Google, Facebook, and Amazon have fundamentally transformed the web
staltz.com
staltz.com
But beyond the details, I think it's hard to argue with the main point. The web is much more of a large corporation's playground today, far more. That means new things will be built in a different, more giant friendly way. The part of that that worries me most is the cultural part, more than the economic side.
My favourite example is wikipedia. If we didn't already have wikipedia, I don't think we'd be likely to get one on today's web. The culture is just far too corporate for wikipedia to be the end result.
Youtube's another sort of example. Democratic media! A new culture factory!...
Youtubes play by the rules these days. Copyright.. business friendly policy, erring on the side of restriction. It's just more manageable. Nudity? Why annoy politicians and advertisers? Just give us the purple hills version. Violence? Do what TV does. Revolution? Maybe, yes. Sure. Up the arab spring! Wait.. no. actually, wait. Hold on, not in america. Look.., no just means not here. Political ads, eh...? How about you leave us out of this.
They are no longer interested in the unfolding and unpredictable consequences of their inventions. Facebook is the world's news stand & coffee house. Youtube's regional political radio, newsletters & party magazine. They do not want this job, so they're pretending it isn't they're job. Pretending they won't have to draw lines between truth and lies, free speech and hate speech, laws and despotism.
The fear driven incumbent mentality.
It's a pity we didn't get more wikipedia's back when the gettin was good. I would have preferred to see a giant wikipedia end up with the fake news problem (which I think these two giants almost created themselves).
GrooveShark is an example of failing to make it, although there are several successful clones elsewhere.
The original vision for the Web according to its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, was a space with multilateral publishing and consumption of information. It was a peer-to-peer vision with no dependency on a single party. Tim himself claims the Web is dying: the Web he wanted and the Web he got are no longer the same.
Parent comment:
> The web is much more of a large corporation's playground today, far more. That means new things will be built in a different, more giant friendly way. The part of that that worries me most is the cultural part, more than the economic side.
The fact that 2014 was cited as the start time of this cultural shift gives me pause, because it also coincides with the start of the campus cultural shift.
What I'm accusing (bemoaning?) them of mostly is being big, corporate and basically reserving a big portion of media for that big-corporate voice. This isn't new in media, but it is in online media.
On the point about policing truth (or maybe currating content)..this is just something they now have to deal with. Regimes have fallen on their platform, coups prevented, elections impacted.... They can't hide behind algorithmic moral neutrality as Google 1.0 did, at least least not without taking a bold (costly) stance in a free speech direction.
At the moment Google and Facebook are trying to be neither democratic or undemocratic. Not unbiased, just unopinionated in their role as the media. This is something you could only say in a corporate tone of voice.
These problems are all consequences of being enormous superpowers. I want stuff from GoogleFb, stuff I might feel I have a right to like speech or affiliation. I have to go to them for these. We don't have the "don't like my store, shop elsewhere" relationship anymore because they have all the stores where all the people buying and selling are.
I don't know, I can get a VM and a public IP much cheaper now than ever before. It's never been easier to put content or innovation in front of the entire Internet.
Use to be when someone thought they could do something better they'd do it and let the Internet judge. For example, if you want a different social network then build one and get your friends to try it out. If they like it then maybe it'll grow. That's pretty much how every social site that was ever tried (including Facebook) started. Will your idea fail? Probably, but failure is just part of the process.
Seems like here you read a lot of "well Google/Facebook exists so why even bother?". That mentality is the real problem.
This is true. There are also a lot more people using the internet that you can get to. Taking it even further you don't even need a virtual machine or IP to do most of things people were doing back then with a regular machine. You could just use facebook.
I disagree with you on what this aggregates to. Controlling the path of least resistance as FB and Google do in online media (or just media if we project out somewhat) is a lot like controlling the medium entirely. This is (as I said above) not new in media but it is new in online media. In old media a small group controlled most of it. Now in online media, a few people do the same.
I'm not saying why even bother. I am saying (echoing the article in saying) that we're moving into a world where ordinary innovation and competition is simply not going to move these beasts from their entrenched position, not easily.
BTW, you can also start your own TV news show. Cameras are cheaper than ever. Doing a radio show (online obviously) is genuinely accessible since podcasting is still a largely open medium. That doesn't negate the point that entrenched incumbents dominate the market, structurally. HTTP is not how you get the content of your VM & IP to people. FB & Google is.
No one will look at it. I had a Diaspora account. There's nothing and nobody there.
True most ideas are going to fail. But (e.g.) even FB was born in an era where there was a chance of success. I'm not so sure that's the case now. That is, you're like to be stuck in mediocrity, and that can be stifling.
Failure is one thing. Average is another. These seem to be the nature of the beast of our current times.
For example, both Google and Facebook used to offer lower cost ways to get visitors based mostly on you delivering quality content.
That's mostly gone now. It's pay to play. Breaking out of the walled garden costs now. Quality is a secondary concern, at best.
The rampant censorship is something I could not have envisioned.
5 years ago, if you told me censorship would be the norm on reddit, twitter, facebook, youtube, etc. I would not have believed you. 10 years ago, if you told me anyone would support banning/stealing of domains ( daily stormer, etc ), I would not have believed you.
It is just astounding to witness the censorship powers of corporate + government + media.
The promise of the internet as an open platform for ideas/speech/etc that I grew up with in the 90s/00s has ended.
Perhaps it's the result of the centralization of the internet in the past 10 years. Hopefully the pendulum swings back towards a more decentralized version of the internet.
I don't even use Google, Bing, or any other large search engine. I don't need to. I block all ads, tracking, cookies, beacons, and browser fingerprinting pretty well.
The way to win is to not play their game. I give my data to no one. Fastmail doesn't even have my address, just my name. I use Visa gift cards to buy stuff online.
