They got lucky. Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered the company broken up. The Bush Administration is plausibly the only reason Microsoft remained one company.
June 7th, 2000:
"A federal judge today ordered Microsoft Corp. split into two companies, prescribing the biggest corporate breakup since AT&T while harshly rebuking the software giant for stifling computer-age competition. "
Then Microsoft and the DOJ made a deal on November 2nd 2001. Bush won the Presidency November 7th 2001. It's very likely the Clinton DOJ made a deal to ensure all of their hard work - indeed their victory - couldn't be easily reversed by the dramatically more business friendly Bush Administration if he were to win.
In truth they broke themselves into smaller companies due to the concurrence of an even bigger monopoly: Google.
This was a bit of an accident really.
Maybe one day big companies with monopolistic tendencies will be broken-up. But it will be a long and hard process.
Look at the Standard Oil monopoly of the late XIXe/early XXe century, it took decades to break it up, even with laws against it.
When the break-up will happen, I see two ways this could happen:
* either break by activity (separate AWS and Amazon, Gmail, Youtube and Search in Google, etc)
* break each service in a way to form a distributed system shared by several companies
For example, split Google Search with part of the search index and engine distributed across several companies, and each companies having their own offer in term of UI design, data privacy, additional functionalities, plugged on this shared index.
It's a hunch. People are not happy the way it is now, at least people on the fringes. Technology allows for disintegration and decentralized services today
I've started using hidden services a lot more recently.
They remind me of the internet I remember from 1998-2006.
I wouldn't say it's the 'old' internet, because I wasn't alive for the supposed glory days of arpanet, but it definitely has the sleazy, probably illegal, never say who I am irl vibe I remember and miss.
Freenet definitively has a old-school feeling, I'm subscribed to their mailing list and I just wish the project wasn't plagued by a lot of internal fights.
I think a big part of it was that the internet still had a lot of artifacts from the pre-advertising model days.
I think we're being blindsided by just how bad the side effects of the advertising model are for media. In general, not just for the internet. It's done unbelievable damage to our culture, but it's slow and indirect and difficult to predict or quantify. Like asbestos, tetraethyl lead, carbon dioxide, etc. Those are the technologies you have to watch out for.
today we essentially define our culture and personal identities with advertising demographics and terminology. We've commoditized ourselves so thoroughly that any alternative is unimaginable and sounds silly to us.
The concept of paying for things online is what still sounds silly, despite the dominance of Netflix and Spotify. Can you imagine paying $.50 per Google search? How about a monthly fee to Facebook or Twitter? Reddit (pay by the subreddit)? HN?
What still sounds silly, and has always sounded silly, is micropayments.
But between its user base and Gold, Reddit is well situated to evolve the Internet just a bit further, and implement micropayments. Charge users an optional $5/month, and for users that do pay, take their upvotes and give money to recipients of upvotes from those users.
They could also pay subreddit moderators, and of course Reddit itself from that, plus Stripe Connect makes the backend payments platform stuff easy.
That somehow made me think of the viagra ads as an indicator of a changing of eras.
The viagra ads were a product of a time when the goal was to immediately and directly sell things. Now the era has shifted to one where the goal is to sell your information to people that want to sell you things (or otherwise use that information to further their ends). So instead of spamming you with viagra ads you're spammed with requests to divulge information at every turn you make. Register for this, register for that, give us your email address, let us access your location, let us send you an SMS (aka let us have your phone number), login with your facebook account, talk about yourself, and so much more.
I think the logic is that those who caused the problem won't fix it (or they would have already). They have financial interest in not fixing it. Though I do expect a mix of voluntary and forced improvements, now that there is awareness. That's not a very daring prediction because both have already started ;)
The business model of using targeted advertising as the main source of revenue will always be at odds with protecting user data privacy, and same goes for not making users addicted to the service. These companies may say they will protect privacy and not make you addicted, but that goes against their financial interests.
Sure, but it helps that they are being watched, which aligns good behavior with their self-interest. Seems to be the only factor promoting good behavior at Facebook. Other companies seem to have leaders with more genuinely good intentions (e.g. Google - not Eric Schmidt, but Larry Page and Sergey Brin).
"...but the solutions they are offering could just help the big players get even more powerful." That's why we should support startups from outside the valley, especially the smaller ones.
Why do these articles always have to mention Russia, fake news and the 2016 US election? I've noticed this pattern a while ago and it's always somewhere in the second paragraph.
