Why Tim Berners-Lee is no friend of Facebook
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I think the writer is pointing out the irony that an investor who has benefited enormously from an open web has now effectively made it less open, because of the potentially stifling effect of lawsuits like his.
>As that uber-blogger Dave Winer observed: “Gawker is gone because Peter Thiel financed its murder-by-lawyer. It’s legal to do this in the US, but until now as far as I know, no one has crossed this line. Now that the line has been crossed, it’s fair to assume it will become standard practice for billionaires like Thiel to finance lawsuits until the publication loses and has to sell itself to pay the judgment.”
>I wasn’t ever a great admirer of Gawker, but Dave Winer is right: Thiel’s strategy demonstrates how tech money not only talks, but can now also suppress freedom of expression, even in the land of the first amendment.
As someone in a country without a first amendment equivalent, I think it's great. It's fabulous. It also doesn't give you free reign to say whatever you want to about anyone in public and that's entirely reasonable.
As for a party with more money tying up someone else in multiple expensive lawsuits. It's certainly not a practice limited to tech billionaires alone.
I suspect Denton expected to have negative ramifications. I do not believe he expected to be held personally liable for the actions of a corporation he was part of and that both the personal and corporate liabilities would have unprecedented magnitude. Further, the article says that benefactor style lawsuits are fairly novel and thus it is unreasonable to expect someone with a vendetta for publishing a true statement about them would relentlessly pursue and finance litigation until the company was destroyed.
> it only effects[sic] the weak and diseased
I would hope, but would not expect that to be the case. The government and large scale corporations can certainly make headway sueing companies like wikileaks for publishing damaging media they do not control. This is quite a dangerous precedent and how bad things can potentially get is up to the creativity of very powerful companies & lawyers.
So if I publish all your personal details online: address, contacts, workplace, political leanings etc, it'd ok?
The only problem here is that non-billionaires aren't able to easily do this.
> This is quite a dangerous precedent
So is the behavior of Gawker going unchecked.
This is in no way true! Everyone is vulnerable because win or lose, a lawsuit costs both sides money. Repeated enough times, the side with more money wins.
If I had the motivation and the resources, do you think I would fail to fund a suit by someone who has a valid grievance against you for something you did in the past 5 years? Are you certain you are not "weak and diseased"?
I mean if Tiel was pouring millions after millions into failing lawsuits that just aim to drain whatever money he can sure but a single successful lawsuit?
It's not spin if it is true: a suit does not need to be successful to ruin the targeted victim - simply defending yourself from a lawsuit costs a lot of money, good luck defending yourself from a well-resourced nemesis.
Without commenting on Gawker's culpability, I will draw parallels to Mother Jones, which was also sued by a billionaire[1] (Vandersloot), but they managed to beat the suit.
Incensed, VanderSloot set up a million dollar fund available to pay the legal expenses of people wanting to sue Mother Jones or other members of the "liberal press."[1]
MoJo even weighed in on Thiel v Gawker, stating For the likes of VanderSloot, Adelson, Thiel, and Trump, the courts have become an avenue not so much for vindication, but for exacting a price[2]. They've been in the trenches, I'll take their word over people who assume only the guilty get punished by the justice system.
1. http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/10/mother-jones-vander...
2.http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/thiel-trump-vand...
> They've been in the trenches
Thiel isn't like the others in that list. And was Thiel and the others not "in the tranches" too?
If it wasn't clear - I was quoting a Mother Jones article (which I agree with). And if you don't mind my asking, how is Thiel different from the others, if the premise is that the others are weaponizing the courts to exact a price on their foes?
> And was Thiel and the others not "in the tranches" too?
"In the trenches" isn't a metaphor I would use for Thiel and the other aggressors; I would say he was more than 200 miles behind the front in an air-conditioned tent with a fridge and a decanter of whisky in the corner.
Because his case had merit. The price exacted was just punishment for crime.
> isn't a metaphor I would use for Thiel
because he's wealth and well off? I don't think any of the publications employees had to skip a meal either.