I've been in IT over three decades and my online life is just fine. I don't use or miss any of the big services. Like many, I preferred the Web of old, circa 1998. I miss Geocities, even.
Arguments like these are about "how can we structurally change this problem so that society as a whole ends up in a better place".
Your "well, I do it better" anecdote is neat, but doesn't really help anyone.
Back in 90's the internet was for the young, curious and open minded. And I mean like 5% of the most most open minded people around.
Now internet is for everybody. Maybe the average population just wants their media bit stale and censored.
I mean, obviously, noone could really have known the exact time frame in which it would happen, but I really cannot fathom how people are surprised by this. When a power structure incentivises a certain behaviour, that behaviour will be what happens, and large concentrations of power always are extremely prone to corruption of any ideals they might have had at some point in their history.
The only way to avoid this is to avoid concentration of power.
It turns out ideas are dangerous, but not in the way we thought - we thought they would set us free and railed against government censorship, but instead people were seduced by the idea that they were born kings, only to have that taken from them by the immigrants/Jews/homosexuals/media elite/Hillary/Trump.
It turns out using the ashes of public education to shine the light of liberty ends up with racist public opinion.
Please don't speak for me.
> It turns out I won't defend, to the death, your right to copy and paste the n-word a million times and call it discourse, and death threats to anybody, especially journalists, are simply unacceptable.
Which are justifications for censorship how?
> The surprise is that online, people yell "fire!" into a crowded theater for the fun of it
Hu? What would be an example of that?! I can't really imagine how that analogy could possibly apply to online conversations (given that those usually don't take place in a crowded theater) ...
> I now find myself supporting limits on speech - not by the government, but the corporations running the modern day printing press.
So, you are convinced that censorship by corporations will overall have a better long-term outcome for society than free speech combined with efforts to change people's minds (instead of preventing them from saying what they think) and other approaches to combatting crimes?
> It turns out ideas are dangerous, but not in the way we thought - we thought they would set us free and railed against government censorship, but instead people were seduced by the idea that they were born kings, only to have that taken from them by the immigrants/Jews/homosexuals/media elite/Hillary/Trump.
Yes, I agree that ideas can be dangerous, and as far as I am concerned, in exactly the way that I thought. I think one of the most dangerous ideas ever is the idea that authoritarianism is a solution to anything. Some use that idea to come to the conclusion that you have to elect a strong leader that will deport all Mexicans. Some use that idea to come to the conclusion that you have to empower a private communication monopoly to decide what speech is acceptable in society. All do it with the expectation that the power they put in place will defend their interests. History tells us that that is a naive expectation.
> It turns out using the ashes of public education to shine the light of liberty ends up with racist public opinion.
Are you sure that you aren't confusing visibility with existence? That is to say: Has unrestricted online discourse led to people adopting a racist standpoint, or has it simply made visible what was there all along?
Encarta.com of course!
We didn't get more Wikipedia's because most of us sold out. The allure of 8 or 9-figure paydays, with "FU" money almost within reach, hell yes I'm going to build the best social-media kitten-photo coupon-clipping app for my chance at that instead of slaving away to saving the Internet from ungrateful masses who don't understand the dangers of the corporations.
From that era of the web, we also got archive.org and the EFF (please donate to them too!), both with very admirable missions, moreso these days.
The other site from that era I can think of is Craigslist, and they're still committed to a purple-on-white mostly-text interface and they still don't charge for personal use. (A peek at their own jobs page says they're hiring for React and mobile developers in SF, so maybe they're also changing.)
Same for facebook, perhaps start using a different social network and messaging apps. Sure, no one will see my posts, that is until I send them a good old fashion link, to a photo of my cute daughter.
we need those "PODS" from Tim Burner's Lee's https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-w...
In this model, all your data belongs to you. Any social network you allow or visit can make use of the data, but it all still belongs to you. And you'll be able to switch from Social network to social network or document provider(docs, spredsheets software) as easily as changing your socks.
And we don't have to completely replace GOOG and FB, we should have to offer alternatives and reduce the cost of switching - That's the key to preventing these services from turning Evil.
Are there any social networks out there currently that do this yet?
Telegram is nice for instant messaging: it's simple, cross-platform, does well with resources, and run by a non-profit org. Yes, russians might be spying on it. FB/G are spied by others. Meh. (There's Signal as well, but I like my SMS separated.)
Google Docs are terrible anyway: slow, lacking lots of features. Libreoffice or (god forbid!), installed M$ Office - and share the docs on, for example, Dropbox.
However, it's already very hard to tell people what the web used to be. Just read the entry "I’m 22 years old and what is this."[2] - web devs being in the business for <10 years may not even remember how it was before G or FB. I'd welcome any ideas how to address this.
[1]: https://yunohost.org/ [2]: https://medium.com/@tylrfishr/im-22-years-old-and-what-is-th...
It's not in their interest to allow open access to their messaging service. The current status quo means you have to be in their app or on the website to access your contacts and view their ads!
The bigger hurdle are the email clients. Both on desktop, android and as webmail, email clients are mostly fairly bad (as in: just as good as the one I had nearly twenty years ago). It's hard to keep up with Gmails UX and features, especially since open source software isn't exactly known for stellar UX.
I have been considering migrating away from Gmail, but it is a bit daunting, mostly due to all of the logins I will need to update (if that is even possible) and because I would have to go back to manual sorting and categorizing.
