We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon

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.

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?

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.

The very thought of this terrifies me.

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.

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.

This article doesn't even make sense.

> 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.

The sad thing is that I actually trust Google, Amazon and Facebook (maybe less the last two) more than I do the British government. Obviously that can change but at least these giants understand tech. Their response in the Snowdon leaks to being tapped was correct. The UK's response to any perceived threat is to question the validity of core technologies such as encryption.

Nationalisation of the big tech services by government would just lead to pointless tail chasing as the they learn in the slowest possible way that the internet can route around the blockades they wish to implement. Giving the government something like Facebook is akin to giving the reins to some unchecked righteous teen who thinks they know how to make it all "better".

>We’ve only begun to grasp the problem, but in the past, natural monopolies like utilities and railways that enjoy huge economies of scale and serve the common good have been prime candidates for public ownership. The solution to our newfangled monopoly problem lies in this sort of age-old fix, updated for our digital age. It would mean taking back control over the internet and our digital infrastructure, instead of allowing them to be run in the pursuit of profit and power.

The article is a mishmash of sensationalism and trending buzzwords.

OK let's accept the argument that said companies are "too big". Why nationalize them? To nationalize a company you first have to ask the question what are the consequences for the nation if company X increases prices/fails/stops offering services? If the answer is not dire, you don't touch them

I'll buy that search is important, but what's the vital utility of google apart from that, e-mail and maps? Android? Facebook is a chat/opinion/vanity medium, are we really saying that losing facebook (or whatsapp or whatever) access is a national emergency? I can't buy the argument about "our data". Privacy is important and mishandling of personal data should be severely punished, but that's not an argument for letting the state operate those companies - that's an argument for better laws and enforcement.

And how do you nationalize a globally accessed service with limited physical national presence anyway? This is getting more silly by the minute

There are antitrust/competition laws in every capitalist country, if a company is too big just break it - it won't be the first time or the last. If you think a company mishandles or has privileged access to something it shouldn't (your citizen's data) just punish it and limit its access.

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!

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.

Let's do a mental exercise: the US government decides to nationalize those 3 companies.

1) Buying them would require at least 30% over their market caps, so let's say $1.3T for Google, and $1.3T for Amazon and FB combined, which is about 2/3 of the entire US Gov budget, so there's no way the government is paying fair market price for this

2) Since the government isn't paying fair market price, it essentially needs to seize the shares by force and then go through the courts for years to fight it off. Millions loose hundreds of billions of dollars in their ETFs, and their retirement savings take a massive hit

3) Even if the government seizes the shares by force, there are very few actual assets owned by those 3 companies, most of the value is in data, systems, growth expectations, employees, etc.

4) With the government forcibly taking control of those companies, countries around the world would take action and either take control of the local subsidiaries or just detach them from the US company, everything starts breaking down

5) Employees quit em masse, there's nobody able to run the systems, the government either has to arrest employees and force them to work, or simply let all the systems go down one by one. Hiring new people won't make a difference, as the learning curve is massive, and you wouldn't even have access to the systems

6) The products offered by those companies quickly fail, and the former employees open new companies that offer similar products, the government wiped out trillions of dollars from the global economy, a massive economic colapse ensues

7) As the global economy crumbles, the author blames the companies and the employees for not being willing to work for a shitty government job in a gulag with no opportunity for innovation, and refuses to take responsability for his/her stupid idea.

It doesn't take a lot to understand how stupid this idea is. I usually don't like to call things stupid, but whoever came up with this idea put so little critical thinking behind it, that it isn't just bad, it's stupid.

What a terrible idea.

It's also a terrible article, since the conclusion isn't supported by the rest of the article. It gets in to some things about these new large companies that have problematical aspects but just grazes by on what those problems are. I guess the evil can just be assumed?

Since the main problems haven't been clarified there's no way to argue about if or how nationalizing would help solve them.

Meanwhile nationalizing has some huge issues of its own which aren't even hinted at here... (1) do we want the government controlling the platforms for our scocial interactions, purchases, and information retrieval? (2) these are global companies so you'd have to break both the company and the platforms they run by political boundary. How is that not nonsensical? There are other issues, but I'll leave it at two fatal flaws for now.

As an alternative, why not regulate the problematical aspects of these companies? Let's figure out each one and determine a regulatory framework that lets us get to the root of the problem without stifling, and develop the regulations to drive it.

Did he bother thinking about what Google, Facebook and Amazon thought of the idea? Google is the worldwide leader in search because they have an army of the world's brightest engineers working 24/7 on improving their algorithms... Why would those people continue working if you seize their company and tell them they're now public employees? If they wanted to be public employees, don't you think they'd be doing that already? We are, after all, talking about people who have their pick of pretty much any job they want. Google isn't a product that you can bottle up or store in a warehouse. It's made of people. People who might have other opinions.

