I 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 government. You're no longer selling product through a third-party storefront, you're selling through the US government. Google and Facebook, two of the most important information gateways, are now controlled by the US Congress and Senate. All that information on people all over the world is now in the hands of the US government.
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? Ireland and the Netherlands probably don't feel the same way about hosting a branch of the US Government as they do about a global corporation, and vice versa the US government wouldn't want the same level of scrutiny from foreign governments that Google does. Would European countries attempt to nationalize their local Facebook datacenters? Would it effectively break those colossi apart along national borders?
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.
I guess the idea is that each country or region has its own Google, Facebook or Amazon - Not that it all belongs to the US government.
I would also argue that they are US companies first and global companies second. Their main focus is always USA and their spirit is also very American for the good and the bad. Strategy for the rest of the world is made in the USA. All important decision are made in the USA. Most investments are made in the USA and also the profits go to the USA.
This is nor good or bad but the point is that those are not global companies.
According to [1] 75% of Facebook Users are located outside the US. And According to [2] India has more Facebook Users than the US. The statistics differ somehow, though they both should be current, but the point remains: Facebook is very much a global company. I am sure that you can find similar statistics for Google or Amazon.
I didn't say that their audience is not outside of the USA. Feel free to re-read what I wrote.
Think about it like that. BMW sells most of their cars outside of Germany but still is a German company that operates world wide. And this is very true for most big companies today.
Maybe nationalization is a bad way to go about it, but these companies are too large, they have too much power over society and society needs to exert power back onto them. So there should be some kind of external oversight when decisions that affect millions of people are being made.
I think governments are inefficient and corrupt, but companies are absolutely free to do as they please when deciding how to change products that affect society. Also, there is much more spying freedom in the private sector. This is why there should be a mechanism to oversee what happens with our data.
You mean like a set of regulations these companies had to comply with? Maybe with panels of ordinary citizens to adjudicate their application, overseen by a professional expert. Maybe we could call these regulations 'laws'.
Are you more or less forced to buy a Toyota simply because all your friends drive a Toyota? Is the majority of roads exclusive to Toyotas? If you question a business decision of Toyota, or a design of their car, can you then sell said car and purchase one from another brand with minimal impact on your daily life (Other than the fact that you have to sell and buy a car)?
I think nationalising Walmart is a perfectly reasonable idea. Considering issues like the level of access to quality food in poor neighbourhoods in the US and the fact that US government subsidises much of Walmart's labour cost already, it would be a much better deal for the American people on average.
Not really relevant, it's not the revenue that is a problem. It's their massive network effects that are, as the author puts it, platform monopolies.
Walmart, Toyota, Apple, do not have entrenching networks that lead to a monopoly. You can just as easily go to Target, buy a Honda, or get an Android phone
I could see Facebook and Google move to a subscription-style model. People would easily pay, say, 3$ per month for Facebook and 5$ per month for Google if it was the only option. (Prices should be lower in less developed regions, of course.)
Once freed from the prime directive of collecting increasing amounts of data to improve ad tracking, operating and development costs should be much lower than they are now, too.
This is such a widespread idea I wonder where it comes from. At least your government (hopefully) is a somewhat democratic institution and is to that extend accountable and is providing standard procedures to make it more accountable if you believe it ought to be.
There's no such thing in Facebook or Google. Managers dictate policy and if you don't like it you can leave/stop using their service.
My government is far more democratic than the US but I still wouldn't trust it with that kind of power.
Democracy is nice and all but the representative democracy most of the world is ruled by puts people who are good at getting elected in power rather than people who are good at running a country. Google/Facebook don't have that problem, their leaders are there on merit rather than their charisma, popularity or the lies they told.
Also, Google/Facebook are very much regulated by data protection authorities in the countries they operate in.
> I trust all of them more than I trust the US government
Governments don't deserve your trust. The same goes for business. Trusting either is is a terrible idea, because power corrupts wherever it accumulates. While public and private use power in different ways, they are both a serious threat when they are allowed to act without regular check on their power. The solution isn't to pick sides. Power needs to be diluted regularly, and that happens when government and business work as checks on each other. It is the conflict itself that keeps power from accumulating.
> Can you even imagine how their business would work when these are state entities?
They already are, in all but name. Remember Prism?
> All that information on people all over the world is now in the hands of the US government.
That ship already sailed, unfortunately. I agree that this is a terrifying problem, but I'm not sure how to fix it. However, consider this: right now there are effectively no restraints on that power. Nationalizing/utilifying Google et al at least introduces the opportunity to add regulation by bringing the problem into public scrutiny.
>Trusting either is is a terrible idea, because power corrupts wherever it accumulates.
Concentrated power is also concentrated responsibility.
It's the lack of individual power for any one member that makes groups (governments, companies, political organizations, etc) untrustworthy. When nobody feels like they have enough individual power to do what they consider right they also do not feel responsible for doing wrong. They're just doing their jobs.
Wow this guy does not mention taxation and the huge advantage governments bestow upon large companies by making it possible to engineer taxes away, an opportunity much less open to small companies. Instead he wants a merger with the biggest responsibility-shirking enterprise of all: the state!
The author spends a long time talking about how companies are planning to make money (shocking news!) on AI, and then concludes with "What’s the answer? Nationalization!"
But he forgot to ask the question he's trying to answer.
Governments have broken up large companies in the past, and that works out pretty well. Why suggest nationalization over that? The article only mentions “huge economies of scale”, but doesn’t do a good job convincing me that there isn’t room for broken up Amazons, Google’s, etc.
On the other hand, nationalization is a terrible idea for so many reason. It also goes against the fabric of the American economonic system.
I know it’s opinion, but hard to believe that the guardian published this with how poorly written it is.
Considering their irresponsible painting of Whatsapp's end-to-end encryption re-key scheme as a "backdoor", I no longer can be surprised by The Guardian's lack of editorial quality.
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, Uber etc have been set up, using hundreds of millions in investment, able to operate against smaller competitors for literally years without breaking even until the opposition is crushed and consumers are herded into being customers... is that freedom? Maybe for the already established wealthy. For everyone else it's an unfair advantage. There is no freedom for the average Joe to start a publishing an distribution powerhouse
I agree it's a terrible idea to nationalize these companies, but citing 'freedom' as the reason why is not why it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea because it would lead to excessive bureaucracy, higher prices and is unlikely to benefit the competition much. It might help governments get those companies to pay some tax though.
>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 major industries, by outlawing private citizens from owning productive enterprises in those industries, and have everyone else accept their definitions as equally valid as a classical liberal's.
Think about it practically for a moment: what is the government going to do when private citizens in another country fire up thousands of servers and begin providing web services to the people within the government's jurisdiction? Put up a firewall? Start raiding anyone running a relay node that bypasses the firewall? How is that congruent with any reasonable definition of freedom?
We can pretend that we're frameless and judging all perspectives as equally valid, but in actuality that will never happen, as it would make any sort of meaningful communication impossible. Someone could argue war is peace, slavery is freedom, etc, and there would be no way to reject their statements as unequivocally wrong. We would be uttering words to each other that mean completely different things to different people, because we would no longer follow the basic convention of language, which is that the widely observed and long established definition trumps the unorthodox one.
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.
In which case there is no need to nationalise, because by definition if another competitor can be created then the government can create one itself.
All nationalising would do is give the government a leg-up in having an existing user base. In practice government inertia would lead to the service atrophying and becoming outdated and overburdened with bureaucratic controls and costs. Page & Brin, Bezos and Zuckerberg (or someone new) would each raise capital, start their own competing services and in a few years time we'd be back where we started.
This whole idea is so utterly misconceived and pointless it blows my mind how many people here are trying to justify or defend it. Unless you actively regulated to prohibit competing private services, it would be doomed from he start and if such regulation was enforced - literally banning other search engines including Bing, banning other social networks, banning any other online retail businesses, the lurch towards dystopianism would create a very different world to the one we live in. Even China hadn't come even close to anything like that.
> You keep saying "not something that free societies do" as though that phrase in itself has meaning, but fail to explain why.
Uh... no offense intended, that's a failure of your comprehension abilities, and not my responsibility to satisfy. Your confusion amounts to "why is the sky blue?"
Regulation, e.g. of utilities, in the in U.S. is sort of a form of nationalization. Technically they are not nationalized, but since they have all kinds of requirements, including needing to apply for rate changes, they aren't exactly normal, either. And if you don't have control of your prices, do you really have a capitalistic business?
