American tech giants, it'll be Chinese or some other countries tech giants.
> America ... doesn't hold a monopoly on tech Certainly seems that way.
There are a lot of less well known technology giants elsewhere in the world. E.g. ARM from the UK (now owned by Japanese giant SoftBank) has pretty much total domination on the smartphone CPU market (licensing anyway - lots of manufacturing is done by e.g. Samsung of Korea)
My mum will have heard of Facebook and Google, but I guarantee that she and probably most other people's mother's have never ever heard of ARM.
Just one example - countless others.
The "tech giants" are creating and controlling core forms of communication, both interpersonal and broadcast/public. That's too important and fundamental to the health of society to allow it to be arbitrarily engineered, filtered, and slanted for maximizing profit. If they were acting like common carriers, it would be a completely different issue. But they're not; they have business models that necessitate the manipu…
I also find it ironic that this is from the NYTimes when one could argue that 60 years ago that they were the too powerful one. The easiest source of information is always going to have an unfair advantage and drive the narrative. The only thing that has changed is that this is cheaper to do and scale now then in the old days. You can't stop people from being lazy.
I'm OK with giant tech companies. America isn't the only place in the world and doesn't hold a monopoly on tech. If it's not American tech giants, it'll be Chinese or some other countries tech giants.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But these aren't American companies any more. They were founded in America, and there are lots of jobs created by them in America, and there's something to be said for both those things. But I think there's a larger issue here which is that sovereignty is being eroded by the consolidation of wealth and power. Companies move to Ireland to avoid taxes, set up warehousing shell companies in Nevada to avoid taxes, set up…
> file patents in Jamaica to claim precedence on things that others may have thought of Can you explain how this works? Why would anyone care about Jamaican patents if they apparently don't play properly?
The "tech giants" are creating and controlling core forms of communication, both interpersonal and broadcast/public. That's too important and fundamental to the health of society to allow it to be arbitrarily engineered, filtered, and slanted for maximizing profit. If they were acting like common carriers, it would be a completely different issue. But they're not; they have business models that necessitate the manipu…
I agree that they are getting too powerful but the main issue is that the FTC keeps allowing all these mega mergers and consolidations. I also find it ironic that this is from the NYTimes when one could argue that 60 years ago that they were the too powerful one. The easiest source of information is always going to have an unfair advantage and drive the narrative. The only thing that has changed is that this is cheap…
Such a short-sighted effort to identify a singular bad apple seems disingenuous. Hardly anyone on this site is blind to the FTC’s corrupt motivations for cooperating with the tech corporations. Is this an effort to soothing some personal guilt? I can’t make sense of it.
>The only thing that has changed is that this is cheaper to so and scale now then in the old days.
Not true or helpful. Why even try to make such a comparison? What about the FTC allowing mergers? You said it yourself! And nobody here will have trouble finding examples of businesses not participating in these dystopian and authoritarian practices. Very odd minimalization of these issues as laziness. I can’t imagine who you think you’re fooling.