One challenge (at least amongst my circles) is that people do not seem to value diversity and are for some reason obsessed with mono-culture. For example, they are not willing to try another docs or email or phone provider. Even if they try something new, they are quick to jump to opinions in mere seconds (for example, I asked a friend to try mattermost[2] instead of slack and he wanted to go on about how the shade of blue was unappealing...). Many of my friends are also truly vested into converting their entire household into apple or google products (i.e one of them). If apple made a mattress tomorrow, they would immediately buy it :)
free software projects and linux distributions have been around for years, but the focus is often on compatibility and familiarity. i say, we throw all of that in the trash. we need fresh ideas, fresh designs, and interfaces. interesting new devices and interaction models. app stores that engage creators as a revenue channel. there's no reason why liberty and profit should be at odds. [0]
i especially think that we need to rethink how we develop applications. clouds are useful, but why are the developers on the hook for all of that compute? i think we need to radically simplify the tools we use for provisioning compute resources in a way that allows users to leverage all of their compute resources and easily attach more on-demand. this echoes back to plan 9, which has this idea of creating a virtual system out of many hosts.
we're just getting started, and there are a lot of challenges ahead of us. if any of this sounds interesting or fun, maybe you want to get involved with our nonsense. [1]
https://www.heropunch.io/tomo/cybredeck/
most of the action is happening in #heropunch:matrix.org i'm on the os side, actually. @mlg:matrix.org is tackling the hardware. we're starting simple with off the shelf parts, but if people like our shit we are def interested in scaling up to make more advanced devices.
also, if you would like to back something that exists right now there's the librem 5
It's amazing how Google as a search engine has developed such brand loyalty to the point that people don't think there can be any alternatives. Personally, I like DDG's results better, and I also simply like diversifying. But as I said, even which search engine you use is highly stigmatized.
People should really be open to trying new things once in a while. How can people be certain that some search engine X isn't better than Google's engine when they haven't even tried it? Same goes for browsers -- years ago Chrome won people over with its speed, and friends I speak to still have this perception that it's the fastest browser out there, when some tests would begin to suggest its losing that edge (no pun intended).
What's needed is to prevent certain kinds of key acquisitions.
The law around acquisitions is too permissive in an age of network effects; acquisition laws were fine pre-internet but don't solve their intended purpose anymore.
Normally, the market corrects against the biggest players because the biggest players are slow to change culture and their business.
But, acquisitions are the mechanism by which the big players are preventing themselves from being disrupted by smaller, more nimble players.
If the big players can simply buy up any new comers (who will want a deserved pay-out for their efforts) on the scene, they maintain complete control regardless of what consumers want.
Otherwise, any "alternative practices" you try to foster will simply be crushed, if they ever become a large enough threat.
https://stratechery.com/2017/why-facebook-shouldnt-be-allowe...
The problem is that in the internet age, it is not in controlling supply but in effectively unlimited demand created by combination of zero marginal cost to add customers and network effects of the internet.
I wonder at what point companies decided they could own our data, and we agreed to it.
If I write something on a post-it note and give it to my coworker, will 3M rear its head and demand ownership of that information? No, of course not. So why do we allow Google to own our information when we use their software and/or office equipment?
Microsoft is still in the process of transitioning. Google, Facebook and Amazon likely never had a data-agnostic phase in the first place.
It's been a boiling frog situation, but it's not so much that they decided they could own it as that it's been established that we don't. It helps to think of these companies as scavengers picking up the data we trail behind us on our travels. Even so, by at least the Target breach (2013) the message has been that we have no claim or recourse.
A better metric would be a measurement of user initiated actions. Now sure how to pull that off, but it would be a more accurate measure of how the net is changing.
Besides, the direction and relative values show clear and growing dominance.
It's very challenging to figure out how to do this in a way that benefits users and improves user experience - we are very careful about being fair to users on mobile connections - but I think that a distributed web platform is the future and the only way we can combat the (lack of) net neutrality.
We already have a distributed internet, just not as distributed as we had hoped for from a censorship perspective.
Bandwidth is expensive and many let youtube host the video for free instead of paying to host it themselves which is why it is no surprise that Youtube tops the list.
This is easily solved by switching to peer to peer protocols, which would work like a charm if our providers did the sensible thing and gave us a symmetric bandwidth to begin with.
I was also talking about the ADSL tragedy. We should have had SDSL from the beginning. (And yes, the corresponding decrease in raw download rate would have been worth it).
First came dial-up modems. Can't have a server with those without monopolising the phone. Then came the DSL. Providers noticed that nobody has a server, and deduced in their immense commercial wisdom that they didn't want a server. So they made the DSL Asymmetric. Now people could have a server, but the upload was so terrible it wasn't worth it. Conclusion: the ISPs were right: nobody wants a server.
There was this P2P fluke, but the copyright lobby kindly explained this was only used for illegal stuff. Everything's mostly back in order now.
Anyway, now we've established nobody needs nor wants a server, we can put NATs everywhere and nobody will notice.
---
DSL was the first avoidable mishap in a long string of centralisation trends.
If your only connection is through your phone, I have to feel a bit sorry for you.
One can still have an R-Pi at home.
These devices are also thermally constrained.
There's far more to this than upload speed.
However 5G promises much higher bandwidth and more symmetric data rates
By the way, even now, a user have to send requests to the right place to get any data. IP packets still have to go both ways.
How would _you_ implement a secure P2P where you (and only you) can rapidly change content (dynamic web pages) and control who has access to authorized pages?
What about credit card info? Passwords?
I imagine there "are" implementations that solve many of those issues. But it's sure-as-heck not common knowledge if there are "easy" answers to all those problems.
I can't help but feel "Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson screaming at me. How do you ensure every bit of the web stack isn't hacked on every computer in the network, as opposed to your own?
[1] [PDF] http://vxer.org/lib/pdf/Reflections%20on%20Trusting%20Trust....
In fact, when dealing with P2P, you're more likely than not, to be full of compromised programs. Many unintentional, but many others intentionally. Torrent users who run clients that don't upload. Every P2P game ever made being hacked. (See the entire purpose behind QuakeWorld moving to a client-server model over P2P, over the original quake.) And every Kazaa uploader had viruses on his PC back-in-the-day.
I'm not saying P2P is impossible. But first, you've got to define what application you want to implement (webpage, vs public video hosting) because the solutions are completely different. And even then, you're still walking into dangerous territory when you can't control the machines your relying on.