But aside from that, 3 people at Google get to effectively dictate what the world will see on the Internet via the top 10 on the search. 1 guy at Facebook gets to dictate what is on my Facebook page. (I certainly don't get any choice in the matter, beyond banning people) This sounds a lot like a dictatorship, and is this what a free society does? Might a free society decide that it is in the society's best interest to have social media be governed by elected officials, and to not be scientifically designed (via A/B testing) to be addictive?
Everything is forcing you to use Google and Facebook. The market, the public who voted with there feet. You recive invitations to classes via facebook.
There is no freedom of choice in a monopoly where opting out equals social death.
Nobody's forcing in the sense of directly threatening you if you don't use Google or Facebook, that is true.
But:
(a) particularly with regards to social networking, the social pressure to use walled-garden sites like Facebook can be very, very strong
(b) if you're a Normal Person(tm), it can be hard to know what else to do other than use the same services that everyone else uses and that are being actively marketed to you.
Sure, at the individual level, using Google and Facebook services (as I myself do) is still a voluntary, consensual transaction, but there may well be societal-level effects that look fairly close to those of traditional monopolies.
> Regulation, e.g. of utilities, in the in U.S. is sort of a form of nationalization.
That's the example I had in mind when writing my comment. The utilities WERE nationalized, however they were de-regulated in recent years, and the market has not really recovered from when they were handed government endorsed monopolies.
If you spend any real time exploring the concept of freedom and how to measure it, America is in fact the most free nation in the world.
That doesn't mean America holds a monopoly on freedom, it means America is setting the example that others follow, and will continue to until another nation offers it's citizens quantifiably more freedom than America does. And examining the current geo-political climates, that isn't going to happen anytime soon.
> For the briefest moment in March 2014, Facebook’s dominance looked under threat. Ello, amid much hype, presented itself as the non-corporate alternative to Facebook.
Okay, this is a terrible opener. Ello never appeared to have any greater traction than as a hipster fad, much less posing a material threat to Facebook.
Also, you can not nationalise any of the companies listed, because they are not British nor of Commonwealth country origin. Perhaps we could nationalize, but that's not really Trump's style.
Yeah I think I registered on Ello just to get my preferred username if it did become popular (after missing out on early Twitter) and haven't really thought about it until just now
When Ello first arrived, I saw it as a very welcome competitor to Twitter/Facebook, and was using it. The questions of "how will Ello make enough money to survive?" came up. I was one of the vocal supporters of a paid account, as I would gladly pay them $5 a month just to help them continue to exist. In the end they took money from VCs, at which point I promptly stopped using them.
I can't speak for anyone else, but their move to take VC money instead of my money is largely what killed their traction for me.
Imagine there would only be only one car company where you could by good, affordable cars for some reason. Now image this car company would not be an American one. I'd say there were national regulations, taxations and tariffs in about zero seconds.
There are already national regulations and taxes that apply to Google, Facebook and Amazon. Hell, there's a story on the front page right now about that.
I thought that was funny as well. If anyone's going to be nationalizing them, it'd be the US, and I'd wager that non-US residents would like that even less.
The politics of this discussion is really interesting. I think this might be the only substantial policy topic where The (progressive leaning) Guardian and (fairly right-wing) Breitbart[1] both push roughly the same approach.
The thing both have in common is that they are media destinations, and are deadly afraid of the the power Google and Facebook have to direct traffic.
Actually, I think behind the nationalisation idea, which doesn't seem workable given the circumstances, there's an interesting thought: these companies are sitting on basic infrastructure so instead of treating them like other companies, perhaps we should treat them like utilities.
Note that this piece appears in The Guardian. I don't know how it works in the US, but I'm of the impression that in many European countries, basic infrastructure like energy or transportation or communication links is either very tightly regulated or owned by a non-profit organisation that in turn is owned by either the local consumers, the local authorities, or by the state.
DNS operates in this way, as far as I'm aware.
Can we move in this direction with things like search (Google) and personal publishing (Facebook)?
Perhaps if the tech community delivers the software, and the societies themselves start a serious discussion about it and delivered the users?
This would also make me a lot happier about sharing info with said companies. Right now I avoid their products (the non-open source ones) because they just have too much market share and power, but if a site like Facebook turned non-profit I'd be much happier to use it.
Facebook goes "non-profit" -> becomes regulated in terms of privacy/earnings -> competing social network springs up -> is able to advertise and boast features that the "non-profit public" Facebook cannot have due to cost or regulations -> new social network is now the de-facto Facebook, and you're right where you started.
and this is assuming that the whole "lets beg Mr. Zuck to pretty pretty please stop doing that whole business thing and start serving us for free, we'd appreciate it" thing works out.
It's a perfectly fine situation for nation-states to have access to such data, because nation-states already have access to everything inside Facebook and Google. In the US, you only need a warrant to access anything inside those companies.
Indeed but at least with a warrant all access is documented on public record. Which has got to be better than already having access to all that data in private. Plus private companies can (and sometimes do) challenge a warrant.
True, but I'd rather that process happen publically rather than in secret (as would be the default if the Facebook and Google were nationalised). Not that I'm implying there isn't already secret requests for data (if PRISM is to be believed) but at least with the aforementioned being privately owned there is some chance that unlawful / unjust requests for information can be challenged.
It only appears I'm making that conclusion when you selectively quote small passages from my comment. The very next sentence that follows the portion you quoted starts off by saying:
> "Not that I'm implying there isn't already secret requests for data"
I appreciate that you consider it worth reiterating the point about national security since I had only glossed over it. But I don't appreciate you manipulating my comment to suggest that I was ignoring that point entirely when I quite clearly did raise it.
The SMTP equivalent for Facebook and Google is HTTP which is a federated protocol. With email anyone can store the content on a centralised server in any format they want. Be that inside an open source RDBMS like MySQL or PostgreSQL, or a flat text file like Postfix defaults, or a proprietary format like Microsoft Exchange does. And the same is true for the services that Facebook and Google offer.
The issue here isn't federated protocols (though that is something we could benefit from in other domains) but rather the dependance on a centralised archives in the cloud. Most people simply don't care or even aren't aware of self hosting solutions. And those that are aware often choose cloud solutions because it's cheaper and/or less hassle than self-hosting. Federated protocols doesn't fix this (just look at how hard it is to set up a mail server compared to running Google Mail).
Plus in the case of Facebook you have network effects where a social network is only as good as the size of the member base.
But with IPFS, [1], (which is a federated protocol) you can "host" a HTML file or video or any content without any difficulty yourself.
I'm not sure if it would be suitable for the functionality in Facebook though (sharing stuff with friends only), sending messages, so that's part of the reason why we need more research.
The network effect of Facebook can be mitigated by introducing laws that open up competition, like the telecommunications acts, which opened up the market for telephony.
You could host HTML files et al without any difficulty long before IPFS came along. There are plenty of easy to use web hosts out there aimed at the layman for more than 2 decades. I mean that literally as I have none-IT friends that had sites up on Geocities (and it's equivalent) back in the 90s.
However as much as we could argue the differences between IPFS and the plethora of other hosted solutions all day and night, but ultimately it would be a moot argument because as cool as IPFS is - and I do think it's a genuinely interesting platform - it is still only a platform for serving static content. So it's definitely not suitable for Facebook-like functionality. In that regard IPFS is more akin to Amazon S3 than it is Facebook.
> The network effect of Facebook can be mitigated by introducing laws that open up competition, like the telecommunications acts, which opened up the market for telephony.
While I can't see that happening - or at least not inside my professional life time - it is an interesting point. We've seen monopolies split up before and while Facebook is a long way from being a monopoly it would be interesting to see which line they needed to cross before the government stepped in.
> it is still only a platform for serving static content
The name might be slightly misleading (InterPlanetary FileSystem) but IPFS has more functionality that just hosting files. Two that comes to mind is pubsub which enables you to have a distributed publish/subscribe network to send messages globally and "dialing directly to nodes" which enables you to send/receive messages directly to peers without having to use location-based addressing.
While the primitives in IPFS are simple, they enable you to build powerful architectures, such as CRDTs. So it wouldn't be impossible to re-implement something like a social network on top of IPFS.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers working on IPFS
Do you think we should have regulated AltaVista and MySpace as utilities, way back when? If so, what would this have done to Facebook and Google's prospects? If not, what makes something a utility?
