Big Tech Has Become Too Powerful
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Unlike switching from Facebook, you don't need to get all your friends to come along. Unlike switching from GMail, you don't need to move a bunch of data. Unlike switching your company away from Windows, you don't need to buy all new software, retrain all staff, or get your partners to change the format they use to interchange data with you.
If someone were to build a better search engine, we would all just switch. Like when everyone left Altavista in 1999.
1. Abusive use of patents to prevent small upstarts that can't afford litigation
2. Getting regulations passed that are so expensive only established players can afford them.
3. Making visa requirements so complex and expensive that it becomes a competitive advantage to have an entire department dedicated to it in your largco.
Having so much money that you can put out a product that integrated better with yours is just another spin on putting out a great product as far as I'm concerned, and thus never worries me.
IMHO doing away with patents would do much more to "curb bad monopolies" than any litigious strategy.
If a site owner wants traffic on their site - and most do - they want to make their site as easily discoverable as possible. That means being in all the search engines. Blocking one engine (or all except one) flies in the face of most business models.
The only exception I can think of is Google properties. By blocking out competitors, they can try to worsen the experience on other engines. Like imagine a video search on Bing that didn't include YouTube? But even then, it seems like someone finding a Google property via Bing still furthers their interests.
Related, "Please Don't Block Everything but Googlebot in robots.txt": http://danluu.com/googlebot-monopoly/
Odds are the more troublesome scrapers are probably ignoring robots.txt anyway, so I wonder how useful it is.
I use Bing as my default search engine, but it falls short of Google's results for a lot of programming-related queries. I still end up having to use Google a few times per day when I'm working.
That said, DDG is damn good at giving me relevant stuff on clear queries. But i find that Google and DDG alike gets into a bind if i get a bit technical.
There is also startpage.com (!s(tartpage) in DDG) to give anonymized Google results. And also ixquick (!ix(quick), natch) for a meta-search (not sure exactly what engines they cover).
I am as skeptical as anyone about giant corporations, but this is a stretch. How and why does our society expect players to refrain from using their current position to advance to a better position?
Note that I'm not talking about some clever algorithms or UI or any other kind of actual innovation. All that stuff is solely "capital" they could accumulate due to their existing power and reputation, but which gives them a huge advantage. A startup, no matter how genius their algorithms are, couldn't beat them in that field, simply because they don't have those resources.
Of course you could say "so what, that's the free market" - and of course building capital is a normal post of business - but when this inequality is so severe that it makes competition practically impossible (or only possible between 3 or 4 well-established players, as we see now) then I'd argue that something sounds be done.
But isn't that what the essence of competition is, in the search engine market?
No, those are all OK because they fit the agenda of total control. Technology is the only industry putting up a fight, the only industry that is solving problems for people instead of creating them.
Can't have that.
or in this case "howaboutery"
Claims of hypocracy or some kind of inconsistent total position say absoutely nothing meaningful or interesting about the claims somebody makes, and are frankly, a really stupid reason to dismiss them.
Especially when the claimed inconsistency is so massively general that they can apply to anybody that somehow dosent like something about "the system".
Don't like the amount of corporate money in politics? Well you surely buy things from corporations! How can you justify such an obviously inconsistent position!
> only industry putting up a fight
Firearms? Gun companies are starting to refuse to sell to police in states where ownership by other citizens is prohibited. And, predictably, we're suddenly in the middle of a "gun control" debate, despite firearms deaths and especially murders on a steady decline over decades.
The thing about "Big Tech" is that you think the word "Tech" has anything to do with technology. It doesn't. It's just how the companies in question managed to get into a position of power. At the level of business this article deals in, it's just an identifier for a market segment.
Tech business is no longer the scrappy young underdog doing good and fighting the good fight. Sometimes their interests align with the people's and we benefit when they fight to protect their interests. But they also fight to protect their interests when they're at odds with the end user's best interests.
But I think you are missing the fact that all the big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. went to the dark side a while ago. They have become big corps looking to squeeze proftis/blood out of a stone. So the article is really about the old guard having to contend with the newcomers.
My opinion is that antitrust laws and such are not applicable here because even though the companies in question have an effective monopoly on traffic, it does not make it impossible for other players to create a profitable business.
Google is not a domineering empire like Standard Oil or Ma Bell once were. They do not have total control over everything. Even if they have a certain product (for example, Google Drawings), it doesn't stop other smaller players from making quality products that people buy (Sketch, Illustrator, Inkscape, etc.)
I don't really think this is a problem. (And where it is, existing antitrust laws are performing as they should.)
Big Tech also formed a cartel to lower engineers salaries. This is also something that should be punished by law (and AFAIK, they did win a class action suit).
I do think this is a problem and needs to be addressed.
You might see antitrust law force Apple to allow sideloading, including apps built by toolchains third parties have hacked together.
You're also not required to use a Macbook; the Mini is $500.
If a monopoly is allowed to choose, it can use its domination in one vertical to influence another vertical.
Anyway, I would prefer a Linux version of the iPhone SDK. I do not use neither Windows nor OSX normally.
If you don't like the MacBook, you can buy a Mac mini and use it as a build server from other (non-Macintosh!) computers. There are tools for other platforms, and Apple isn't obligated to maintain their platform for "non-standard" use. It's not antitrust, and it's not a technicality. They're not obligated to open their platform, because they're not restricting something that was previously open.
I don't like it either. That doesn't mean it's illegal.
They are Big. It's a word that describes how they can shape policy and public opinion in a way that smaller businesses can not, and that competitors' interests are aligned enough that they routinely collude via lobbying organizations or other means (Big Tech is catching up in this area).