Most people seem to be evaluating this question on an egalitarian premise: what's best for the greatest number of people? On that premise, taking money from very wealthy people and giving it to others will always seems appealing (even though it destroys wealth).

But let's evaluate it from the premise of justice. By what principle can we remove control of these companies from those who created them? From those who have worked there and earned equity in them? From those who have invested in the public stock in order to fund growth and earn a return? By what principle can a government interfere with a private contract, one that has governed how a group of people work together for 15 or 20 years, and unilaterally break it?

The argument is that the companies have too much power. But what kind of power? Can they take money out of your paycheck without your permission? Can they prevent you from erecting a building on your property without their approval? Can they imprison you for failing to appear at a hearing?

There is a difference between government power and economic power. Government power is the power to compel, and it the source of the power is the army and the police, or, more bluntly, the gun.

Economic power is the power to create. The source of economic power is the value that is offered. Sometimes a business offers something so valuable that people shape their lives around its presence and start to take it for granted. These are the businesses we punish most.

Should we turn economic power into government power? The immediate implication is frightening. All three of these companies have well-staffed legal departments challenging the government's requests for private information about their users. Who will fight those requests when these companies are agencies of the executive office?

The long term implications are devastating. Who will create the next Facebook, Google, or Amazon with the prospect of working 20 years and having it taken by force, as punishment for succeeding too much?

And would a nationalized Google have created a self-driving car? Would a nationalized Amazon have invented AWS? Would a nationalized Facebook invest in high-speed internet for Africa? Nationalization destroys growth.

Economic growth follows economic freedom. The world has experimented many times, and the theory and the experiments agree—Venezuela is only the most recent tragic example. At the root of any other argument is a desire to redistribute wealth.

Relevant is this quote from another link recently posted here on HN: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/08/when-it-comes...

"Europe has more stringent privacy regulations than the United States. In general, Americans tend to mistrust government and trust corporations. Europeans tend to trust government and mistrust corporations. The result is that there are more controls over government surveillance in the U.S. than in Europe. On the other hand, Europe constrains its corporations to a much greater degree than the U.S. does. U.S. law has a hands-off way of treating internet companies. Computerized systems, for example, are exempt from many normal product-liability laws. This was originally done out of the fear of stifling innovation."

In my opinion, apart from Medicare, Infrastructure, Law enforcement, Defence, Prison System and a few other should be nationalized, not Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft etc.

As a non-american, I'd be 100x times more scared of these giants being owned by the US gov. Actually I'd completely stop using the services of the two of them that I still use. I'll take a nice faceless profit driven shady corporation any time over a foreign government.

Heck, what freaks me out the most about Facebook is that they act very unlike any of the classical profit driven corporations... which may mean they have other more dubious interest than "just profit". Profit-drivenness is in a sense "pure" and "fair"... when something is state owned/controlled it becomes infused with ideologies and these are known to make people do way more stupid and cruel things that the thirst for more money (hint: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol-Pot and their followers where not profit-driven!)

Is this really leftism or a provocation? Either way it backfires by playing right into the simplistic right narrative of theft and jealousy and makes the left look like clueless out of touch jokers with no solutions for innovation and a weakness for ill thought sledge hammer constraints. It's a disgrace.

The bigger problem is significant gains in western democracy and liberalism are being watered down with serious issues around regulatory capture, surveillance and accountability growing. Or current systems, laws and legislation would have been dealing with some of the privacy and market problems caused by Google, Facebook and Amazon.

The EU is trying but it's not in the US interest to interfere with the growth of these companies for many reasons from surveillance to market domination so they will not meet legislation here.

We'd do better by nationalizing Comcast and Verizon, tbh.

Why doesn't the author mention Microsoft? Why hasn't anyone else mentioned Microsoft in the comments?

Mobile might be what people use most of the time. But for productivity, specialty applications (X-Ray software, billing, medical applications, scientific, tool software, video editing, 3d rendering, ATMs, cash registers) Windows dominates. There is a huge body of software that can not be used on mobile.

Bill Gates threatened to withdraw Windows from the market during the anti-trust trial. I assumed this would also include security patches and key registration. This would have threatened millions of businesses and government services. If you can have any argument against a tech company operating against the public interest you have to include Microsoft.