It wasn't Thiel that threw the first punch. Was was brought upon Gawker's head was brought on by themselves. Describing punishment for crime as "being in the trenches" divorces from the situation the most important thing - right and wrong. I don't know about the MJ cases, but Gawker was in the wrong.
And the whole thrust of his company’s strategy is to persuade billions of future users that Facebook is the only bit of the internet they really need.
The comparison to Thiel may be fair if a comparison was made in the article. Instead we get this:
Interestingly, Thiel is also a member of Facebook’s board of directors.
Actually, parent post is far more convincing than the article, which seems to think that illegal speech somehow deserves first amendment protection.
Hulk Hogan got hit really bad when they found he was using racist words in the video, and they tried to blackmail Hulk Hogan and threaten to release the sex tape if he didn't pay it. Hogan didn't pay, the sex tape was released and he lost his job at WWE and they erased him from most of their history. HHH and the McMahons want a PG rated show, and won't allow R-Rated stuff on their show as they try to appeal to children now with the action figures and other toys.
Facebook's user base is roughly a quarter of the species. It mediates the social interactions of a sizable subset thereof. Network effect implicitly penalizes those who don't behave so as to generate value. To do so requires that you participate. It is trivial to enter, and as difficult as can be made practicable to exit. Those within often enough distrust those without, simply because the distinction exists.
What is this if not a walled garden? What is a walled garden if not this?
Heres why Facebook and Zuckerberg are hypocritical - Freebasics and net neutrality.
Freebasics is a closed system, with FB as the gatekeeper. In its previous iteration it was internet.org. Only the utter debacle (for FB) that was the Indian Netneutrality debate, caused FB to rebrand to the more accurate :freebasic.
Before that they were happy to portray themselves as providers of the internet to the poor. When asked why they needed a model that created them as gatekeeper, instead of cheap/free/advertizer supported internet with actual openness, they tweaked their model but were tone deaf to the gatekeeper role.
With NN, they support it in the states in order to combat telecoms. In India and in other places, they support telecoms and Anti NN positions to further their ability to be the only site users go to.
Zuckerberg is old enough to know the difference between walled gardens and open internet, as are most of his engineers.
Discussing hypocrisy would indicate some sort of moral center in the first place. Facebook is for itself, and is a creature for the perpetuation of its existence.
Where does he say that?
You just described an open web and then somehow attributed all of that to Facebook. If Facebook were to replace the Internet like Zuckerberg would love to do then none of the things you described would still be possible.
>There are a lot of things I find toxic about Facebook
Sir Tim and I agree with you on that.
I have been running complete web applications from home for free for anyone to use for a long time. That is what the web is about - you don't need a dedicated, centralized host. Anyone can connect to it and anyone can run servers on it. It isn't terribly difficult to do, nor costly, I do it on a budget residential broadband connection.
Granted, it might not scale to millions of users, but neither will heroku's or AWS's free/low-cost tiers either.
Besides, even if the ISP had an arbitrary restriction, I think that runs afoul of net neutrality rules and may be illegal now in the US.
That depends on which ISP you choose.
It is not really our concern what you do with your internet connection any more than it is the concern of the power company what you do with the electricity they supply ... However, we ask that you do not use the service for anything illegal
For me one of the greatest times of freedom was during the life of Geocities. This was actually the only time I had a website, and I was in middle school. Sure, there was a lot less people on the Internet, but it was a very wild wild west atmosphere and I feel like a larger portion of the users created their own home pages than today. Malicious parties were not as widespread and powerful, and there was overall not so much control over everything. I was also using Napster at this time.
I've studied computer engineering and I've still had a hard time having the feeling / spirit of freedom and ease of contributing to the Internet as I did back then. Maybe it's because I'm not creative anymore, or because I'm too cheap to pay for or too disinterested in putting my content onto services, or because there's a lot more to worry about with running your own server, or because there's too much visibility/scrutiny/copyright enforcement. Doesn't have the same feeling of openness as back then.
Then there's the lock-in again. Instead of writing your web sites in pure HTML, they are now locked inside a database in some content management system. You can't simply move to another provider.
Also there's the domain names, or rather web addresses, they are too damn expensive. There need to be a free top level domain name so that web addresses stay longer then a year. Maybe only allow ten free domains per person to prevent hoarding.
