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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

#321

Post by thomasz »

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?

You can be negatively impacted if you do not have an account, even if you do not read tweets at all.

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

#322

Post by dreamcompiler »

Let's be careful here. In 1984, AT&T was a monopoly and was forced to break up its local operations into seven regional companies (the "Baby Bells"). Guess what? Over time, the seven slowly merged back together, with one -- Southwestern Bell -- eventually subsuming all the rest. Southwestern Bell then bought what was left of AT&T corporate and renamed itself "AT&T" and here we are again.

It would be a shame to break up the tech giants only to allow them to slowly merge back together again.

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

#323

Post by ptx »

Ibethewalrus wrote: post #307
cabalamat wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What grand utility does Facebook provide that makes it so difficult to stop using it? For example, all your friends might be on it, and organise events via it. Then, if you don't use FB, you don't find out about events you might have wanted to go to. This is the power of network effects, whiuch causes monopolies. The monopolies would be broken up if social networks had to use open protocols to allow interoperabilit…

Can’t a Google calendar invite provide the same functionality?

It could, but if you rely on being sent a calendar invite you'll miss the event, because people aren't sending calendar invites, because everyone is on Facebook, because people aren't sending calendar invites, because everyone is on Facebook. This is the network effect, as the parent post was saying.

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

#324

Post by maxxxxx »

cambaceres wrote: post #180
maxxxxx wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said "companies of a certain size". Don't make this into a socialism vs capitalism issue. Yes, companies benefit society. But I believe trillion dollar companies are a negative for society. They get way too powerful.

Only if they use their power to more bad things than good things.

By the same line of thinking dictatorships are also only bad if they use their power for more bad things than good things.

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

#325

Post by stochastic_monk »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #32
stochastic_monk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AT&T is a tech giant in precisely the same sense that Google is.

Some people have no choice but to use ATT, it's the only way to get internet into their home. I can do everything I need to without Google, but not ATT.

I have some (more bio, less cs) colleagues who only distribute and edit in google documents. I don’t think avoiding all google services is exactly trivial.

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

#326

Post by ilaksh »

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…

I have been suggesting something slightly along these lines.

I think that the monopoly companies provide the platform with the large network. This platform is desirable. The monopoly control over it is not.

We can replace the monopoly platforms with decentralized peer based platforms running on technologies like Swarm Framework, IPFS, WebRTC, cryptocurrency, etc. Diverse companies can build varied opportunities that leverage the common platform and large network.

Its a challenging goal and most distributed technologies haven't been proven at Twitter scale. However I believe it is attainable and should be attempted.

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

#327

Post by cambaceres »

notacoward wrote: post #277
cambaceres wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big companies add huge value to all our wellbeing. 1000 companies with a revenue of ten million dollars can afford to spend little to nothing on research, while one company with a revenue of ten billion dollars can spend a lot. How many startups comes up with new medicines, for example? Furthermore, you are implying that all that people do has to be done with the societal value in mind. What about the value for indiv…

Those $10M companies don't do research because they are research. The founders have an idea, they try it out, if it works they get acquired by a big company that doesn't do nearly as much of its own research as it used to because this is easier. Sometimes the big companies deliberately let groups of employees leave to try something, with IP and funding and legal indemnification, then buy them back if it works. So ple…

Sure, but if these big companies with lots of money to spend did not exist, there would be no one to buy the smaller ones.

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

#328

Post by wu-ikkyu »

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 that people have an (almost) unalienable power, very strong, and pretty underused.

>It's the power of walking away.

Sure, although it seems the power of collective social pressures is far stronger. So while that might work for some people, it won't for most.

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

#329

Post by cambaceres »

maxxxxx wrote: post #324
cambaceres wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if they use their power to more bad things than good things.

By the same line of thinking dictatorships are also only bad if they use their power for more bad things than good things.

Yeah, so?

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

#330

Post by cyphar »

adventured wrote: post #28
supercanuck wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lower the barriers of entry for competition.

I think it's inevitable that Google EU will be split off from Alphabet and Google US, into a stand-alone entity that the Europeans will regulate and mold as they see fit. It's the only possible positive end to the way Europeans largely view Google today (an abusive, dominant, foreign invader they can't compete with). After this many years, it's obvious the EU can't mount a competitive threat to Google's search monopo…

Google controls what 3 billion people see when they search for things -- what information they are exposed to. This is more control than any government of any sovereign nation in the history of humanity (more than the top 3 governments today combined) has ever had.

And please note that there are well-known processes by governments are held accountable by countries' constitutions and courts. A user of Google has no such recourse.

I don't think it's unreasonable that a company with impact larger than any single government in the history of humanity (yes, even larger than the EU) should have more than a little accountability. (Honestly, I think the Google board of directors should be elected at this point -- just like we elect leaders of governments -- but I know that's going to be a contentious view.)

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