As "googling" becomes the most common way most people obtain information, I believe we do need some means to provide for this need w/o private enterprise, and lots of new regulations to defend the users, e.g. in case of Facebook. Persons' private data has become an acceptable good traded silently behind the scenes. The industry needs to gain a means to maintain the quality of software, and basic software needs must be guaranteed by those who we appoint to furnish us roads, electricity and water. WRT nationalisation, well, nations are slowly becoming obsolete as globalisation progresses, and what is most apt instead is that we engineer a globally distributed system at least for search.

"We need" - Who are WE?

As far as I know, Google and Facebook helped and helping people in places where almost everything is nationalized - by providing alternative to local gov-controlled media by making the information and data available to anyone with internet connection.

As far as I know, users are sharing and storing their data and trusting those organizations, rather than their governments. The problem starts when governments try to enforce the providers to tap or provide records our of their data centers.

The internet is good as is, and improved every day, and will continue improving. We need no nationalization over here.

Not really, thanks, but no!

By "we" does he mean the UK? How do you nationalise a multinational?

You know, there's this simplistic view about the left - that it's only interested in taking things that other people have created, forcibly, and redistributing them.

I wonder, where that simplistic view comes from.

One fascinating question is which country should be responsible for nationalizing them. According to the Snowden leaks, the US government is already more than happy to cooperate with FB and Google and alike to spy on non-US citizens; handing the private data to the US government bureaucracy appears to be not much of an improvement from a point of view of an EU citizen

Maybe these megaliths should be split according to the national boundaries, not unlike how the AT&T / Bell System was structured as a combination regional telephone companies.

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.

I share the sentiment that we are dealing with a new kind of companies that don't fit into our "capitalism 2.0" thinking but I wonder: where are those crazy and capable people trying to compete with them in a realistic way? Probably optimizing ads and investment models. Please don't mention blockchains as a solution to this problem.

I have some very raw ideas about this. For example, I really think that Google search engine is unique and its complexity almost almost irreproducible but back in 2013 I wrote[1] a small piece thinking about layered search engines where web sites, specially the top ranked ones, improve their local search, and subsequent layers improve the global searches. Local searches within a specific site are usually awful. I am thinking of these web sites sharing the search "parameters" so we can integrate these information along the different layers. I find many flaws in this thinking but it is good to start discussing different ideas.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bKpAf08NQa7ChQnGQh--YwdP...

I agree that advertising should be nationalised and Facebook is a particularly good target. Advertising makes capitalism more centralized; whoever has the biggest budget gets all the customers. Having worked for both big corporations and small companies in the tech industry, I'm certain that big corporations are less efficient overall; I think that they are successful in spite of their innefficiencies because of their advertising power.

Centralization reduces the number of people who have wealth (increases inequality); there are so few of these people and their money is in such high demand (and they have so much of it) that they are effectively incapable of investing it efficiently - Their investing bandwidth is all used up (they are spammed-out with investment opportunities). If wealth was more spread out, more people could be investors and they would have more time to really think through and consider opportunities and because they would have less money on an individual basis, they would be much more careful about their investment decisions.

Lets assume it would be possible to nationalize Google, Facebook and Amazon.

But by whom? US government?

So a nation should run a global company in everyone's interest? Everyone as in the entire population of the world?

Why would I as a non-US-person use a US government system?

Should I then as a non-US-person have a say in how the US run these companies?

This does not make sense.

I guess next article from Guardian will be like 'We Need to build a global government'.

I believe that the fact that the article doesn't compare the solution of nationalization with the prevalent alternative of breaking-up says all you need to know about the quality of the article.

Hell, it doesn't even mention the alternative, even though it's the prevalent one.

Not sure if that's the right path to take, but I definitely agree something need to be done to add further consumer protections. Many people have a large chunk of their lives tied up tightly into their ecosystems, with no simple way out.

I've been reflecting on the impact of oauth / openid during the last few years. For some people, losing your Facebook or Google account could mean ending up locked out of dozens, if not hundreds, of services! Haven't checked Facebook's TOS, but Google's TOS says they can shut down your account at any time. Considering the size and reach of both, I think they should be required to at least provide a reasonable migration period before fully closing down an end-user's account.

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.

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.

Not sure why Amazon is included in this though..

[1] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/07/28/report-steve-bannon...

Nationalizing said companies might sound like a good idea at first but one must wonder if this is indeed for the better.

In theory, we own the Govt. in a democracy but it's often realized that in practice, it is owned by whosoever can afford to lobby ignorant politicians, who often care neither for the profit of public industries, nor for their constituency composed of generic ignoramuses.

This seems reminiscent of how 'communism' came to indicate a crony-capitalistic system with a single worst crony possible - the state itself. I for one don't believe public ownership is the same as being owned by a state agency.