1. As organizations metastasize, the negative tail of the competence distribution becomes more and more populated. In response, the organization clamps down with restrictive rules that retard its innovation in exchange for protecting itself from the invisible stupid within. See Microsoft, see IBM, and see increasingly Google and Facebook as they turn to acqui-hires over internal expertise.
2. It's nice to rant yet again about 20-year patent cycles, but when are we going to fix the copyright system? Or will we eternally be Mickey Mouse's beeyotch? At this point, I'd be happy with a Mickey Mouse Forever Amendment(tm) to the constitution if it would free up all the other copyrights.
3. Working around patents is what clever people do best. Make more or import more clever people and you'll eventually get the companies that knock Google and Facebook onto their increasingly lethargic keesters. And free bonus, if you make more technically literate young adults, they'll have a lot less to fear from looming technological unemployment.
But perhaps that because I'm 100% progress-driven. Process drives me nuts. It's great to have someone who can drive your progress through the channels of process, but I find that talent exceedingly rare. That said, my best work has happened the few times I've found that magic combo.
Those most impacted by this proclaim that big tech is too powerful. Throw in Google to skirt the thrust of the issue.
Color me unimpressed by the Times' "value-added" coverage.
> Big Tech Has Become Way Too Powerful
but on HN it was changed into a question:
> Is Big Tech Too Powerful?
nytimes.com/2015/09/20/opinion/is-big-tech-too-powerful-ask-google.html
News sites are much too fond playing with their headlines to drum up hits, and with New York Times in particular I can't help but think of this quote from one of their editors:
I often hear from readers that they would prefer a straight, neutral
treatment — just the facts. But The Times has moved away from that,
reflecting editors’ reasonable belief that the basics can be found in
many news outlets, every minute of the day. They want to provide
“value-added” coverage.
There are forces that level the playing field: Open source; Utility-Grade Internet services (where Google and Amazon compete head-to-head); cheap, ubiquitous connected computers; billions of Internet-connected customers...
It has never been easier for a couple of people to build and launch an app or online business and sell to the entire planet. If you consider anyone who has done this a 'business' I am skeptical that there are in fact fewer businesses being created.
EDIT: Or maybe I am. Is it better to live in a cage if the cage is nice enough? Who knows. Humanity possibly just hasn't developed a good enough cage yet.
Besides, the giants diversifying into experimental R&D moonshot projects is a bad sign too. Shareholders should not support that and probably wont in the mid- to long-term.
Besides, the giants diversifying into experimental
R&D moonshot projects is a bad sign too.
I've never heard this take before, can you elaborate?
So we're left with mostly Elon Musk to carry the embers of our space program while Craig Venter, Google and a few other companies are increasingly taking on aging research, something I think will ultimately have enormous returns in the private sector. Just not in time for next quarter's results so David Einhorn (and his net worth of 1/40th that of Bill Gates) can go @#$% himself.
And for all the supposedly wasted public money on science cited by conservative sorts that got us here, it's trivial to find yet another dead-end weapons system or overseas military adventure that cost the taxpayers exponentially more.
To be fair, there is the Connectome Project ($100M annually) and also the Exascale Project ($126M) but those won't even cover the cost of a single F-22 fighter jet ($339M).
Defense R&D spending is way higher but nondefense spending is still keeping up with inflation [1]. There are some agencies who have had reduced budgets, such as National Institutes of Health, while DoE and NSF have enjoyed increased budgets. [2]
Overall I find your post hyperbolic and not consistent with the stats and figures. I'm assuming that your university's research was defunded and that's why you have adopted this world view. It's consistent with your experience but I believe that it doesn't represent funding in general.
But from the above articles, I see two trends.
From (1) Nonmilitary science funding has been effectively flat for a decade while military research was increasing annually roughly until a year or so into the Obama administration.
From (2) and its responses, the money itself is being misallocated to the top (just like everywhere else) and also into a metastasizing tumor of administrators:
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-11-21/the-troublin...
And then there are articles like this:
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/report/2014/...
http://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/nsffundhist_files/frame.htm
which imply the NSF is relatively OK but that the NIH is increasingly underfunded relative to GDP, no?
It's not like we've cracked mortality, figured out our own minds, or even cured a whole bunch of nasty diseases yet.
What is the reason for this? I've seen this pattern in a few places and assumed it was to speed up mobile page loads. But seeing as it loads the full page before hiding it I'm now not sure.
After reading the headline and first paragraph, many people would bounce (especially on mobile). By giving them alternative exit strategies, the button marginally increases traffic.
(Yes, this has been rigorously tested.)
Most likely, the page is being rendered to HTML on the server and then client side javascript picks up where the server left off, once it has loaded and launched. So, you get the full page load, and >then< the javascript checks to see if it should display it.
The alternative is to have the page hide the content initially and have the javascript re-enable it, but this would involve a flash of 'closed page' for actual subscriber and people who came via google.
Try throwing in privacy badger, ghostery and no script, then see if it still does it.
Perhaps a better-researched version of this article would merely lament that OSS hasn't been more successful than it has.
You must be one of those people that think that airplanes fly not because physicists and engineers found a way to propel steel through the air, but because the FAA allows them to.
This reminds me of that.
Eh... nice try on that stolen base. The internet, which is what drives "big tech", wasn't really an economic force until the mid '90s. If business formation has slowed since the '70s it's more likely to be a result of rise of the regulatory state. You can't do anything without a permit any more, something that wasn't true in 1970.