What happens if you need more bandwidth than your usernet can give? You can't simply "install more servers" or "buy more bandwidth" when your "server" is every user connected to your site.
And what happens when you roll out new versions, and some users don't upgrade?
The list goes on. And I say all of this as someone who has considered using distributed computing model for game hosting, where machines assist in computations and bandwidth. It's possible to do, but it opens up entire dimensions of additional problems to solve.
---
The trust problem still applies to HTTP. We still download viruses on the web, and we still lose our credit card numbers to con artists. The only reason there's more malware on current P2P network is because those networks are disproportionately used to infringe copyright. The risk doesn't come from the distributed nature of the network, but from the lack of legality of the content.
Securing peer to peer communications to current web levels is trivially easy: just sign the damn data, and have a certificate authority ascertain the identity of the signer. For static content such as YouTube videos, you can also use a content addressable system.
While that would require some level of centralisation, it woulndn't exceed that of DNS, and would definitely solve the bandwidth issue.
> What happens if you need more bandwidth than your usernet can give?
I won't happen, because we enjoy symmetric bandwidth, thanks to our regulators being sensible, competent people. (At least that's the case in my rainbows & unicorns world). Seriously, though, symmetric bandwidth is the ultimate and only solution to many problems: it ensures total upload keeps up with total download, so we get the equilibrium we want.
That would be flawed if individual sites couldn't also host videos -- or if we didn't care whether they do.
a measurement of user initiated actions
how to pull that off
Traffic is traffic, and it’s no one’s business whether I’m watching a video, clicking a button, issuing shell commands, or typing a reply to a message.
No thank you, to the idea of changing protocols, or forcing people onto the application layer, in furtherance of analyzing our already-over-analyzed activities with an electron microscope.
>> I'm not going into Freenet
Well there's your answer.
All: Other comments being bad doesn't mean it's ok to make the site even worse. The guidelines cover this issue too, so please read and follow them!
If you object to having your name associated to it, reddit also has fun places.
Then I noticed the small print under the table: it's peak time mobile usage in Latin America.
To me, the real issue is that we have a service which people depend on like a public utility (the internet) whose components are completely privatized and uncontrolled (ISP's, search, social networking). It's not a bad thing that so much of the traffic is being routed through certain pages. What makes this unsettling is that those pages are undemocratically, privately controlled and you've got next to no say in it because if you switch to a different private alternative, who's to say we won't be in exactly the same situation 10 years from now?
> if you don't rank on google for whatever it is you're launching/publishing -- you don't exist.
And yet, Andre and his blog clearly 'exist' (i.e. can be accessed and read, and perhaps even found in a search engine if search terms are relevant enough). Medium blogs (or other indexable and searchable media) obviously 'exist'. Reddit and Hacker News definitely 'exist'.
Perhaps that comment refers to commercial viability of internet media, or to their overall reach, but what do we, regular netizens, care about such pecuniary stuff? It's up to executives to think about business models and profitability; while it's up to us to use whatever suits us best on the Internet.
Hacker News regularly dominates Google queries, and Reddit does too.
I do agree that the statement that search engine rank is all misses a rather significant element, that being virality / social reach.
If you can regularly gain enormous traffic from Reddit, Facebook, or even HN, you don't necessarily need search engine rankings. If you can afford to pay for ads, likewise.
It's if you're in none of those three camps that you might as well not exist on the Web. Tree falls, forest, no-one to hear it, etc.
I think the key place where we went wrong is that we envisioned the web as a utility to help expand each person's mind and communication abilities. Instead it's morphing into a service where large groups of people can clan and waste time around the virtual water cooler. It was supposed to be a brain super-power. Instead it's a shared newsletter for angry mobs. It was supposed to free us up to find out amazing things about the world around us. Instead it's freed up the world around us to examine us in exquisite detail. We don't surf the internet anymore. The internet surfs us.
And yes, that sounds a lot like hyperbole, but such is the nature of essays like this. When I wrote "Technology is Heroin" ( http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is... ) I didn't mean it was literally heroin. I meant it was taking on the role that dangerous drugs had in times past. The web isn't literally dying. It's changing into something so different than what we wanted that it is for all intents and purposes dead. Many folks are getting wrapped up in the semantics of the discussion instead of the underlying meaning.
Looking forward to seeing more of your work!
There is a way forward, though. Between the Old Web and GOOG-FB-AMZN's Trinet, we can build something else: the New Web based on decentralized protocols like IPFS, Dat, blockchains, secure-scuttlebutt, and others. That's what I'm working on.
Like guns kill people, right?
Seems like the solution is to begin treating infrastructure as a public utility, but I can hardly imagine that actually happening.
What creates decentralisation is distance and transport costs, not (merely0 prottocols, and definitely not efficiences: they are inherently centralising.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/240xss/the_dop...
Do you have a link to a bibliography where this book appears?
By the way, I found your article interesting too. I do think it has a blind spot, in that you're missing a very big addiction that has stayed with us for a long time: work.
Google now has at least one product in the entire stack of the internet.
You can use a Google Pixel, and Google Chromebook, using Android and Chrome OS, browsing with Chrome, while using Google Fi and Google Fiber, connected directly to Google's backbone, visiting Google's Search, Maps, etc or other sites hosted on Google's cloud, using Google's DNS server.
At this point you can use most of the functionality of the internet without ever leaving the Google ecosystem.
And this is just going to be expanded.
Google has launched 5 social networks, 4 messaging apps, and dozens of phones by now.
The only reason it's not yet a walled garden is because Google is incompetent at it for now, but we can't bet the future of the open web on that.
that is a bold statement. care to elaborate?