There's not a clear boundary, but it's basically the same as when electric power turned from something-only-a-few-rich-could-afford to a utility. At some point, electric power was important enough that it was deemed necessary to impose tight regulation that ensures its availability under fair prices to all citizens (which is what being a utility means to me).
That analogy makes sense. So the discussion should be around what makes Facebook as important as e.g. electric power.
Personally, I think Facebook is more like a lottery or a tabloid than it is like electric power. Citizens are fine, nay, better off without it.
Most arguments e.g. ITT fail to convince me on the critical-ness of Facebook/Google. Instead, the possible harm they cause is brought forward. That's a serious issue, but I don't think it has bearing on the utility analogy.
Google is undeniably important to people. And mainly because they've squeezed themselves into every part of our online lives. Facebook is less so, though it has become a platform that many businesses rely on.
It becomes less clearly undeniable once we separate Google into its constituent parts, though.
Is search a utility? How about email? Webmaster tools for SEM? WiFi thermostats?
It seems unfair to blanket classify Google's offerings as utilities, if many of their products and services are just also-rans.
Again, the concentration of power and the strong competitive position of Google can be problems in themselves, whether or not the products are utilities.
For certain pieces I certainly can make really good arguments.
For example, I can certainly argue that YouTube is a problem.
Google effectively uses search to subsidize YouTube. This chokes off any competitor to YouTube as they simply cannot afford the bandwidth costs (YouTube was hemorrhaging money when Google bought it).
If you forced YouTube to stand on its own, you might actually get some competition to it.
> Google is undeniably important to people. And mainly because they've squeezed themselves into every part of our online lives. Facebook is less so, though it has become a platform that many businesses rely on.
But both of these are free. I don't see how comparing these to the expense of early electric power makes sense. Title II classification for ISPs is currently under threat and surprisingly not the focus of this article.
In fact, the article doesn't mention net neutrality or title II classification once. It is odd that it discusses "platform" monopolies without mentioning "broadband" monopolies.
Facebook and Google only charge fees if you want to advertise through them. And, it is pretty cheap unless you're trying to control a nationwide or worldwide narrative.
If you want to turn these into utilities, you start with a standardization process that allows the public to utilize them as infrastructure.
Like there is an HTML standard, there would likely be a search standard and a social-network/photo-sharing/messaging-platform standard. People would run their own servers that host their own data that connects to these standards, with other companies creating apps that people can use to connect to them.
And make the standards UX friendly, so that it becomes obvious and intuitive enough to use.
The underlying infrastructure is quasi-nationalised in many cases and the private companies sit on top.
For an example look at the big six (largest electricity providers) they all buy electricity from the same place at the effectively the same price, they don't even maintain large parts of their own infrastructure.
The way it was privatised was the worst of all options.
Same with the railways. The companies Joe public interact with don't own the track etc.
It's a truly British solution, what's the worst way? Let's do that.
Perhaps it's the online identity part that needs public infrastructure protected by legal constraints? Let the free market piggy-back on top of that platform then. Same thing goes for loyalty cards.
As these are large organizations involved in a variety of activities, it might be possible to separate the infrastructure parts into a strictly regulated utility. Google Search becoming a utility doesn't have to involve stuff like their hosting services or their hardware products.
It will be hard to get buy-in for an all-or-nothing plan like "Nationalize/Utilitize ${BUSINESS}", because it groups together too much into a single proposition. We "just" need to figure whatever minimum change is needed to protect the infrastructure. I realize this, like most important political problems, doesn't have a trivial solution. It will end up with imperfect compromises that everybody is annoyed with. I'm just suggesting there must be a better, more nuanced way to fix this problem than a Boolean "Convert to utility? (Y/N)".
What we should learn from history is that ICC regulation was crippling (nearly destroying the rail industry in the US: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-nation-der...) and the county has been a lot better off since railroads, air freight, airlines, and yes telcos were deregulated.
That is not to say that we can't regulate things we care about (data privacy, competition, etc). But looking with rose-colored lenses at ICC regulation is foolish. It's the worst sort of regulatory regime: where government bureaucrats are in charge of approving/denying the rail ties that go in the ground and how much can be charged for a ride.
Whatever you wanna say about how regulation worked out for trains in the US, the situation in the early era of US rail was not a good one. It was one of the worst monopolies we've seen and was terrible for the workers.
What bias? As far as I can tell, the author has no connection to the rail industry.[1] As to your other point, the fact that early rail monopolies were bad doesn't mean that ICC-style regulation was good. You can have labor protections, antitrust enforcement, and safety regulations without having the government be involved in deciding how much a trip from Chicago to Milwaukee should cost. There is a reason there was a bipartisan effort to get rid of those regulatory regimes in the 1960s-1990s, and why Europe copied those reforms in the 1980s-2000s.
[1] If you're referring to the fact that the article appears in the American Conservative, merely being conservative is not a "bias." In any event, left-leaning organizations like the Brookings Institute have featured similar coverage: https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-success-of-the-stagge....
I wouldn't call Brookings left-leaning. Centre-right or better neoliberal.
I agree with your points though, the rail situation in the US is awful. Good regulation is hard to do, especially in a place where regulators typically do not share the interests of the people they are in the service of.
I don't think Europe copying the reforms you mention is necessarily a good endorsement of them. The rail situation in (at least Western) Europe has also become quite bad.
> A simple solution is to treat these companies as telcos.
Woh woh woh. Back the truck up. We're not even treating ISPs as common carriers. I mean, we are, but the FCC is about to reverse that.
If that happens we'll all end up paying more for slower access to limited content. It'll be like going back to when you thought AOL or Prodigy was the internet. Even if Google and Facebook were put under greater government supervision, you wouldn't have many options outside of those anyway.
Good luck with the legal work required to patch up Google's physical infrastructure than spans, literally, worldwide. For example, if it owns a cable (or just wavelengths) that connect Asia to Europe, how would you handle that ? It certainly doesn't comply to US territory regulations. Unless of course I'm mistaken which is very likely.
An undersea cable will have to comply with the regulations of the connected countries. A regulator can just come and disconnect the part that runs through their jurisdiction if laws are broken.
> but I'm of the impression that in many European countries, basic infrastructure like energy or transportation or communication links is either very tightly regulated or owned by a non-profit organisation that in turn is owned by either the local consumers, the local authorities, or by the state.
"Europe" is a big place so it's hard to talk in generalities, but this is mostly not true. Europe followed the US's deregulation trend and in many cases European utilities are less regulated than American ones.
The EU electric market is similar to the U.S. As in the US, it is split up into distribution, transmission, and generation components. Distribution tends to be handled through regulated local monopolies or municipal entities, while generation happens in a competitive market: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2016/59351....
Telecom market structure is roughly similar too. Big telecom companies that were previously state-owned were privatized in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. British Telecom and Deutsche Telecom). The biggest difference probably is that the EU has strong rules requiring wholesale access of "local loops" (the wires into peoples' houses). However, this is a smaller difference in practice than in theory. In the big EU countries, unbundling doesn't apply to cable, http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/2-7.pdf. In many EU countries (notably Sweden and Spain, which have among the highest fiber deployment), unbundling doesn't apply to fiber either.
Your awareness is wrong. DNS is, by and large, operated by for profit enterprises. Y combinator, for example, uses Amazon Web Services as their DNS provider.
I 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 opinion piece in a national news paper. You can argue it is a bad idea all you like, but ultimately, Facebook Google and Amazon are building something that scares people. Scared people do stupid things.
If the tech bubble does not look at articles like this as symptoms of a growing scepticism, or a check on the implicit (and often abused) trust of their users, then the backlash is only going to grow. The tech bubble inhabitants will have only themselves to blame.
You can argue all you like about whether people are logically correct to fear the big three. What matters is that they are fearful, and how the bubble reacts to that.
The Graun is ideologically committed to nationalising all the things. It would be noteworthy if they ever called for anything to remain private, let alone be privatised.
Having said that there's a decent case for Google being broken up.
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.
I saw a comment years ago and I dearly wish I'd saved it.
Paraphrased it was "large corporation shit on the floor. Of course it did, that's basically their job, the job of government is to supply the rolled up newspaper and occasionally the mop".
It made me laugh in its succinctness.
Corporations don't exist in isolation, they are part of society and should be answerable to that society, the all regulation is bad thing is as annoying as all regulation is good.
In a democracy fundamentally the corporation should answer to the people.
This isn't new, Standard oil is a good example from a century ago.
Or maybe author wants strong reaction, clickbait or dont care. There will be backslash against tech arrogance, sure, but there is no need for it to involve nationalisation.