Really ? A year of a .com, .net, .org costs less then monthly internet bill.
Not to mention there have been many services offering subdomains of a rich domain list in the past.
I used them in the beginning of high school before finally buying a .net, putting it on a home DNS server with IPv6 tunnel and gain "l33t" points on IRC with a custom hostname.
We may be free to travel the world. But our freedom includes the right to create a space that we control. And invite in those we choose and do things our own way.
That's what I do at my house. Don't you?
mmm... How are you measuring that?
> Everything you need to build a web application like Facebook is free to try and use.
That is not what is being discussed. However, you have a HUGE disadvantage that is growing exponentially.
In India we are fighting, and quite possibly going to lose the Net Neutrality battle to Facebook and our Homegrown telecoms.
The number of people who still don't have internet access far dwarfs the number of people who are online right now.
We've constantly being losing space to walled gardens from the day that the appstore showed it was profitable.
Recently it was shown that even Google was tacitly supporting groups on the anti-neutrality side of the debate.
Most of those tutorials are in English, the majority of the people who will come online will not use that as a language.
Someone can and will translate those tutorials, and lock it behind a wall.
The openness of the web is under assault, and Facebook and telecoms are actively working to convert their wealth into political power to ensure that their moats are technological, behavioral and regulatory.
Its beyond 'worrisome' and straight up at frightening.
Maybe you think it should be. I personally think it is protected if the people being photographed consent to the publication, and a violation of privacy if they don't. (Privacy and free speech are both human rights, they don't conflict.)
We can have that conversation, though, if you think that privacy isn't a human right.
But the people who are upset about this don't seem to be talking about that. They don't talk in terms of human rights, they paint Theil as a bad guy and try to paint him as being opposed to freedom of speech.
But can you cite a single quote from Theil that has him on the record as opposing freedom of speech?
We should not accept this kind of smear as if it were legitimate argument. It doesn't appeal to reason or argument it is characterization.
And it is eating all discourse. For every time I see an actual argument against a policy of Trumps (notice how they dragged him into it?) I see at least 150 claims that he is a racist. Not quoting him saying something racist, just a smear. And that ratio is probably higher, because to be honest I haven't seen any coverage of Trump in the last 6 months that makes a good reasoned argument against one of his positions.
It's not like it's hard.
Here's one of Trumps positions I disagree with: We should have open borders.
Closed borders is really saying that a company can't hire who they want to hire- that you can't hire the best and the brightest in the world and bring them to america, one of the things that made america great in the past. We shouldn't nationalize talent we should have a free market in it and let anyone who has a job offer (at least, there are legitimate arguments for an even lower bar) come to the country.
There. That's an actual argument against a Trump position.
A similar argument could be made against Theil. They almost make one against Zuckerberg (but in the end they resort to characterization of Facebook as a "walled garden", which by that definition means The Guardian is a walled garden because the editors control what is published on their site.)
Discourse is dying. Don't let it.
Peter Thiel's article is really well researched but his conclusions about monopolies are wrong and dangerous. Monopolies are terrible for society - Monopolies allow companies to enforce arbitrary rules which everyone must follow with no means of escape (it's essentially a total dictatorship). If you got fired from such a company, where else would you work? The CEO could literally just rape anyone they wanted and no one would be able to speak up. Worse than that; the media will probably tell you that it's actually an honour and you should be thankful! What sort of world is that?
Then he uses past history - The fact that monopolistic companies like Google tend to encourage and reward innovation as an example of why monopolies are good but he completely omits the fact that Sergey and Larry were raised in a highly competitive environment (and that's why Google is like this).
Wait a few generations and you're going to see the elite 'inheriting' class develop into a generation of spoiled entitled brats who have no interest for innovation because they're too busy having fun.
It sounds like Peter Thiel wants to turn Facebook into a mega-corporation to take over the world. He has a very black-and-white view of the world which I find really dangerous. He thinks that there is one correct way to do things and that this way is always correct.
The biggest problem is that as soon as you allow a corporation to get a world-dominating monopoly, there will be NO WAY OUT - That corporation will always have the power to manipulate the media and keep everyone locked in their places - There will be NO GOING BACK.