You know who I trust less than Google, Facebook and Amazon? The U.S. government.

Also "nationalize". The author seems blissfully unaware of the existence of other countries where said services operator (about 200 of them!).

If one considers the big three to have become a problem then there is a simple solution. One should just stop using them. Why bring politics into it? The users made them what they are, the users can undo it.

How can someone make this argument without considering broadband monopolies? Don't these limit our ability to even access content from the likes of Google, Facebook, or Amazon?

Why should "platform" monopolies be regarded as more important than ISP monopolies?

I'm not trying to say that there aren't platform monopolies. I just don't see the point in making them a higher focus when our ability to even access these platforms is under threat by the current FCC.

I am not opposed to public ownership of these companies per se. Letting them just go on uncontrolled does pose dangers we are just beginning to understand.

But given rhe massive surveillance and largely uncontrolled data hoarding our governments and their intelligence agencies have engaged in, I do not think handing control of Google, Facebook and so forth over to the (any) government is a good idea.

In the long run, we need to do something, bur I think we need to come up with a better idea.

I doubt that it is possible to nationalize Facebook since it means that you no longer have a global user-base and creating inter-op between such complex systems is all but impossible especially when we have hundreds of countries. This means that any free actor with one system for the entire world will always provide a better experience, so as soon as you nationalize a service most users will migrate away from it making the whole thing moot.

So currently, you have a choice not to use google/fb/amazon. If they were to be nationalized (a truly silly idea), you may lose that choice.

Never reading a Guardian story again, crypto-communists - no other word for them, pretty much every day some kind of idiotic leftist agenda is being pushed.

If the current state is 0, nationalization is 10. Maybe we should look for 5. Something like a law that requires customer generated content to be accessible via API, and allows customers to PERMANENTLY delete data they've generated, the code, and data can be subject to random audits. Companies will only be subject to the rules if their customer numbers are > x. Or something similar to that.

Nationalization is probably too much, but indeed, these mega corporations lack accountability. Maybe we need a new kind of corporation, where users are voting stakeholders. It seems to me we, as users, gave up our personal information for too cheap. We underestimated (and still are underestimating) how much control over our lives we've given up in exchange for "free" services.

What if we had tax brackets for corporations, as we do for individuals? Tie them to market share? As market share goes up, so does the tax rate.

No, I don't want the people who are responsible for all of my data to also have the authority to put me in jail.

That misses an even more important point:

At this point any kind of cloud environment should be considered public infrastructure. It is not so much about all these companies, it is more about being able to keep the things you bought after these services reach their inevitable deaths, as no company survives forever.

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.

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.

Partial sarcasm.

I guess Netflix didn't make the cut - even though its the N in "FANG"... Maybe the hype around Netflix is overblown. After all, Google has Youtube and Amazon has Prime Video which probably give Netflix a run for its money.

So the problem is that one big organization has all this data, and the solution is to put it all under the umbrella of a different organization?

How does that help unless we assume that government can do less bad stuff with it than a private organization?

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.

We need [Trump]'s administration to run Google.

We need [Trump]'s administration to run Facebook.

We need [Trump]'s administration to run Amazon.

In 4 years, substitute your own -- no thanks.

No offense, Nick Srnicek, but please keep the authoritarianism on that side of the pond.

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.

What would happen to those companies if nationalized? I'm pretty sure most googlers et Al don't want to be government employees and would quit immediately.

Guardian just went full communist. Never go full communist.

Or, I think the other way is more sensible or probably already in motion -- we need let Google, Facebook and Amazon govern.

I think we should start small, from, say, nationalizing the authors' personal possessions and primary residence.

I never imagined I would support this position, but after seeing CloudFare CEO disabling a website just because he woke up in a bad mood, I fully support that any corporation should

- either be not allowed to amass quasi-monopolistic power

- or if they want/have to, they should be heavily regulated (eg. utilities) and not allowed to discriminate based on their "values"

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.

Who is John Galt? (I'm not a huge fan of the book, but it's so fitting here.)

As someone who owns stocks of Google and Amazon, I'd like to compare the effect the title of this article had on me, to what a woman would feel if she stumbled upon an article titled "We need to legalize rape : here is why."

I'm all for free speech, but this guy is dancing on a thin line.

which nation?

perhaps, instead, we need to tokenize them:

https://blog.bigchaindb.com/tokenize-the-enterprise-23d51baf...

If you nationalise Google and Amazon, say good bye to innovation.

We need to stop posting links to the Guardian.

The answer is no.

That's the _worst_ idea I've heard this week.

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.

Nah.

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.