You seem to be saying there's a high threshold for extreme opinions to be published in the Guardian, so the fact that someone wrote such an article suggests that there is a genuine problem that needs to be taken seriously. Guardian writers do not live inside a "bubble" and therefore, there is inherent merit to what they write.
I wonder how often you actually read the Guardian, which is famous for having wildly extreme opinion pieces, especially lately. It's basically the Breitbart of the left, a more or less constant stream of clickbait designed to make people angry and upset.
Just a few random headlines I got from clicking around just now:
"Who paid for the leave vote? Brexit should be halted until we know"
"The car has a chokehold on Britain. It’s time to free ourselves: Our insanely inefficient transport system is in thrall to the metal god. Electric vehicles are not the answer"
"Ask Hadley: Why do older people hate millennials so much?"
"Men on the left are sexist. Labour needs to do more to fix it."
"Feminists don't hate men. But it wouldn't matter if we did."
... and in case you think asking the government to take control of internet companies is new idea from Guardian writers:
"The Guardian view on censoring the internet: necessary, but not easy"
"Internet regulation: is it time to rein in the tech giants?"
"The EU is right to take on Facebook, but mere fines don’t protect us from tech giants"
I wouldn't exactly claim the Guardian floats above bubbles and groupthinks.
I read the guardian frequently and long since learned to ignore the clickbait headlines you point out.
Remember that columnists don't write their own headlines. The content of an article is usually more nuanced and thought out that the headline might suggest. Emphasis on the usually.
I don't think comparing the Guardian to britebart is fair at all, but that's another debate.
I'm not saying newspaper columnists don't live in a bubble. Just a different one from the silicon valley / HN bubble. If they get an impression of the tech world that causes them to think nationalisation is the way forward, the tech world needs to respond to that. Undermining the publication or author (as opposed to considering their argument, and separating it into causes - surveillance capitalism - and proposed effects - nationalisation) does not change the fact people are rightly suspicious of Facebook/Google/Amazon etc and they will react accordingly.
> "Ask Hadley: Why do older people hate millennials so much?"
Disclosure: Guardian reader here.
I remember reading the Hadley Freemen [1] article cited here, finding it amusing at the time, so googled it [2] to remind myself what it said. On re-reading, I still find it quite amusing. It includes observations such as “Older people have always found youngsters irritating, self-entitled and arrogant, because young people are irritating, self-entitled and arrogant. That’s part of the joy of being young, and part of the compensation of getting older is you can snuggle on down in your smug eiderdown of condescension about The Youth Today.” The concluding para says “So, in conclusion, don’t feel attacked, young people: older people were always grumpy with the younger generation. And to all the 55- to 64-year-olds out there? Maybe give all that boob Googling a rest, OK? Take a tip from your kids on this”.
To me, the article is a plea for tolerance of the young by the old, pointing out the quirks of both generations.
More widely, I’ll agree that The Guardian does have regular columns written by activists such as George Monbiot [3], and its writers may disagree with or explicitly criticise some of The Guardian’s peer rivals, such as the Daily Mail, The Telegraph, etc. But, personally, I can’t accept it as the Breitbart of the Left.
The Guardian has been a mainstream newspaper for over 100 years. It is not a fringe publication, no matter how much you disagree with everything in it.
I'm sure that says more about your political leanings than it does about the Guardian (as if it even had one unified ideology behind it, which it doesn't).
Please. The Guardian is establishment liberal media. The opinions they publish aren't even that extreme. There are plenty of journals that are far more radical and much further to the left.
It's funny how conservative HN looks when posts like this appear.
The opinions they publish are fantastically extreme and often deeply offensive. The Guardian constantly pumps out honest to god racism, sexism and other deplorable viewpoints. The only reason you don't believe it's comparable to Breitbart is you haven't sat down and done an honest comparison.
My post simply lists out Guardian headlines for all to see. It originally had something like +15 points and now it's sitting at zero, apparently it touched a nerve with some people who can't stand the idea that the Guardian and Breitbart might be comparable.
Here are some more headlines from their opinion writers, just to disabuse anyone of the notion that the Guardian is somehow not a bastion of radical extremism. They hate white people, they hate democracy, they hate men, they hate voters, they hate tea and Thomas the Tank Engine. They make money out of peddling hatred.
"The budget should be less macho - how about it boys"
"Why do women lie more than men? Because we're nicer"
"The Whiteness Project will make you wince. Because white people can be rather awful"
"Sexists are scared of Mad Max because it's a call to dismantle patriarchies"
"Are you too white, rich, able-bodied and straight to be a feminist"
"Tea is a national disgrace: Britain's favourite beverage is a boring relic of our colonial past."
"The tyrannical world of Thomas the Tank Engine. Kids love this little dipstick of an engine ... but what a chilling isle Sodor is."
"What if men had periods? It's a question worth posing"
"Democracy is a religion that has failed the poor"
"The country is screwed, the electorate is evil, but here are nine reasons to be cheerful"
"The week in patriarchy: take a moment to step away for survival"
"Did you weep watching Wonder Woman? You weren't alone"
"Remember when men and women could be friends? Republicans don't"
Seriously? I really shouldn't have to explain this. If you don't see any extreme or unreasonable views there, I hate to tell you this, but you're probably unreasonable and extreme yourself, without even realising it.
Just try a simple thought experiment: invert the genders or skin colours in the headlines and see how they sound.
"The Blackness Project will make you wince. Because black people can be really awful"
Does that not sound extremely racist to you?
"Why the mediocre woman's days may be numbered"
It's a statement of pure sexism. The article, in case you care, is about how much men suck. Try publishing the same article with men and women swapped around and see what your progressive Facebook friends think.
"The country is screwed, the electorate is evil, but here are nine reasons to be cheerful"
I don't think it is possible to make a more extreme statement than this. You can't go bigger than the entire country (short of going to the entire world I guess), and you can't go worse than "evil". So describing the entire voting population of an entire country as evil is pretty much the definition of extreme.
Note that thinking democracy is awful and ordinary people around you are evil has a historical correlation with murderous extremism. It's like the classical warning sign that someone may be about to do something really bad.
Things are awful because someone wrote an opinion piece in the newspaper?
I heartily disagree that anyone should "detect a consensus" from leftists preaching expropriation. That's just an ordinary activity for them. Nick Srnicek may be shouting a bit louder than most from his pulpit in The Guardian, but that has as little to do with truth as his article has to do with reason.
Google, Facebook, and Amazon are just fashionable targets for his emotional appeals for a more powerful state. He doesn't write about Monsanto in this article, even though they have an ever tightening control over the food we eat, because they aren't as well understood by the masses.
That expression is a cynical look at the relationship of the individual to the State: so long as my belly is full and I am entertained I'm all right Jack.
“… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses”
> That expression is a cynical look at the relationship of the individual to the State: so long as my belly is full and I am entertained I'm all right Jack.
Wow. You just describe Sweden O.o I'm mighty impressed how this saying fits perfectly into the context of the modern Swedish culture!
> I heartily disagree that anyone should "detect a consensus" from leftists preaching expropriation. That's just an ordinary activity for them.
Have you missed the conservatives who both argue against net neutrality while claiming that Google (and others) are censoring content because they're too big to be just considered one actor (of many)?
Nationalizing a company would definitely be a left-wing endeavor, but to claim that "leftists" are the ones preaching about Googles unchallenged dominance is just misleading.
He did briefly touch on how Monsanto was using similar practices in the agriculture business. I think most readers can make the implied connection there.
1. What is the issue? (if multiple issues, start over one at a time please)
2. Once you decide the role of Government (which is still in flux), can it even apply to this issue?
3. Does it serve the public interest to nationalize this company to address that issue?
So the answer is no. We don't have a working definition of the role of government in the US, so there's no point continuing. It's rather simple to me, but I'm conservative (you don't disrupt livelihoods aimlessly in hopes it all works out).
The idea that you would break up a company to address an information aggregation problem is idiotic. I can see how this pans out....now we have N companies with the information. Some of the issues can't be addressed with brute solutions from the past...or it wouldn't be something to talk about at all.
The new problem here is that the centralization is pretty much the core value of these companies. Breaking them up would destroy that value. A way around is to first standardize and open all the protocols on which they internally operate, and then split them. But you could say that the standardization is in a way an indirect nationalization. If email was run by a company, it would easily be amongst the richest companies in the world.
