I think we should start small, from, say, nationalizing the authors' personal possessions and primary residence.
We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon
51–60 of 237 posts
Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
You keep saying "not something that free societies do" as though that phrase in itself has meaning, but fail to explain why. From a socialist's pov putting a profitable industry in the domain of _everyone_ and sharing the profits is freeing capital from the few and providing an (more)equal share to all. It's not capitalism but that does not mean it isn't "freedom". What is "freedom"? Market competition The way Amazon…
>From a socialist's pov putting a profitable industry in the domain of _everyone_ and sharing the profits is freeing capital from the few and providing an (more)equal share to all. It's not capitalism but that does not mean it isn't "freedom". I don't believe all ideologies and their definitions need to be given equal respect. Socialists shouldn't get to just redefine "freedom" to mean a government monopoly running m…
The whole point is that these companies are inherently resistant to competition. Nationalization doesn't require limiting access to any other service or restricting competition in any way.
Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
>From a socialist's pov putting a profitable industry in the domain of _everyone_ and sharing the profits is freeing capital from the few and providing an (more)equal share to all. It's not capitalism but that does not mean it isn't "freedom". I don't believe all ideologies and their definitions need to be given equal respect. Socialists shouldn't get to just redefine "freedom" to mean a government monopoly running m…
The whole point is that these companies are inherently resistant to competition. Nationalization doesn't require limiting access to any other service or restricting competition in any way.
Then fund a public option. Better yet, make the public option a distributed protocol. Then no seizures of private property, laws prohibiting private enterprise, or internet firewalls to prevent foreign service providers from rendering their service to local residents, would be needed.
Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed 100%. Does this mean if you ever built a company, and it gets too big, it will get nationalized? And what will keep the law from evolving to nationalizing slightly smaller businesses as time goes.
> Does this mean if you ever built a company, and it gets too big, it will get nationalized? Why not? I guess it also has to provide some important infrastructure for other companies. > And what will keep the law from evolving to nationalizing slightly smaller businesses as time goes. That's a slippery slope argument. Do you want to nationalize nothing ?
> That's a slippery slope argument. Do you want to nationalize nothing?
I meant where do we draw the line?
Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon
#55I totally agree that Google, Facebook and Amazon have too much power and too little accountability. However they're all global companies and as bad as they are, I trust all of them more than I trust the US government (I am not American). Can you even imagine how their business would work when these are state entities? You're no longer buying ad placements from a marketing company, you're buying them from the US gover…
If Google and Facebook were nationalized, why would they need to sell ads?
Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon
#56So the problem is that one big organization has all this data, and the solution is to put it all under the umbrella of a different organization?
How does that help unless we assume that government can do less bad stuff with it than a private organization?
Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why nationalize what we can distribute? There is no reason a future youtube has to be centralized and many good reasons that it shouldn't be.
I am amazed that there is no open source, distributed search engine to rival Google. We let Google get too much data about us. Search engine research has advanced a lot, we can use that.
"Search engine research has advanced a lot, we can use that."
A strong part of Google's search engine results is leveraging the data it has from Google Maps (including the almost unique Google Street View), actions tracked through the user’s Google account, and proprietary image-recognition technologies. It’s hard for another party to compete with that; Google hasn't been a mere web crawler in a long, long time.
Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon
#58I totally agree that Google, Facebook and Amazon have too much power and too little accountability. However they're all global companies and as bad as they are, I trust all of them more than I trust the US government (I am not American). Can you even imagine how their business would work when these are state entities? You're no longer buying ad placements from a marketing company, you're buying them from the US gover…
I'm not sure it would be such a huge difference from now, when the US government can go through the NSA to acquire data from internet companies. Surely if you had a document the contents of which you wouldn't want the US government to know, you already wouldn't put it on Google Drive? But you raise another important point. What happens to all the infrastructure and personnel that Google or Amazon have outside the US?…
I would say there is a difference. Right now my assumption would be that American Law Enforcement could target someone to have access to everything. And they might be able to surveil unencrypted traffic. But I do not think that they are always reading anybodies WhatsApp messages. Nationalized that assumption couldn't be made anymore.
Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon
#59I think a lot of the "oh my gosh nationalisation is such an awful idea" / "not in my free society" comments are missing the point. I too believe nationalisation is a bad idea in this case , but given the enormous reaction it would bring, can you imagine how awful the situation appears to be from the authors (any many other non-tech-bubble) peoples perspective to even contemplate such a thing? Let alone write an opini…
Are you sure the authors are writing this story out of a genuine heartfelt fear? Do you think the editor who published them shares this genuine fear?
Re: We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon
#60I think a lot of the "oh my gosh nationalisation is such an awful idea" / "not in my free society" comments are missing the point. I too believe nationalisation is a bad idea in this case , but given the enormous reaction it would bring, can you imagine how awful the situation appears to be from the authors (any many other non-tech-bubble) peoples perspective to even contemplate such a thing? Let alone write an opini…
I agree to an extent, however I think this is just a part of it. The other part is that these companies are these mega corporations that have more money and power than many countries and they aren't accountable to the people but to their owners. And these are the companies that are going to end up inventing stuff like generalized AI. I don't agree with nationalizing them, but I also don't agree with letting them run around unchecked.