Their authentication in general seems convoluted and complicated, their console is slow and useless (why aren't all the search results preloaded? I type in 'iam' and it takes several seconds for the results to appear). Oh, and also alpha K8s clusters will terminate after 30 days whether you like it or not (perhaps you're using a feature that's apparently stable but languishing in alpha - I'm looking at you, cronjob). There's a lack of services in general (an elasticache type service would be nice) and development seems to move glacially.
Also, they seem to have multiple versions of SDKs, some with outstanding bugs that were reported years ago but are just closed or there are comments in the README that only critical bugs will be addressed. There's no indication which SDK to use where there are several versions. Oh, and if you only want to use one service in python, you have to install about 40 different packages because splitting them up is too difficult.
We've had DFP buckets have their configs get screwed up so we mysteriously couldn't access them, logs stopped being delivered, etc. Apparently Google have such poor monitoring that we had to prompt them about these things which took too longer to get resolved. I could go on...
...viewing content authorized by Google DRM.
> "After taking a look backstage, we can confirm that after recent updates Safari is no longer a supported browser for Web Player"
> Riegelstamm further dug into the details of the Web Player, discovering that the discontinuing of Safari support might have something to do with Google's Widevine media optimizer plugin, which Spotify requires for music streaming on the web and Apple opposes due to potential security issues.
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/08/spotify-web-player-no-s...
Soon after the storage handling in Android got that much more convoluted, making it much harder to get data out of an Android devices without there being some kind of Google daemon sitting between user and storage.
These are minority services and destined to remain so. Google's core competency will probably never by customer service.
Facebook is a large conglomerate business that grows by purchasing young successfull social networks in multiple areas of services.
I'm not aware of any internet.org region in which Facebook is the only unbilled service.
But they have big plans to provide internet access to underdeveloped countries etc.
They are not going away anytime soon.
Not to say his points are wrong just that it lacks some historical perspective.
IMHO, these companies are on the verge of becoming irrelevant actually.
Companies create an open platform to get users, then they progressively squeeze the platform for more money degrading experience, some other company creates a new open platform that offers a better experience, rinse, repeat.
I’ll add one about user experience. Obviously the big web corporations benefit from the natural advantages of scale.
But an overlooked aspect of what makes these platforms sticky is that they all, including Apple, work very hard at making their products easy to use. And these are complex systems (I find Apple’s attempt at maintaining a global user state baffling, just from a user point of view, working with such an unwieldy system must be insane.)
Though this is an old problem, I think it remains: product developers and engineers vastly over estimate a potential users willingness/ability to learn a new system.
This is a “threshold “ problem, with a binary outcome. If your service is “good enough “ you might get some traction. But if you don’t hit that threshold of usability, your efforts are for naught.
The challenge is that usability is often an optimization problem, where one might be inclined to see how the MVP does, before investing the extensive resources in improving user experience. It’s also a big advantage to already have a lot of users, upon which a company can test and iterate.
My main point is that the general public has not become more technically skilled. On the contrary, all this effort by Google-Facebook—Amazon is focused on making these services drop dead easy to use.
Even technically skilled people have limits on how much they can invest in using alternative, less polished systems.
- The web was invented in 1989
- It became public in 1991
- The first ad banner appeared in 1994
- The first central ad server appeared in 1995
Interestingly ads roughly coincides with the "eternal september", the time when the internet really became public. It means that the greater web, the one that is accessible to all people was born with ads.
And BTW, I wouldn't trade todays internet for what we had in the 90s. Yes, it was cleaner back then, ye didn't have to worry too much about ads, privacy, all that stuff and the SNR was much higher but it doesn't make up for the sheer amount of information that is available now backed by search engines that are borderline psychic.
I've gotten better at guessing whats coming.
I miss the days of yore when we were young and innocent and dreamed of a brighter open future.
Now the only solution is to disconnect.
There's more information, but it's much harder to find anything, and outside of small communities, everyone writing interesting things has either stopped or has happily stepped into a walled garden and become undiscoverable.
How Web is supposed to be decentralized if the means of accessing it directly support centralization? You will always prefer external services if your own get capped pretty easily. You cannot have truly distributed web if access points are basically one-way connections.
Maybe we should get our wifi routers into a mesh network. Maybe we should start hosting our own stuff, or make simple tools for this, like YunoHost, iRedMail, etc. But please, stop writing articles about how bad it is.
"I get things are bad. But what are we doing to fix it?" — Casey Newton (Tomorrowland, 2015)
[1]: http://anildash.com/2012/12/the-web-we-lost.html [2]: https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a4... [3]: https://indieweb.org/
https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-w...
However, many of his later ideas, like the Semantic Web, have not taken off. “Own your data” is not a new idea, but it isn’t happening. Most people don’t care. It takes more than a famous name to change that.
they cant force "their web" upon the rest of the world. there will _always_ be some form of web where one can be anonymous, where you can run your own server without any hardware from "them", using standard-protocols.
maybe the business-people and most poeple who dont care about their privacy will use everything they get thrown from "them". that does not mean the web is dead, it is only that the "mainstream" will live in a separate web. maybe this (their) web will be much bigger than our web. even then, the cool kids will switch to the cool punky web again :D
of course everything is just reading tea leaves..
So, yeah, maybe 10 years from now things do like almost entirely like the article predicts, but for most consumers that probably really isn't a problem at all except in some theoretical ethical/privacy sense.
For the people who really do care, they'll just go make their own custom shit like you describe.
Maybe smaller websites are getting less absolute visits than in 2010, but even if that was true, you should say that the web was dying in the 90's.
It's also difficult to believe the web will stop working, or that people will stop making websites just because more people are browsing just on the "trinet" (remember, 20 years ago people already wrote websites, even if they would expect only 3 visits per month). Would Facebook, Google and Amazon come up with a plan to stop ISPs from serving other domains? Why would they do that?
Is it? Lots of small companies and social groups rely on having a Facebook page as their primary way of contact and advertisement, where they would have created a web page of their own in the past.