> Secondly, all social networks should be required to enable social graph portability — the ability to export your lists of friends from one network to another. Again Instagram is the perfect example: the one-time photo-filtering app launched its network off the back of Twitter by enabling the wholesale import of your Twitter social graph. And, after it was acquired by Facebook, Instagram has only accelerated its growth by continually importing your Facebook network. Today all social networks have long since made this impossible, making it that much more difficult for competitors to arise.
Amazon sells products at a loss in order to put competitors out of business.
Google disables accounts, with no notification / justification, if someone's opinion offends them. Again with no justification / warning, they alter search traffic to/away form companies, with the ability to choose winners and looser in the 'free' market. I dont know how true it is, but I heard they were suppressing positive search results and bringing results with soldiers pointing guns to peoples heads during the arab spring to destabilize governments.
Facebook - well zuckerburg's manifesto on deciding whose words are heard or suppressed scares the shit out of me.
On top of all this, the big tech companies are avoiding taxes and concentrating jobs to small geographic areas. They are using their power/capital/lawyers to monopolize their respective markets and I feel we are starting to see the consequences of that more and more
Post on another site then, or post it on your site.
But it doesn't have the audience you'd argue, well that's how new sites gain popularity, because things are seen/said there that exist no where else. And as far as audience goes, the controlled content argument is not new, we've had that for years with TV networks/channels in terms of who had a platform and what entertainment you had to select from.
To take it further, something like YouTube was just cable public access television taken to an extreme. Now YouTube wants to be mainstreamish, so they're largely doing what MTV, or History Channel did in the late 90's, taking off or downplaying the unique niche content that got them noticed and people originally went there for and promoting the mainstream "reality" shows, etc.
Yes, this is the case, yes, this is the natural progression of things when sites become more mainstream, corporate, and focused on revenue (especially advertiser revenue). But this also leaves an opening for someone else to provide a platform for what is lost to go to. YouTube funny enough replaced MTV as the go to to watch music videos, so in a way I guess it was good MTV had a bunch of high rating low common denominator appeal reality shows to lean on when that happened.
The beauty of the Internet is that there will always be the sub-communities and places for people to go to who have other non-mainstream interests or views. FB, Google, etc are now mainstream, but largely that's because they're replacing the media people used to consume over legacy platforms like TV and Radio.
I agree with your broader point but The Guardian is a consistently far-left, pro-large(r)-government publication, so it actually doesn't take much for them to publish something like this; the suggestion is right up their alley.
Why don't we just nationalize the compute power? There is a billion dollar barrier to entry to offer services like Youtube for free. Nobody is going to do it because they don't have a giant Ad company to subsidize it.
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.
Just rip them apart and start going after them for anti-trust reasons. Instead of going after Apple for harming consumers with their ebook BS (actually, in addition to) go after Amazons monopoly on the space.
A further alternative - require that certain businesses that reach this level of monopolistic influence transition into some kind of Public Benefit Corporation.
I don't quite know what this would look like, but I'm thinking of some kind of framework where we develop controls and accountability mechanisms on a company-by-company basis.
The scary thing is that you'll find conservatives are going to come on board with this, if you pay attention to ruminations recently. They're very concerned about censorship. I am as well, but I'm too libertarian to want the government to be the solution.
Facebook in particular should really be governed by its users, whether that's indirectly under the public ownership of a democratic state, or directly through some built-in form of democratic governance. Nobody should have so much power without some form of accountability.
FB, Google, Amazon should be split on many levels. The companies, the datacenters, the data. Especially the user data. The new system should federated, like email and SMS, with account and user data portability.
There should be public access to the unique datasets these companies collected from user interactions - all done in a privacy conscious way, for the betterment of sciences and society.
We can't let this valuable, unique data (that only exists in the largest companies of their field) benefit only those companies. It's our data, ultimately.
Flashback time, anybody remember when AIG insured multiple claims on the same pieces of property which were overvalued and unable to be paid for by an individual plebe's income, and got Congress to use everyone else's money to pay for this business practice by having the Treasury/Fed buy shares of AIG?
And then AIG used the surplus floated capital to give bonuses to the executives and traders, because that quarter happened to be awesome, numerically.
And then AIG was part of a lawsuit that sued the Treasury/Fed under the expropriation clause of the 5th Amendment because the value of the shares was not deemed correct?
Well. ultimately the Fed made like an 80 billion profit, 1/12th of what they make from annual tax collection, so if they keep that up maybe they won't even levy income taxes to fund the Federal Government's general operations anymore.
With that logic, nationalize all the things because I can't stand paying for the general operation of this plunder.
Nationalizing doesn't mean the decisions won't be for the benefit of a single person, a single person can manipulate them regardless, and the people will support it.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadHowever 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 government. You're no longer selling product through a third-party storefront, you're selling through the US government. Google and Facebook, two of the most important information gateways, are now controlled by the US Congress and Senate. All that information on people all over the world is now in the hands of the US government.
The very thought of this terrifies me.
But you raise another important point. What happens to all the infrastructure and personnel that Google or Amazon have outside the US? Ireland and the Netherlands probably don't feel the same way about hosting a branch of the US Government as they do about a global corporation, and vice versa the US government wouldn't want the same level of scrutiny from foreign governments that Google does. Would European countries attempt to nationalize their local Facebook datacenters? Would it effectively break those colossi apart along national borders?
I would also argue that they are US companies first and global companies second. Their main focus is always USA and their spirit is also very American for the good and the bad. Strategy for the rest of the world is made in the USA. All important decision are made in the USA. Most investments are made in the USA and also the profits go to the USA.
This is nor good or bad but the point is that those are not global companies.
[1] https://brandongaille.com/facebook-user-statistics-by-countr... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-...
Think about it like that. BMW sells most of their cars outside of Germany but still is a German company that operates world wide. And this is very true for most big companies today.
I think governments are inefficient and corrupt, but companies are absolutely free to do as they please when deciding how to change products that affect society. Also, there is much more spying freedom in the private sector. This is why there should be a mechanism to oversee what happens with our data.
[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/07/20/revealed-worl...
Clearly it's not just about revenue numbers here.
Walmart, Toyota, Apple, do not have entrenching networks that lead to a monopoly. You can just as easily go to Target, buy a Honda, or get an Android phone
Once freed from the prime directive of collecting increasing amounts of data to improve ad tracking, operating and development costs should be much lower than they are now, too.
If people had to pay a monthly fee for search or social media, it would very quickly not be the only option anymore
There's no such thing in Facebook or Google. Managers dictate policy and if you don't like it you can leave/stop using their service.
Democracy is nice and all but the representative democracy most of the world is ruled by puts people who are good at getting elected in power rather than people who are good at running a country. Google/Facebook don't have that problem, their leaders are there on merit rather than their charisma, popularity or the lies they told.
Also, Google/Facebook are very much regulated by data protection authorities in the countries they operate in.
Governments don't deserve your trust. The same goes for business. Trusting either is is a terrible idea, because power corrupts wherever it accumulates. While public and private use power in different ways, they are both a serious threat when they are allowed to act without regular check on their power. The solution isn't to pick sides. Power needs to be diluted regularly, and that happens when government and business work as checks on each other. It is the conflict itself that keeps power from accumulating.
> Can you even imagine how their business would work when these are state entities?
They already are, in all but name. Remember Prism?
> All that information on people all over the world is now in the hands of the US government.
That ship already sailed, unfortunately. I agree that this is a terrifying problem, but I'm not sure how to fix it. However, consider this: right now there are effectively no restraints on that power. Nationalizing/utilifying Google et al at least introduces the opportunity to add regulation by bringing the problem into public scrutiny.
Concentrated power is also concentrated responsibility.
It's the lack of individual power for any one member that makes groups (governments, companies, political organizations, etc) untrustworthy. When nobody feels like they have enough individual power to do what they consider right they also do not feel responsible for doing wrong. They're just doing their jobs.
I hate to tell you this, but that barn door was already left open a long time ago.
But he forgot to ask the question he's trying to answer.
This article doesn't even make sense.
On the other hand, nationalization is a terrible idea for so many reason. It also goes against the fabric of the American economonic system.
I know it’s opinion, but hard to believe that the guardian published this with how poorly written it is.
First of all, "Nationalizing" corporations is not something that free societies do.
Second, the effect of this would be to further stifle competition from smaller businesses. Which is also not something that free societies do.
I question the motives of the author.