I think they are the the most visible symptoms of a disease that has been growing for the past decade or so. They were a wakeup call to a lot of non-tech people on how much power social media/big data can have.
What a crappy useless article. I sincerely doubt it was written by anyone honestly searching for solutions to the named problems.
Reading it feels like having a priest going through your life trying to craft "sins" from everything you broke when life was moving fast. The only person this is helping is the priest of course- it does not solve any problem, it does not stabilize anything.
Makes me wish there was a way to warn follow up users of wasted time on HN.
If history is any guide, regulation will strengthen the incumbents. This would prevent people from moving to decentralized platforms like Mastodon: https://joinmastodon.org/
There is a threat worse than the power of Google or Facebook. It's the threat of the surveillance state. Just look at how China is implementing a ranking system for its citizens. Regulation that strengthens the incumbents will pave the way for it, since it will concentrate everybody's data into a few regulated data brokers.
Of course it will. It's why Walmart aggressively supports higher minimum wage laws. It's why Zuckerberg had no concerns about advocating for increased regulation, during his testimony he was overly eager to support it.
They all know they can comply and influence the rules - as they're crafted - enough to ensure they can deal with them just fine, but their smaller competitors can't or will struggle.
> One can easily imagine a version of Facebook that embraces the principles of tech humanism while remaining a profitable and powerful monopoly. In fact, these principles could make Facebook even more profitable and powerful, by opening up new business opportunities.
A note to the readers - the real article starts somewhere after the middle point - the whole first part is just rehashing all the information YC readers know by heart.
The main thesis seems to be that framing the problem as health issue (as the so called Tech Humanists try to do) is:
- hiding the political issues related to the power the tech companies have on our lives
- giving them even more power - because they are the experts here and in health we defer a lot of our judgement to the doctors
- is based on a mythical 'human nature as separate from our technology' idea
What to do with it: use anti monopoly laws, tax, introduce rules about the usage of private data and build public/coop infrastructure.
I am not so sure about public/coop infrastructure part - I don't think government is automatically better than a company - but maybe it should be tried. But the most difficult part will be the 'rules about usage of private data', that goes much deeper than just 'protecting privacy' and I am not sure how it can work - you cannot stop an individual from thinking about you and using all his memories in his thinking, sure a person is not a perfect analogy to organization.
By the way, the Facebook 'time well spent' project priorities our private communications over public ones - it is really about hooking us even deeper into the machine.
> I am not so sure about public/coop infrastructure part - I don't think government is automatically better than a company
Coops aren't the same thing as government, they're about worker or consumer ownership and management of a business - although coops are certainly vulnerable to anti-competitive behaviour in the current state of affairs.
Having social media companies be cooperatives of their users could be a way of ensuring that people still have some realistic degree of control over how that data is used, for example.
It's great what their trying to do. But if we can't talk about the fact that sometimes we don't even need technology around us is worrying. E.g. Sometimes you don't have to be on facebook, you shouldn't be on facebook, it's detrimental for you to be on facebook.
Good, human centric design is part of the solution, but sometimes technology just needs to get out of the way completely.
tldr; "In short, the effort to humanise computing produced the very situation that the tech humanists now consider dehumanising: a wilderness of screens where digital devices chase every last instant of our attention. To guide us out of that wilderness, tech humanists say we need more humanising. They believe we can use better design to make technology serve human nature rather than exploit and corrupt it. But this idea is drawn from the same tradition that created the world that tech humanists believe is distracting and damaging us."
It’s extremely telling that this huge article uses the words ad/advertise/advertising only twice. This is basically a puff piece that talks about all the great changes coming that change absolutely nothing about the fundamental reality of modern SV companies.
Of course advertising is not the problem! Design just has to be more “humanising” and the problems inherent with surveillance capitalism would disappear.
55 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 98.4 ms ] threadWe are going to have to get creative or settle in and prepare for an eternal reaming.
You have to pay the bribes.
June 7th, 2000:
"A federal judge today ordered Microsoft Corp. split into two companies, prescribing the biggest corporate breakup since AT&T while harshly rebuking the software giant for stifling computer-age competition. "
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000607/aponl...
Then Microsoft and the DOJ made a deal on November 2nd 2001. Bush won the Presidency November 7th 2001. It's very likely the Clinton DOJ made a deal to ensure all of their hard work - indeed their victory - couldn't be easily reversed by the dramatically more business friendly Bush Administration if he were to win.
http://time.com/3553242/microsoft-monopoly/
(*at the time, when the sector was much smaller)
This was a bit of an accident really.