Of course, the saying about the cobbler's children still applies.
What the original post is showing is that a lot of heavy load of the content (videos) and actual access and control (including optimisation for fast loading on mobile clients) is now being controlled. It lowers barriers to entry and success as a YouTuber (no need to fiddle with hosting anymore, like Ze Frank had to). However, having users instinctively connect to a handful of platforms every day, rather than decide to see your content means you might have to pay for most views, pay as high as your margins would allow you to and not make a significant profit.
An equivalent (I’m not saying it’s a perfect metaphor) is if there be more taxis roaming the street but to go from an old model where you used to hail marauding cabs from the curb to a new model where all taxis, to get business, have to be affiliated to Uber and Gett. All the revenues of those taxis are now controlled by Uber and Gett. Those revenues might be shaved down to operating costs thanks to heavy-handed optimisation. Upsides of those include better control (you grope your passenger and you are out/you write that this ethnic group should be eradicated and you are out), more free rides/free articles thanks to VC-sponsored acquisition vouchers/advertising. Downsides include that you might, in the future, have to pay whatever profit VCs expect as soon as competition is kept away with deep moats -- and lack of innovation.
Being uncomfortable with the Big-Brotheresque aspect of Uber isn’t fully solved by having a single competitor, too. So if you do things in the back seat that some drivers object to (say, French kissing); or if you post something that some people find objectionable (say, show your nipples) then you might lose your ability to travel or publish anymore.
Facebook (and I’m assuming Alphabet) employees themselves will acknowledge that they can’t make perfect judgement-calls at their scale. They love (and often actively participate themselves) alternatives. If you see the other options become victims of either margin-squeezing or editorial control, that admission becomes a little too damning.
The fact that the author doesn't see any Chinese companies is an illustration of fragmentation.
However, I think it's worth noting that each of these fragmented sub-nets are have more traffic and servers than the global Internet did even a few years ago (how many? I'm not sure).
A punishment worse than jail in the New World Order.
The web needs to really become decentralized. Even Tim Berners-Lee has said it [1]. He has started a project to re-decentralize it called Solid [2].
Email was decentralized but now it's become super centralized with GMail etc. And look at how easy it is for the NSA to vacuum all that up from one spot.
Wordpress powers 20% of the decentralized web. Because it's a free, open-source piece of software with a plugin ecosystem that runs on a popular runtime - PHP. We need stuff like that, but for things like SOCIAL MEDIA. Nothing currently exists that can rival facebook, google+ etc.
I believe that the software can change the internet's topology. Right now all signals go through giant centralized server farms. Consider how people use Google Docs for collaboration Facebook / Slack for conversation or Dropbox for their files. The default is to immediately connect to "the cloud" which is in reality some company's server farm. AWS just capitalized on this trend and made it easier.
In fact, you can do all of it LOCALLY by default. There's no reason that bits need to go through Google's servers for a classroom to collaborate on a document, or for an African village to plan a community dinner. Except one: lack of open source software that can run locally, and rival Facebook, Google etc. in ease of use.
We are building that software and started around 2011. My company Qbix [3] wants to decentralize not just the web, but also identity [4], data [5] and social networking [6]. We look to partner with companies who want to decentralize cellphone signals (like gotenna) and energy generation (like solar panels) so human networking in the future has a LOT more local options to utilize before ever jumping onto the public internet.
PS: Whenever I post this topic, with links to back it up, I get downvoted heavily. But I never get any explanation why. If you are an HN member who disagrees with this thesis, first of all that's not enough reason for a downvote. And secondly, I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHY you feel so strongly against what I'm saying here: that the web, cellphone signals and energy generation should be decentralized. Contribute constructively to the conversation, and explain what alternatives do you think are better. Are you so ferventlu against developing software to run on local networks as to militate against comments advocating it? Am I breaking some HN rule by linking to our work that we passionately believe in and spend most of our time on? What are the words behind your downvote?
1. https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web
4. https://github.com/Qbix/auth
It is how the big players gets to dictate policy virtually unchecked.
Email, on the protocol level, is still decentralized. But Google and a few other big players have via their spam filters dictated how every email server on the planet is to behave, or else.
And we are seeing similar things happening with web servers and browsers, just look at the railroading the W3C DRM spec got.
Email spam is only a problem across the global internet. Not within local networks. Same goes for other types of communications.
Human speech for example has remained peer to peer even as radio was invented :)
I really think the problem is a technical one. The social and political outcomes are almost inevitable, just like the two party system is a nearly inevitable outcome of the first-past-the-post ballot.
Lots of paradigms changed as technologies were introduced. The phone, radio, the printing press etc. Technology has a great impact on society.
Google has gone from a welcomed tool (indexing a priori data) to telling what should be the data (ranking). It switched naturally and logically so, but it's a problem IMO.
Lastly, when a domain becomes a social organ, everything changes. It has to be regulated, will cause tension, economic impact ..
google search results are actually terrible these days. nothing but commercial sites, ads, and a few hand picked non-commercial sources like wikipedia, stack overflow, etc.
i cant remember the last time i found an interesting new site searching on google.
Today my heuristic is: the older the HTML the better. Often the horrendously crafted website were the work either of naive individuals that had no hidden agenda beside having fun with webpages, or passionated ones that would put long articles full of interesting facts.
Google's original algorithm of giving weight to inbound links was a very good way of surfacing good content programmatically but I don't think they ever solved how to make it work in an adversarial environment.
Google's other algorithmic approach is to measure user response to sites (what do they click on, how long do they view it, does it satisfy their query, etc). that algorithm is great for maximizing revenue but is bad at surfacing new original content.
In the end they also had to hand curate, which is what failed to work before them, and what they originally replaced, so really we are back to DMOZ and Yahoo now. Just with a very sophisticated monopolist as the gate keeper.