What is "freedom"? Market competition The way Amazon, Uber etc have been set up, using hundreds of millions in investment, able to operate against smaller competitors for literally years without breaking even until the opposition is crushed and consumers are herded into being customers... is that freedom? Maybe for the already established wealthy. For everyone else it's an unfair advantage. There is no freedom for the average Joe to start a publishing an distribution powerhouse
I agree it's a terrible idea to nationalize these companies, but citing 'freedom' as the reason why is not why it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea because it would lead to excessive bureaucracy, higher prices and is unlikely to benefit the competition much. It might help governments get those companies to pay some tax though.
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 major industries, by outlawing private citizens from owning productive enterprises in those industries, and have everyone else accept their definitions as equally valid as a classical liberal's.
Think about it practically for a moment: what is the government going to do when private citizens in another country fire up thousands of servers and begin providing web services to the people within the government's jurisdiction? Put up a firewall? Start raiding anyone running a relay node that bypasses the firewall? How is that congruent with any reasonable definition of freedom?
We can pretend that we're frameless and judging all perspectives as equally valid, but in actuality that will never happen, as it would make any sort of meaningful communication impossible. Someone could argue war is peace, slavery is freedom, etc, and there would be no way to reject their statements as unequivocally wrong. We would be uttering words to each other that mean completely different things to different people, because we would no longer follow the basic convention of language, which is that the widely observed and long established definition trumps the unorthodox one.
All nationalising would do is give the government a leg-up in having an existing user base. In practice government inertia would lead to the service atrophying and becoming outdated and overburdened with bureaucratic controls and costs. Page & Brin, Bezos and Zuckerberg (or someone new) would each raise capital, start their own competing services and in a few years time we'd be back where we started.
This whole idea is so utterly misconceived and pointless it blows my mind how many people here are trying to justify or defend it. Unless you actively regulated to prohibit competing private services, it would be doomed from he start and if such regulation was enforced - literally banning other search engines including Bing, banning other social networks, banning any other online retail businesses, the lurch towards dystopianism would create a very different world to the one we live in. Even China hadn't come even close to anything like that.
Uh... no offense intended, that's a failure of your comprehension abilities, and not my responsibility to satisfy. Your confusion amounts to "why is the sky blue?"
Because it's blue, Billy. Because it's blue.
But aside from that, 3 people at Google get to effectively dictate what the world will see on the Internet via the top 10 on the search. 1 guy at Facebook gets to dictate what is on my Facebook page. (I certainly don't get any choice in the matter, beyond banning people) This sounds a lot like a dictatorship, and is this what a free society does? Might a free society decide that it is in the society's best interest to have social media be governed by elected officials, and to not be scientifically designed (via A/B testing) to be addictive?
Rediculous, nobody is forcing you to use Google or Facebook.
There is no freedom of choice in a monopoly where opting out equals social death.
But: (a) particularly with regards to social networking, the social pressure to use walled-garden sites like Facebook can be very, very strong (b) if you're a Normal Person(tm), it can be hard to know what else to do other than use the same services that everyone else uses and that are being actively marketed to you.
Sure, at the individual level, using Google and Facebook services (as I myself do) is still a voluntary, consensual transaction, but there may well be societal-level effects that look fairly close to those of traditional monopolies.
That's the example I had in mind when writing my comment. The utilities WERE nationalized, however they were de-regulated in recent years, and the market has not really recovered from when they were handed government endorsed monopolies.
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.
This is the same logic that people use to argue against the Estate tax.
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?
I meant where do we draw the line?
there are so many reasons it would literally fill hours of political philosophy and economics debate.
and has. These debates have been had. At length, and for many years.
Sure it is.
America does not hold a monopoly on freedom.
The current government in my state won on a platform of not privatising the main electrical utility.
If you spend any real time exploring the concept of freedom and how to measure it, America is in fact the most free nation in the world.
That doesn't mean America holds a monopoly on freedom, it means America is setting the example that others follow, and will continue to until another nation offers it's citizens quantifiably more freedom than America does. And examining the current geo-political climates, that isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Okay, this is a terrible opener. Ello never appeared to have any greater traction than as a hipster fad, much less posing a material threat to Facebook.
Also, you can not nationalise any of the companies listed, because they are not British nor of Commonwealth country origin. Perhaps we could nationalize, but that's not really Trump's style.
I can't speak for anyone else, but their move to take VC money instead of my money is largely what killed their traction for me.
The thing both have in common is that they are media destinations, and are deadly afraid of the the power Google and Facebook have to direct traffic.
Not sure why Amazon is included in this though..
[1] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/07/28/report-steve-bannon...
Note that this piece appears in The Guardian. I don't know how it works in the US, but I'm of the impression that in many European countries, basic infrastructure like energy or transportation or communication links is either very tightly regulated or owned by a non-profit organisation that in turn is owned by either the local consumers, the local authorities, or by the state.
DNS operates in this way, as far as I'm aware.
Can we move in this direction with things like search (Google) and personal publishing (Facebook)?
Perhaps if the tech community delivers the software, and the societies themselves start a serious discussion about it and delivered the users?
It just sounds like a great idea all around.
and this is assuming that the whole "lets beg Mr. Zuck to pretty pretty please stop doing that whole business thing and start serving us for free, we'd appreciate it" thing works out.
I mean, G+ couldn't do it, and Google tried damn hard. If they can't do it at their scale, who can?
You're making it appear as through National Security Letters were public, which they very much are not.
> "Not that I'm implying there isn't already secret requests for data"
I appreciate that you consider it worth reiterating the point about national security since I had only glossed over it. But I don't appreciate you manipulating my comment to suggest that I was ignoring that point entirely when I quite clearly did raise it.
The issue here isn't federated protocols (though that is something we could benefit from in other domains) but rather the dependance on a centralised archives in the cloud. Most people simply don't care or even aren't aware of self hosting solutions. And those that are aware often choose cloud solutions because it's cheaper and/or less hassle than self-hosting. Federated protocols doesn't fix this (just look at how hard it is to set up a mail server compared to running Google Mail).
Plus in the case of Facebook you have network effects where a social network is only as good as the size of the member base.
But with IPFS, [1], (which is a federated protocol) you can "host" a HTML file or video or any content without any difficulty yourself.
I'm not sure if it would be suitable for the functionality in Facebook though (sharing stuff with friends only), sending messages, so that's part of the reason why we need more research.
The network effect of Facebook can be mitigated by introducing laws that open up competition, like the telecommunications acts, which opened up the market for telephony.
[1] https://ipfs.io/
However as much as we could argue the differences between IPFS and the plethora of other hosted solutions all day and night, but ultimately it would be a moot argument because as cool as IPFS is - and I do think it's a genuinely interesting platform - it is still only a platform for serving static content. So it's definitely not suitable for Facebook-like functionality. In that regard IPFS is more akin to Amazon S3 than it is Facebook.
> The network effect of Facebook can be mitigated by introducing laws that open up competition, like the telecommunications acts, which opened up the market for telephony.
While I can't see that happening - or at least not inside my professional life time - it is an interesting point. We've seen monopolies split up before and while Facebook is a long way from being a monopoly it would be interesting to see which line they needed to cross before the government stepped in.
The name might be slightly misleading (InterPlanetary FileSystem) but IPFS has more functionality that just hosting files. Two that comes to mind is pubsub which enables you to have a distributed publish/subscribe network to send messages globally and "dialing directly to nodes" which enables you to send/receive messages directly to peers without having to use location-based addressing.
While the primitives in IPFS are simple, they enable you to build powerful architectures, such as CRDTs. So it wouldn't be impossible to re-implement something like a social network on top of IPFS.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers working on IPFS
Personally, I think Facebook is more like a lottery or a tabloid than it is like electric power. Citizens are fine, nay, better off without it.
Most arguments e.g. ITT fail to convince me on the critical-ness of Facebook/Google. Instead, the possible harm they cause is brought forward. That's a serious issue, but I don't think it has bearing on the utility analogy.
Is search a utility? How about email? Webmaster tools for SEM? WiFi thermostats?
It seems unfair to blanket classify Google's offerings as utilities, if many of their products and services are just also-rans.
Again, the concentration of power and the strong competitive position of Google can be problems in themselves, whether or not the products are utilities.
For example, I can certainly argue that YouTube is a problem.
Google effectively uses search to subsidize YouTube. This chokes off any competitor to YouTube as they simply cannot afford the bandwidth costs (YouTube was hemorrhaging money when Google bought it).
If you forced YouTube to stand on its own, you might actually get some competition to it.