Peter Thiel severely underestimates human greed and ego (both of which he has plenty of). His monopoly idea is only good for people like him - The fact that he thinks it's good for EVERYONE just shows how out of touch he and his friends are.
> the Facebook founder has no intention of allowing anyone to build anything on his platform that does not have his express approval.
I assume this is based on the fact that you can not directly use facebooks APIs, and can not utilize Facebook itself. Facebook does allow for people to link out to other sites content, so in that way there is no barrier to seeing external sources in Facebook. An external site can't extend the experience of Facebook though, but I don't know of any successful web business that does allow this.
I'm curious of examples that actually meet the definition of open which he's using. Almost all sites require a form of login, many news sites are putting up paywalls, and there have always been private services requiring login to get at secure data.
So, the openness that I think people want, is access to the Facebook user base, but I would argue that everyone already has that, in is the rest of the web. The difference is Facebook is not going to give that to any other companies, because that user base is their revenue stream.
To me this isn't a problem until people are incapable of accessing anything other than Facebook. This would be like the AOL of 1992, before most AOL users realized there was more to the Internet than what AOL gave them. I don't think people will want to go back to that. But competition will constintently pull on this. Email is not dead, Messenger is not the only messenging platform. Btw, I find myself barely ever using Facebook these days.
And a question, what sites operate in the way this article wants? There were no examples. Reddit?
Almost no sites require a form of login.
You can login to most sites, but primarily so that you can keep a persistent pseudonym and set preferences. You can browse almost every site without logging in. There is nothing that stops you from e.g. linking to a YouTube video from your own site regardless of whether you have a YouTube account. For Facebook you need an account to even see the large majority of the content.
> So, the openness that I think people want, is access to the Facebook user base, but I would argue that everyone already has that, in is the rest of the web. The difference is Facebook is not going to give that to any other companies, because that user base is their revenue stream.
Which is why people dislike them. Who wants to be somebody else's "revenue stream"? Replacing Facebook with a decentralized social network that no single party controls would be better for everyone but Facebook.
For Facebook you only need an account to see content that the user / page has deemed not public. This has nothing to do with Facebook and everything to do with the owner of the account / page that publishes the content you're wanting to see.
https://www.facebook.com/YCombinator/
Do you need to be logged in to view PUBLIC posts or comments on that page? No, you don't. Now if you were trying to visit Mark Zuckerberg's personal profile obviously, yes, a very large amount of content is NOT going to be visible to you.
This is no different than every other site out there. Sure, you can read the news and comments posted on this (https://news.ycombinator.com/) webiste, but you most certainly CANNOT post comments without having an account.
Or want to view public pages without them being covered by some obnoxious "See more of PAGE by logging in."
Yes, it's the account owner's fault for using Facebook in the first place. But they're likely always logged in, and so are most of their visitors, so they're only marginally aware such problems even exist.
Blame that can be squarely placed at Facebook is exploiting such gaps in knowledge from their users to pressure non-users into signing up.
> This is no different than every other site out there.
This is vastly different from almost every other site out there, except for a few big players. The Internet is still a huge place, at least for the time being.
Facebook is a major erosive force on the Internet as it tries to quietly subsume and privatise it, and using it to publish content on is contributing to the demise of one of the few globe-spanning projects our species ever managed to get right.
> . . . pressure non-users into signing up.
These days you'll see similar examples by visiting any forum. Want to see some code, or a link someone posted? Sorry! You have to login or register.
> This is vastly different . . .
OK, OK. I'm sorry. This is most certainly, however, similar to any other website out there that uses real identity; don't let me get everything muddied by trying to compare real identity web to the anonymous web.
> Facebook is a . . .
Lol? I don't even. There's so many die-hard Facebook haters out there. Go build open source applications that do what Facebook is offering and does it better and before you know it the company should be gone. I'm solely basing this on the amount of comments I see for people coming out against Facebook, rather than ever for it (or even just playing devil's advocate). It seems to always be a circle jerk.
I can't imagine that would ever be the case. People hate on facbook for being behemoth that it is. No kind of open sour project would defeat it unless it is backed by the same amount of money. Who would dare to finance such an effort?