The hand curation is coming back and not only at Google and there's a weird feeling that in the end we want "humans" as much as "results". Even the most satisfying algorithmic result don't have the same as a collection made by a group (considering that algorithm cannot pass some SEO version of the Turing test of course).
Unless of course we all fight back.
The question is, why is it not happening?
A tiny nitpick, but what's with the trend of using stock symbols in non-financial context? GOOGL isn't much shorter than Google, same with AMZN and Amazon. It just looks... annoyingly out of place.
Regarding the article itself, the topic of Facebook/Amazon/Google domination is much spoken and written about and this post doesn't really add much new. This issue is well known for a quite a long time, especially in the HN and similar social circles. What most of the posts are missing is how do we escape this? But that might be too late.
[0] "Look! these are the large organizations ruining everything!"
On average, when people can, they do try to sound more sophisticated than necessary to express a message, including in this message.
Agree. I can't take an article seriously when the author is too lazy to type out Facebook.
I have convinced one project manager to not implement AMP and will continue to try in the future. Please do your part by spreading word of the dangers of GOOG and FB.
This is the inevitable conflict from Google putting their marketing needs ahead of the user experience. If they used site performance as the rating metric, AMP would just be one option for better performance but since the goal was to keep traffic on google.com we're stuck with a worse experience because that's better for Google.
Weight loading times higher in the Pagerank algorithm, and voila. (They do this already, but it's mild)
Where AMP gets a disproportionately high representation in search results, making an obvious target for content creators, and encouraging lock-in.
This problem (the fact Google has a large majority in web browser and mobile device sales) is very concerning to me - the data is interesting and the points are relevant but I have a very hard time reading past titles like "the web is dying". I hope you read this with the intended respectful tone I wrote it in.
Click bait titles have a bad reputation because they either lie or don't go in-depth into the topic. That's not the case here. I wrote with depth and research, and the body of the article is truthful to the title. I believe the title is, although sensationally shocking, true.
With all due respect, I don't see how the article backs up this utterly exaggerated claim.
Unless, of course, you're using the word "dying" in the sense that everybody and everything will die at some time. But I don't think this is meant here, as that wouldn't be "shocking" at all.
And I hope it won't stop others who are allergic to clickbait titles to read your article, because it is very well documented and very insightful.
I am, too, afraid of the end of net neutrality and the future you describe is really scary.
It's a simple explicative sentence.
Maybe you folks have just been conditioned enough by click-bait now that you can't distinguish the difference, and I don't mean to denigrate you by stating that.
The technology is still there but the diverse hosting options and the creativity that many of us associated with it (what could be called “the spirit of the original web”) could be in peril.
I don’t think that you are arguing that Google and Facebook are fighting HTTP/HTML - although they are offering alternatives that they present as technologically preferable.
"The original vision for the Web according to its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, was a space with multilateral publishing and consumption of information. It was a peer-to-peer vision with no dependency on a single party."
This web is still alive and well, nobody stops you from grabbing a domain name and launch anything you wish. Tim was a bit naive that he assumed profit seeking won't mess with his creation.
The underlying protocol is still the same as it was 20 years ago. With 3,885,567,619 internet users this dying platform is the best thing in computing we had so far. Of course it's changing, but the web is much larger than GOOG, FB, AMZN.
Yo are ignoring the long tail and that tail is very long.
If I have a big, world changing individual thought and I create something good, then it will probably be picked up by the endless blogs, magazines, journals. I can place it on GitHub or buy a $10 server and I'm good to go, in that case I manage almost everything about it. It's not the web's jobs to filter out the gems.
If my individual thought is not much better than "Mondays suck" then Twitter is probably a good place for it to be forgotten.
plenty does!
if you don't rank on google for whatever it is you're launching/publishing -- you don't exist.
you could try sharing it with friends on facebook and hope for a social network effect, but just ask the journalism industry how organic reach is working out as of late
selling something online? your only hope is FBA. where the A stands for Amazon. I guess etsy might work too. so, okay...duopoloy!
and even if you don't care to be found, and aren't selling anything, it is TRIVIAL to take down any kind of not-expensive hosting (your raspi @ home, your DigitalOcean VPS, or colocated server) with a DDoS attack.
AWS, GCP, & Azure can weather most attacks, but it will cost you. And if it's large enough they'll shut you off anyway. and then send you a bill you can't pay.
so no, there is plenty stopping you from launching anything on the internet. the cost structures (be it time or money or both) greatly favor the massively entrenched incumbents. and not a little bit of favor. they favor them....bigly.
True, you'll be able to do that, but if most of people will have "free internet package" that will allow them to access GOOG, FB, AMZN only, having the domain will not make much sense.
I wonder though, if we really descent into a multi-tier internet and if a version of a "legacy" internet survives in some form (even though not accessible by main stream FB/GOOG users), if that legacy part of the internet will become cleaner and once gain open to grass roots innovation?
I.e. If people generally knew that Bono was dying already through other sources, a headline of "Bono is dying" would be shocking by the nature of what it is, but ultimately not clickbait.
Does smtp 'exist' now that most of it is over google, yahoo, and microsoft? Or linux considering RedHat/Cent/Fedora and Ubuntu/Debian are responsible for most installs.
I think its rational to accept that big players will, naturally, take big slices and that doesn't mean you're kinda sorta making a 'x is dying' argument. If anything, the natural distribution of the network effect probably falls onto a ~80/20 relationship where the bigger players take 80% of the market and many smaller players take the remaining 20%.
The web will be no exception to this. It just took a little while to get here. Its already happened to ISPs, remember early on when every city had multiple competing DSL resellers? PC operating systems (is anyone even pretending that Windows and MacOS as a distant second will ever have real competitors anymore?), PC GPUs (two real players now), 3D game engines (2 non-in house engines dominate), does Linkedin even have competition now?, etc, etc.
