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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

#331

Post by onion2k »

richardwhiuk wrote: post #256
onion2k wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead, companies with > $1 billion annual revenue... That would just turn the issue in to an accounting problem. Facebook would license their logo from Facebook Logo Inc, the like button from Thumbs Up Ltd, their servers from Facebook Servers PLC, and so on. Every one of the companies would make, at most, $999,999,999 in revenue. A much simpler and easier legal solution would be to tax companies based on the number…

Because only rich people should get access to computing resources.

Would you say that bread should be free because it's not fair that only rich people should have bread? How about Ferraris? Houses? Why should social media be different? Note that I did suggest some smaller social media services should be free of this tax, so they could still operate free for user if they chose to. Social tools are useful. It just doesn't have to be a huge network run by a single company.

Besides, there's nothing stopping social media companies charging right now other than the fact they make more money by not charging, arguably to the detriment of everyone in society. Who do you think should be paying to solve that problem? No one?

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

#332

Post by wu-ikkyu »

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…

There are both human and technological problems at play here.

The human problems, as you stated, have long been well known. These technological communications problems are new.

It seems pretty self-evident that the character limits, the incoherent way conversations are rendered, and how easy it is to take tweets out of context are all detrimental to the quality of discourse and understanding between users.

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

#333

Post by noir_lord »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #318
notacoward wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silicon Valley is not responsible for most of the world's innovation. Not even within tech. If the internet started any one place it was at BBN around Boston. The web started at CERN. Microprocessors started at Bell Labs and Texas Instruments. Cellular phones started at Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia. Amazon's up in Seattle, next door to Microsoft, and even Facebook is an import. SV isn't even a player in biotech, clean t…

You're not going back far enough though — personal computers, the transistor, microprocessor....

Liquid Crystal Displays at the university of a former fishing town in the north of the UK (my home town) [1].

[1] George William Gray - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_William_Gray

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

#334

Post by _dczq »

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #314
moorhosj wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of our two political parties is campaigning on a platform to reign in this type of campaign finance influence: "Democrats would use their first month in the House majority to advance sweeping changes to future campaign and ethics laws, requiring the disclosure of shadowy political donors, outlawing the gerrymandering of congressional districts and restoring key enforcement provisions to the Voting Rights Act, top…

Everybody says this before elections. Trump was going to 'drain the swamp' and Obama was going to take down k-street influence. Then they get into office, tip their hat, and turn their back until the next election when suddenly they're incredible again, or at least they promise they will be. Obama ended up creating a special executive chair to let a Monsanto VP take control of the FDA, tried to jam the corporate writ…

Does cynicism help solve the problem?

There are also bunch of promises that Obama kept (and Trump). Focusing on some that he didn’t keep doesn’t change that.

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/

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

#335

Post by notacoward »

cambaceres wrote: post #327
notacoward wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would that be so bad? If the small companies funded by other means (let's call that "venture capital") could grow into medium-sized fish themselves instead of being gobbled up by the big fish, that might actually be a healthier ecosystem.

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

#336

Post by sixstringtheory »

criddell wrote: post #289
sixstringtheory wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the feed algorithm surfaces it to them. I’d wager many social media users only consume content though the feed and not by going directly to people’s profiles to see what they’re up to, so may never see everything.

That's a good point. Likewise, with email there's always the chance that the spam filter could hide the message and lots of people never check their spam folders.

Also a good point. That is just as much an algorithm!

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

#337

Post by amanaplanacanal »

dkonofalski wrote: post #222
nine_k wrote: 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…

One thing that I have been discovering recently: Discussion groups. Back in the day it was Usenet, of course, and there are still websites that host niche forums. But it seems I am now running into weird new interests where the major discussion is happening on a facebook group. I go months without logging into facebook, but this seems to be what's drawing me back in.

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

#338

Post by mattmaroon »

uxhack wrote: post #109
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…

Why not break them up with identical tech stack to start off with. So you could have 10 Google Search engines. Then let them inovate from there. With Apple it would be the same. You would have several platforms competing with IOS. Eventually they will start to doffer on thier offerings.

Because whichever identical tech stack got the domain name Google.com would win. Do you know if Google is even the best search engine anymore? If Bing had gotten better would you know? Most people wouldn't.

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

#339

Post by enjeyw »

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 wonder if this is one of those few genuine uses for a blockchain based system. Comments (tweets) would be posted on a very thin layer of technology, which would only support say: - comment id - comment text - datetime of comment - commenting user id - list of [upvoting/downvoting] user id - list of reply comment ids

As you say, third parties could then come along and build whatever front-end they see fit. Don't want to show or allow clients to downvote? Go for it! Only aggregate upvotes from user ids over a certain age? Be my guest! The underlying information would never change.

Operating costs would be funded by transaction fees, whatever that specific blockchain model may be.

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

#340

Post by osrec »

enjeyw wrote: post #339
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 wonder if this is one of those few genuine uses for a blockchain based system. Comments (tweets) would be posted on a very thin layer of technology, which would only support say: - comment id - comment text - datetime of comment - commenting user id - list of [upvoting/downvoting] user id - list of reply comment ids As you say, third parties could then come along and build whatever front-end they see fit. Don't wan…

But why blockchain?
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