But both of these are free. I don't see how comparing these to the expense of early electric power makes sense. Title II classification for ISPs is currently under threat and surprisingly not the focus of this article.
In fact, the article doesn't mention net neutrality or title II classification once. It is odd that it discusses "platform" monopolies without mentioning "broadband" monopolies.
Facebook and Google only charge fees if you want to advertise through them. And, it is pretty cheap unless you're trying to control a nationwide or worldwide narrative.
Like there is an HTML standard, there would likely be a search standard and a social-network/photo-sharing/messaging-platform standard. People would run their own servers that host their own data that connects to these standards, with other companies creating apps that people can use to connect to them.
And make the standards UX friendly, so that it becomes obvious and intuitive enough to use.
The underlying infrastructure is quasi-nationalised in many cases and the private companies sit on top.
For an example look at the big six (largest electricity providers) they all buy electricity from the same place at the effectively the same price, they don't even maintain large parts of their own infrastructure.
The way it was privatised was the worst of all options.
Same with the railways. The companies Joe public interact with don't own the track etc.
It's a truly British solution, what's the worst way? Let's do that.
As these are large organizations involved in a variety of activities, it might be possible to separate the infrastructure parts into a strictly regulated utility. Google Search becoming a utility doesn't have to involve stuff like their hosting services or their hardware products.
It will be hard to get buy-in for an all-or-nothing plan like "Nationalize/Utilitize ${BUSINESS}", because it groups together too much into a single proposition. We "just" need to figure whatever minimum change is needed to protect the infrastructure. I realize this, like most important political problems, doesn't have a trivial solution. It will end up with imperfect compromises that everybody is annoyed with. I'm just suggesting there must be a better, more nuanced way to fix this problem than a Boolean "Convert to utility? (Y/N)".
1. Universities and government agencies create the protocols and the software.
2. Companies create just the hardware.
3. Infrastructure is run and maintained by the government with the help of companies.
We could learn something from history. See e.g. the Mann-Elkins Act (1910), [1]. And the telecommunications acts, [2], [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann%E2%80%93Elkins_Act
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
That is not to say that we can't regulate things we care about (data privacy, competition, etc). But looking with rose-colored lenses at ICC regulation is foolish. It's the worst sort of regulatory regime: where government bureaucrats are in charge of approving/denying the rail ties that go in the ground and how much can be charged for a ride.
Whatever you wanna say about how regulation worked out for trains in the US, the situation in the early era of US rail was not a good one. It was one of the worst monopolies we've seen and was terrible for the workers.
[1] If you're referring to the fact that the article appears in the American Conservative, merely being conservative is not a "bias." In any event, left-leaning organizations like the Brookings Institute have featured similar coverage: https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-success-of-the-stagge....
I agree with your points though, the rail situation in the US is awful. Good regulation is hard to do, especially in a place where regulators typically do not share the interests of the people they are in the service of.
I don't think Europe copying the reforms you mention is necessarily a good endorsement of them. The rail situation in (at least Western) Europe has also become quite bad.
Woh woh woh. Back the truck up. We're not even treating ISPs as common carriers. I mean, we are, but the FCC is about to reverse that.
If that happens we'll all end up paying more for slower access to limited content. It'll be like going back to when you thought AOL or Prodigy was the internet. Even if Google and Facebook were put under greater government supervision, you wouldn't have many options outside of those anyway.
"Europe" is a big place so it's hard to talk in generalities, but this is mostly not true. Europe followed the US's deregulation trend and in many cases European utilities are less regulated than American ones.
The EU electric market is similar to the U.S. As in the US, it is split up into distribution, transmission, and generation components. Distribution tends to be handled through regulated local monopolies or municipal entities, while generation happens in a competitive market: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2016/59351....
Telecom market structure is roughly similar too. Big telecom companies that were previously state-owned were privatized in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. British Telecom and Deutsche Telecom). The biggest difference probably is that the EU has strong rules requiring wholesale access of "local loops" (the wires into peoples' houses). However, this is a smaller difference in practice than in theory. In the big EU countries, unbundling doesn't apply to cable, http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/2-7.pdf. In many EU countries (notably Sweden and Spain, which have among the highest fiber deployment), unbundling doesn't apply to fiber either.
Your awareness is wrong. DNS is, by and large, operated by for profit enterprises. Y combinator, for example, uses Amazon Web Services as their DNS provider.
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 opinion piece in a national news paper. You can argue it is a bad idea all you like, but ultimately, Facebook Google and Amazon are building something that scares people. Scared people do stupid things.
If the tech bubble does not look at articles like this as symptoms of a growing scepticism, or a check on the implicit (and often abused) trust of their users, then the backlash is only going to grow. The tech bubble inhabitants will have only themselves to blame.
You can argue all you like about whether people are logically correct to fear the big three. What matters is that they are fearful, and how the bubble reacts to that.
Having said that there's a decent case for Google being broken up.
Paraphrased it was "large corporation shit on the floor. Of course it did, that's basically their job, the job of government is to supply the rolled up newspaper and occasionally the mop".
It made me laugh in its succinctness.
Corporations don't exist in isolation, they are part of society and should be answerable to that society, the all regulation is bad thing is as annoying as all regulation is good.
In a democracy fundamentally the corporation should answer to the people.
This isn't new, Standard oil is a good example from a century ago.
I wonder how often you actually read the Guardian, which is famous for having wildly extreme opinion pieces, especially lately. It's basically the Breitbart of the left, a more or less constant stream of clickbait designed to make people angry and upset.
Just a few random headlines I got from clicking around just now:
"Who paid for the leave vote? Brexit should be halted until we know"
"The car has a chokehold on Britain. It’s time to free ourselves: Our insanely inefficient transport system is in thrall to the metal god. Electric vehicles are not the answer"
"Ask Hadley: Why do older people hate millennials so much?"
"Men on the left are sexist. Labour needs to do more to fix it."
"Feminists don't hate men. But it wouldn't matter if we did."
... and in case you think asking the government to take control of internet companies is new idea from Guardian writers:
"The Guardian view on censoring the internet: necessary, but not easy"
"Internet regulation: is it time to rein in the tech giants?"
"The EU is right to take on Facebook, but mere fines don’t protect us from tech giants"
I wouldn't exactly claim the Guardian floats above bubbles and groupthinks.
Remember that columnists don't write their own headlines. The content of an article is usually more nuanced and thought out that the headline might suggest. Emphasis on the usually.
I don't think comparing the Guardian to britebart is fair at all, but that's another debate.
I'm not saying newspaper columnists don't live in a bubble. Just a different one from the silicon valley / HN bubble. If they get an impression of the tech world that causes them to think nationalisation is the way forward, the tech world needs to respond to that. Undermining the publication or author (as opposed to considering their argument, and separating it into causes - surveillance capitalism - and proposed effects - nationalisation) does not change the fact people are rightly suspicious of Facebook/Google/Amazon etc and they will react accordingly.
Disclosure: Guardian reader here. I remember reading the Hadley Freemen [1] article cited here, finding it amusing at the time, so googled it [2] to remind myself what it said. On re-reading, I still find it quite amusing. It includes observations such as “Older people have always found youngsters irritating, self-entitled and arrogant, because young people are irritating, self-entitled and arrogant. That’s part of the joy of being young, and part of the compensation of getting older is you can snuggle on down in your smug eiderdown of condescension about The Youth Today.” The concluding para says “So, in conclusion, don’t feel attacked, young people: older people were always grumpy with the younger generation. And to all the 55- to 64-year-olds out there? Maybe give all that boob Googling a rest, OK? Take a tip from your kids on this”. To me, the article is a plea for tolerance of the young by the old, pointing out the quirks of both generations.
More widely, I’ll agree that The Guardian does have regular columns written by activists such as George Monbiot [3], and its writers may disagree with or explicitly criticise some of The Guardian’s peer rivals, such as the Daily Mail, The Telegraph, etc. But, personally, I can’t accept it as the Breitbart of the Left.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadley_Freeman
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2017/aug/21/ask-hadley-o...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Monbiot
That's ridiculous.
The Guardian has been a mainstream newspaper for over 100 years. It is not a fringe publication, no matter how much you disagree with everything in it.
I'm sure that says more about your political leanings than it does about the Guardian (as if it even had one unified ideology behind it, which it doesn't).
Please. The Guardian is establishment liberal media. The opinions they publish aren't even that extreme. There are plenty of journals that are far more radical and much further to the left.