The web is free, you can whatever you like.
The Zuck does whatever he likes.
We can do whatever we like.
No one can do whatever you like.
Freedom gain, freedom pain.
Facebook make, facebook take.
Open source, opean sauce.
Kitchen sink, pidgeon pink.
Many sites allow anonymous posting. Even those that don't, you can create an "anonymous" throwaway account. That doesn't work for Facebook because an anonymous throwaway account would have no friends and no more access to anything than not logging in at all.
You don't need what Facebook is doing for access control. The alternative is to post encrypted content and only give the key to people you want to allow access to.
Probably what that really needs to be popular is support for encoding a decryption key into a URI which isn't passed to the webserver but rather used by the client's browser to decrypt content from the server.
It might be that I'm required to login to a specific site in order to access my email account that is hosted there, but since everything is based on the "open" SMTP protocol, I'm not dependent on that specific site if I want to exchange messages with my friends.
An example: SMTP, to prevent spam many SMTP hosting companies activity block anyone they deem to be spammers, or those who don't properly use things like SPF.
So even SMTP is t really open any more. There's a general agreement from most SMTP providers that they will accept and deliver emails for those that play by the rules.
(I don't disagree with this, just pointing out that it's not quite as simple as just standards, etc)
I think this to keep all the data to themselves (from crawlers, Google, Baidu); not necessarily for the benefit of their users.
some bizarre chain of reasoning: Lee, Zuckerberg, Thiel... Trump???
It's a real shame. There's a conversation around Facebook that needs very badly to happen. A better article than this one could have done much to advance it. But the structural flaws evident here render the work useless, or worse than that.
Who cares that Facebook is a walled garden? I'd say their investments is open source tools has outweighed the fact that my grandma spends her browsing time in a silo.
Factor this: 1. Websites had to apply to be available to FreeBasics users, else not. 2. They had to conform to Facebook's technical requirements (which could have arbitrarily been changed by Facebook), and more importantly, comply with Facebook's own terms and conditions. 3. The data-cost differential between the open web and FreeBasics meant that users would have gotten some information, but would think twice before accessing the open web because it would cost them to do so. 4. This is from sources, but the figure that Facebook mentions for people accessing the open web after "trying" free basics is merely the number of people who have clicked on a link, not those who have bought data connections. So it's hardly an on-ramp. 5. In India, we have the only data ever released about FreeBasics, in terms of users: only 20% of users who used FreeBasics till May 2015 had never used the Internet before. 6. There's a better way of increasing Internet access than this. Facebook has ignored other models for providing Free Internet access: the equal rating models from Mozilla, for example. 7. Countries in the EU where Zero Rating has been implemented showed that ISPs had a lower tendency to drop data rates for regular usage.
One journalist in Gujarat (an Indian state) told me how retailers stopped pitching FreeBasics to customers because the service was being marketed as "FreeNet: Free Internet service", and customers found that they were being billed for using sites other than FreeBasics sites.
We run the risk of Facebook becoming the primary and perhaps only site accessed, as has been indicated by surveys done in Indonesia (by LirneAsia) and Nigeria (I think; by Quartz).
The bigger risk is the notion that because the platform is entirely controlled by them, they define the norms, they get to control creation of content and services. The Internet, when access is neutral, is a place where all users are equal, and all users are both consumers and creators. A better product or a smarter strategy, or fund-raising capability has the ability to challenge giants: Facebook beat myspace. Non-neutral Internet access creates separates consumers from creators, and reduces the freedom that creators have to innovate.
Facebook is doing what is best for its business, not for the open web. Look at what has happened in case of Instant Articles, and the reach of fan pages: Facebook is prioritizing publishing on its own platform and giving that content greater reach with users. It has also deprecated reach for fan pages. Of course, it's not that changes in google search and youtube's algorithm don't hurt creators, but with Facebook, what is clear is that the intent isn't increasing relevance: it is exercising control to improve monetization. Publishers who are going with Instant Articles are missing the long game: the bait-and-switch.
So yes, Facebook celebrating the open web looks hypocritical.