Comment by kagamine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kagamine | Hacker News Reader

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You keep saying "not something that free societies do" as though that phrase in itself has meaning, but fail to explain why. From a socialist's pov putting a profitable industry in the domain of _everyone_ and sharing the profits is freeing capital from the few and providing an (more)equal share to all. It's not capitalism but that does not mean it isn't "freedom".

What is "freedom"? Market competition The way Amazon, Uber etc have been set up, using hundreds of millions in investment, able to operate against smaller competitors for literally years without breaking even until the opposition is crushed and consumers are herded into being customers... is that freedom? Maybe for the already established wealthy. For everyone else it's an unfair advantage. There is no freedom for the average Joe to start a publishing an distribution powerhouse

I agree it's a terrible idea to nationalize these companies, but citing 'freedom' as the reason why is not why it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea because it would lead to excessive bureaucracy, higher prices and is unlikely to benefit the competition much. It might help governments get those companies to pay some tax though.

>From a socialist's pov putting a profitable industry in the domain of _everyone_ and sharing the profits is freeing capital from the few and providing an (more)equal share to all. It's not capitalism but that does not mean it isn't "freedom".

I don't believe all ideologies and their definitions need to be given equal respect. Socialists shouldn't get to just redefine "freedom" to mean a government monopoly running major industries, by outlawing private citizens from owning productive enterprises in those industries, and have everyone else accept their definitions as equally valid as a classical liberal's.

Think about it practically for a moment: what is the government going to do when private citizens in another country fire up thousands of servers and begin providing web services to the people within the government's jurisdiction? Put up a firewall? Start raiding anyone running a relay node that bypasses the firewall? How is that congruent with any reasonable definition of freedom?

We can pretend that we're frameless and judging all perspectives as equally valid, but in actuality that will never happen, as it would make any sort of meaningful communication impossible. Someone could argue war is peace, slavery is freedom, etc, and there would be no way to reject their statements as unequivocally wrong. We would be uttering words to each other that mean completely different things to different people, because we would no longer follow the basic convention of language, which is that the widely observed and long established definition trumps the unorthodox one.

The whole point is that these companies are inherently resistant to competition. Nationalization doesn't require limiting access to any other service or restricting competition in any way.

Then fund a public option. Better yet, make the public option a distributed protocol. Then no seizures of private property, laws prohibiting private enterprise, or internet firewalls to prevent foreign service providers from rendering their service to local residents, would be needed.

In which case there is no need to nationalise, because by definition if another competitor can be created then the government can create one itself.

All nationalising would do is give the government a leg-up in having an existing user base. In practice government inertia would lead to the service atrophying and becoming outdated and overburdened with bureaucratic controls and costs. Page & Brin, Bezos and Zuckerberg (or someone new) would each raise capital, start their own competing services and in a few years time we'd be back where we started.

This whole idea is so utterly misconceived and pointless it blows my mind how many people here are trying to justify or defend it. Unless you actively regulated to prohibit competing private services, it would be doomed from he start and if such regulation was enforced - literally banning other search engines including Bing, banning other social networks, banning any other online retail businesses, the lurch towards dystopianism would create a very different world to the one we live in. Even China hadn't come even close to anything like that.

> You keep saying "not something that free societies do" as though that phrase in itself has meaning, but fail to explain why.

Uh... no offense intended, that's a failure of your comprehension abilities, and not my responsibility to satisfy. Your confusion amounts to "why is the sky blue?"

Because it's blue, Billy. Because it's blue.

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