It's funny how conservative HN looks when posts like this appear.
My post simply lists out Guardian headlines for all to see. It originally had something like +15 points and now it's sitting at zero, apparently it touched a nerve with some people who can't stand the idea that the Guardian and Breitbart might be comparable.
Here are some more headlines from their opinion writers, just to disabuse anyone of the notion that the Guardian is somehow not a bastion of radical extremism. They hate white people, they hate democracy, they hate men, they hate voters, they hate tea and Thomas the Tank Engine. They make money out of peddling hatred.
"The budget should be less macho - how about it boys"
"Why do women lie more than men? Because we're nicer"
"The Whiteness Project will make you wince. Because white people can be rather awful"
"Sexists are scared of Mad Max because it's a call to dismantle patriarchies"
"Are you too white, rich, able-bodied and straight to be a feminist"
"Tea is a national disgrace: Britain's favourite beverage is a boring relic of our colonial past."
"The tyrannical world of Thomas the Tank Engine. Kids love this little dipstick of an engine ... but what a chilling isle Sodor is."
"What if men had periods? It's a question worth posing"
"Democracy is a religion that has failed the poor"
"The country is screwed, the electorate is evil, but here are nine reasons to be cheerful"
"The week in patriarchy: take a moment to step away for survival"
"Did you weep watching Wonder Woman? You weren't alone"
"Remember when men and women could be friends? Republicans don't"
"Why the mediocre male's days may be numbered"
etc etc.
Just try a simple thought experiment: invert the genders or skin colours in the headlines and see how they sound.
"The Blackness Project will make you wince. Because black people can be really awful"
Does that not sound extremely racist to you?
"Why the mediocre woman's days may be numbered"
It's a statement of pure sexism. The article, in case you care, is about how much men suck. Try publishing the same article with men and women swapped around and see what your progressive Facebook friends think.
"The country is screwed, the electorate is evil, but here are nine reasons to be cheerful"
I don't think it is possible to make a more extreme statement than this. You can't go bigger than the entire country (short of going to the entire world I guess), and you can't go worse than "evil". So describing the entire voting population of an entire country as evil is pretty much the definition of extreme.
Note that thinking democracy is awful and ordinary people around you are evil has a historical correlation with murderous extremism. It's like the classical warning sign that someone may be about to do something really bad.
I heartily disagree that anyone should "detect a consensus" from leftists preaching expropriation. That's just an ordinary activity for them. Nick Srnicek may be shouting a bit louder than most from his pulpit in The Guardian, but that has as little to do with truth as his article has to do with reason.
Google, Facebook, and Amazon are just fashionable targets for his emotional appeals for a more powerful state. He doesn't write about Monsanto in this article, even though they have an ever tightening control over the food we eat, because they aren't as well understood by the masses.
Bread and circuses. This is the circus part.
That expression is a cynical look at the relationship of the individual to the State: so long as my belly is full and I am entertained I'm all right Jack.
“… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses”
So, no, this is not the circus part.
Wow. You just describe Sweden O.o I'm mighty impressed how this saying fits perfectly into the context of the modern Swedish culture!
Granted, I'd completely accept a quote from The Dude as a legitimate response: "Yeah, well you know... that's just, like, your opinion, man."
It is.
Have you missed the conservatives who both argue against net neutrality while claiming that Google (and others) are censoring content because they're too big to be just considered one actor (of many)?
Nationalizing a company would definitely be a left-wing endeavor, but to claim that "leftists" are the ones preaching about Googles unchallenged dominance is just misleading.
I think perhaps you should look up what "bread and circus" actually means, because it's not what you think it is.
Perhaps like in the matrix where Neo was in his own little mind trap where he was the "One" while the machines still had control.
or inception where your in a dream inside of a dream...
...maybe arguing about this BS is the circus deju to keep people from really getting involved and actually effecting change in the world.
They really aren't. Far larger, more entrenched monopolies have existed before; when they needed to be resolved, they were simply broken up.
Suggesting to nationalize them is not only entirely unnecessary, it contradicts decades of experience in dealing with monopolies.
IMHO, nationalizations are either bail-outs or power-grabs.
They really are? The back and forth is tedious.
The questions I have are,
1. What is the issue? (if multiple issues, start over one at a time please) 2. Once you decide the role of Government (which is still in flux), can it even apply to this issue? 3. Does it serve the public interest to nationalize this company to address that issue?
So the answer is no. We don't have a working definition of the role of government in the US, so there's no point continuing. It's rather simple to me, but I'm conservative (you don't disrupt livelihoods aimlessly in hopes it all works out).
The idea that you would break up a company to address an information aggregation problem is idiotic. I can see how this pans out....now we have N companies with the information. Some of the issues can't be addressed with brute solutions from the past...or it wouldn't be something to talk about at all.
advertising with communication.
privacy with contact management
web index with advertising.
content creation and distribution with advertising marketplace.
product distribution with product marketplace with eCommerce store.
Data storage with advertising
...the list goes one.
1. identity management
2. data storage & privacy individual, group, and public level.
3. Data graphs
4. open standards for apis with an api broker
5.
https://stratechery.com/2017/manifestos-and-monopolies/
> Secondly, all social networks should be required to enable social graph portability — the ability to export your lists of friends from one network to another. Again Instagram is the perfect example: the one-time photo-filtering app launched its network off the back of Twitter by enabling the wholesale import of your Twitter social graph. And, after it was acquired by Facebook, Instagram has only accelerated its growth by continually importing your Facebook network. Today all social networks have long since made this impossible, making it that much more difficult for competitors to arise.
Google disables accounts, with no notification / justification, if someone's opinion offends them. Again with no justification / warning, they alter search traffic to/away form companies, with the ability to choose winners and looser in the 'free' market. I dont know how true it is, but I heard they were suppressing positive search results and bringing results with soldiers pointing guns to peoples heads during the arab spring to destabilize governments.
Facebook - well zuckerburg's manifesto on deciding whose words are heard or suppressed scares the shit out of me.
On top of all this, the big tech companies are avoiding taxes and concentrating jobs to small geographic areas. They are using their power/capital/lawyers to monopolize their respective markets and I feel we are starting to see the consequences of that more and more
Lower prices are good for consumers.
But it doesn't have the audience you'd argue, well that's how new sites gain popularity, because things are seen/said there that exist no where else. And as far as audience goes, the controlled content argument is not new, we've had that for years with TV networks/channels in terms of who had a platform and what entertainment you had to select from.
To take it further, something like YouTube was just cable public access television taken to an extreme. Now YouTube wants to be mainstreamish, so they're largely doing what MTV, or History Channel did in the late 90's, taking off or downplaying the unique niche content that got them noticed and people originally went there for and promoting the mainstream "reality" shows, etc.
Yes, this is the case, yes, this is the natural progression of things when sites become more mainstream, corporate, and focused on revenue (especially advertiser revenue). But this also leaves an opening for someone else to provide a platform for what is lost to go to. YouTube funny enough replaced MTV as the go to to watch music videos, so in a way I guess it was good MTV had a bunch of high rating low common denominator appeal reality shows to lean on when that happened.
The beauty of the Internet is that there will always be the sub-communities and places for people to go to who have other non-mainstream interests or views. FB, Google, etc are now mainstream, but largely that's because they're replacing the media people used to consume over legacy platforms like TV and Radio.
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.
Just rip them apart and start going after them for anti-trust reasons. Instead of going after Apple for harming consumers with their ebook BS (actually, in addition to) go after Amazons monopoly on the space.
I don't quite know what this would look like, but I'm thinking of some kind of framework where we develop controls and accountability mechanisms on a company-by-company basis.
There should be public access to the unique datasets these companies collected from user interactions - all done in a privacy conscious way, for the betterment of sciences and society.
We can't let this valuable, unique data (that only exists in the largest companies of their field) benefit only those companies. It's our data, ultimately.
And then AIG used the surplus floated capital to give bonuses to the executives and traders, because that quarter happened to be awesome, numerically.
And then AIG was part of a lawsuit that sued the Treasury/Fed under the expropriation clause of the 5th Amendment because the value of the shares was not deemed correct?
Well. ultimately the Fed made like an 80 billion profit, 1/12th of what they make from annual tax collection, so if they keep that up maybe they won't even levy income taxes to fund the Federal Government's general operations anymore.
With that logic, nationalize all the things because I can't stand paying for the general operation of this plunder.
Partial sarcasm.
How does that help unless we assume that government can do less bad stuff with it than a private organization?