While I support the idea of breaking up big tech, I don't think it'll be the panacea everyone is hoping it'll be. We need real, substantive change with regards to privacy, security, and business ethics; if they're broken up as is, we'll have N*X companies seriously good at abusing us and the competition instead of just N.
We need to take firm steps to outlaw the practices that got us to this point in the first place. Ban dark patterns, mandate data-use as opt-in outside of a TOS, require breach disclosure within a set period of time, grant exclusive ownership to user generated content to the user, et cetera. There is a lot we can do here!
To some degree, I agree. The problematic business models and practices enabled by tech are not unique to big tech. Their profitability helped grow some tech to big.
I prefer law like this to be narrow focus. I agree these things are important. But, I don't want overreach in the legal effort to fix things. The specific problem here is monopolies, the action is fixing behaviour of a monopolist.
Governance of privacy, security, ethics, don't lie in monopoly law solely.
Force ISPs to roll out IPV6, give customers static addresses for all of their devices, and let people self-host internet services (http, gopher, gemini, imap, smtp, ssh, irc, etc.) on residential connections. Then make appliances that let people have their own private clouds so they can subscribe to their favorite propaganda and bullshit with their friends without making Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, etc. richer.
There is a repeated pattern in economical development, which consists of (1) innovation, which creates new products/markets, (2) expansion, which generates new companies, perfecting new products, (3) competition between new companies, which reduces profits of new companies, (4) merges of companies into a small number of big companies (5) monopolistic markets. What would be beneficial is to address negative aspects of this cycle. Maybe merges should be controlled, to a large extent; maybe something else would be better.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 27.5 ms ] threadWe need to take firm steps to outlaw the practices that got us to this point in the first place. Ban dark patterns, mandate data-use as opt-in outside of a TOS, require breach disclosure within a set period of time, grant exclusive ownership to user generated content to the user, et cetera. There is a lot we can do here!
Governance of privacy, security, ethics, don't lie in monopoly law solely.