Maybe one day big companies with monopolistic tendencies will be broken-up. But it will be a long and hard process.
Look at the Standard Oil monopoly of the late XIXe/early XXe century, it took decades to break it up, even with laws against it.
When the break-up will happen, I see two ways this could happen:
* either break by activity (separate AWS and Amazon, Gmail, Youtube and Search in Google, etc)
* break each service in a way to form a distributed system shared by several companies
For example, split Google Search with part of the search index and engine distributed across several companies, and each companies having their own offer in term of UI design, data privacy, additional functionalities, plugged on this shared index.
They remind me of the internet I remember from 1998-2006.
I wouldn't say it's the 'old' internet, because I wasn't alive for the supposed glory days of arpanet, but it definitely has the sleazy, probably illegal, never say who I am irl vibe I remember and miss.
I think we're being blindsided by just how bad the side effects of the advertising model are for media. In general, not just for the internet. It's done unbelievable damage to our culture, but it's slow and indirect and difficult to predict or quantify. Like asbestos, tetraethyl lead, carbon dioxide, etc. Those are the technologies you have to watch out for.
today we essentially define our culture and personal identities with advertising demographics and terminology. We've commoditized ourselves so thoroughly that any alternative is unimaginable and sounds silly to us.
What still sounds silly, and has always sounded silly, is micropayments.
But between its user base and Gold, Reddit is well situated to evolve the Internet just a bit further, and implement micropayments. Charge users an optional $5/month, and for users that do pay, take their upvotes and give money to recipients of upvotes from those users.
They could also pay subreddit moderators, and of course Reddit itself from that, plus Stripe Connect makes the backend payments platform stuff easy.
The viagra ads were a product of a time when the goal was to immediately and directly sell things. Now the era has shifted to one where the goal is to sell your information to people that want to sell you things (or otherwise use that information to further their ends). So instead of spamming you with viagra ads you're spammed with requests to divulge information at every turn you make. Register for this, register for that, give us your email address, let us access your location, let us send you an SMS (aka let us have your phone number), login with your facebook account, talk about yourself, and so much more.
Think I preferred viagra spam.
The only targets that people were worried about were PLCs in power plans and other things that go boom.
Reading it feels like having a priest going through your life trying to craft "sins" from everything you broke when life was moving fast. The only person this is helping is the priest of course- it does not solve any problem, it does not stabilize anything.
Makes me wish there was a way to warn follow up users of wasted time on HN.
There is a threat worse than the power of Google or Facebook. It's the threat of the surveillance state. Just look at how China is implementing a ranking system for its citizens. Regulation that strengthens the incumbents will pave the way for it, since it will concentrate everybody's data into a few regulated data brokers.
They all know they can comply and influence the rules - as they're crafted - enough to ensure they can deal with them just fine, but their smaller competitors can't or will struggle.
I'm sorry but I can't.
The main thesis seems to be that framing the problem as health issue (as the so called Tech Humanists try to do) is: - hiding the political issues related to the power the tech companies have on our lives - giving them even more power - because they are the experts here and in health we defer a lot of our judgement to the doctors - is based on a mythical 'human nature as separate from our technology' idea
What to do with it: use anti monopoly laws, tax, introduce rules about the usage of private data and build public/coop infrastructure.
I am not so sure about public/coop infrastructure part - I don't think government is automatically better than a company - but maybe it should be tried. But the most difficult part will be the 'rules about usage of private data', that goes much deeper than just 'protecting privacy' and I am not sure how it can work - you cannot stop an individual from thinking about you and using all his memories in his thinking, sure a person is not a perfect analogy to organization.
By the way, the Facebook 'time well spent' project priorities our private communications over public ones - it is really about hooking us even deeper into the machine.
Coops aren't the same thing as government, they're about worker or consumer ownership and management of a business - although coops are certainly vulnerable to anti-competitive behaviour in the current state of affairs.
Having social media companies be cooperatives of their users could be a way of ensuring that people still have some realistic degree of control over how that data is used, for example.
Good, human centric design is part of the solution, but sometimes technology just needs to get out of the way completely.
Of course advertising is not the problem! Design just has to be more “humanising” and the problems inherent with surveillance capitalism would disappear.