Worse, the network effect for Facebook is tremendous. Its power isn't that its a great service, its mediocre at best, but its a such a pita to get everyone you know to switch over that it'll probably never happen.
Back in the old days, bloggers had to get their own domain names, find their own hosting, write their own html/css/whatever, manage their own CMS (and install it on a linux system hosted somewhere and via the commandline/ftp/whatever), etc. This meant a lot of the early web was techie-oriented types who could perform these tasks (endless sites and discussions on who is the best Star Trek captain or which was the worst Star Wars movie, not many on fighting childhood malnutrition in the 3rd world). I'm not sure how this was 'better' than what we have today.
Democratization will often lead to a network effect which will lead to consolidation. Philosophically, to some, a perfectly distributed system is 'better' but to pull that off you'd probably need communist-level social and economic controls and if you had that you most likely would never had the internet or the web.
Just the fact that we use aggregators like HN or Reddit means that we accept a whole lot of consolidation without question and often see it as better than the old system of managing a dozen different topics spread on on various specialist sites and usenet. Or are we giving special exceptions to techie approved sites like Reddit (the 4th most popular site in the USA), which is missing from the article?
Take some figures plucked from thin-air and you have a recipe for retort success!
Thankfully, it's only a caveat that happens 20/80 of the time, sort of like how TCP does such a good job of filtering out the riff-raff. /s
I thought the analogy to SMTP was a very good one and, considering the audience, was not esoteric at all.
You proved my point about esoteric appeal because my argument was opposite to how you viewed it: that us techies get blinded by irrelevant concepts because we can relate to them, that are otherwise esoteric outside the HN bubble.
Glassdoor shows job opportunities side-by-side with company reputations. I'm certainly more inclined to use that over LinkedIn!
I don't see Google(Search/Chrome/Android) and Amazon in the same sphere as Facebook/YouTube/Twitter in doing damage to the web.
I am much more worried about the societal chaos that Facebook/YouTube/Twitter are producing across the globe than any net neutrality issues.
Yes, Google and Apple found ways to break that monopoly, but a chastened Microsoft wasn't prepared to wage the type of scorched earth campaigns that it became famous for.
As a matter of fact, I am. And we have palpable consequences today, with that trusted computing débâcle (backdoors on CPUs that threaten to turn into full blown vulnerabilities…)
As a GNU/Linux user, I'm not too worried about my own OS. But I am scared that Apple managed to locked down its systems in a way that would have Microsoft sharded into oblivion. Numeric prisons are now not only acceptable but downright fashionable.
YES! with my cpu running 2 kernel rings deep that the OS is not aware of. What is even worse if you try to disable it and the cpu kernel detects it will disable the hardware. Makes me truly worried where person computing is headed, aka I'm not in control of my device I paid for!
Yes, Intel is still pulling these stunts and there are not many viable alternatives.
Companies' have achilles heels. They are built into the way they think in the era when it was started, when it was agile and fit in the mind of one person, before it got big and cumbersome, impossible to steer, profit-magnetized and impossible to even think longer term than a quarter. This business cycle is inherent to our laws and culture, it happens to all companies eventually.
Startups 20 years from now will be built by today's toddlers who pinch-zoom magazines and "Alexa, play Spice Girls" an empty room. The incumbent generation can't imagine what the next generation will bring, almost definitionally. But they will have disruptive ideas too. They will probably look stupid to us old people and we won't see it coming until it's too late.
Open-data-web is a good today-generation example. There are chickens and eggs to be solved, maybe the economics are impossible. Or maybe just nobody figured out the path yet. There were a hundred crypto currencies before bitcoin that went nowhere. But if someone figures out a strategic path that gets there, we know that person won't be Facebook, because open data will wreck Facebook's core business.
> On the Trinet, if you are permanently banned from GOOG or FB, you would have no alternative. You could even be restricted from creating a new account. As private businesses, GOOG, FB, and AMZN don’t need to guarantee you access to their networks. You do not have a legal right to an account in their servers, and as societies we aren’t demanding for these rights as vehemently as we could, to counter the strategies that tech giants are putting forward.
This specific part (that dominant companies can ban individuals with no recourse) shouldn't be tolerated.
Nobody is stopping you from starting your own blog and posting your views there. But, just like no one is obligated to seek out a flyer you post on a telephone pole, no one is obligated to seek out your writings.
Suggestions for a better replacement are welcome. 'Better' in this case means accurate, neutral, and using representative language from the article itself.
So - while possibly not 'the web' as in 'browser' - it's arguably 'the web' nevertheless because almost all these apps depend on a great deal of http-ish interactivity etc...
Also - though it's hard to say how much change there has been on the desktop - remember that people do use desktop apps for socially and webby oriented reasons etc..
Imagine: Spotify App vs. Spotify Web, Gmail vs. local client - etc. etc..
This is quite a demarcation.
Finally, one might consider also that 'web experiences' have expanded.
We may not be uses 'other things' less, rather, FB is a new experience that is taking up addition time allocated to the web.
So - we had 'the web' - now we have 'the web + FB web'.
But great article, thanks for that.
The irony here is that if anything were going to kill the web, it would be stupid articles like this one. Thankfully, the internet is bigger than all of the short-sighted johnny-come-latelys in the world.
Frankly, if you weren't using the web before CSS, then you shouldn't be wasting people's time with your predictions.
Freedom shouldn't be tolerated, really? We should force private companies in the private market to serve you because why?
Feels like permissive vs copyleft all over again.
I very much like the idea that no one has the "freedom" to deprive me of my citizens' freedoms. I mean, that's supposed to be the job of judges and juries.
> No more freedom of speech, no more freedom of information, that's pretty heavy stuff.
I don't think you know what freedom of speech even means to be saying that here. Freedom of speech means the government can't limit your speech or punish you for it, it doesn't mean you have a right to every broadcast medium that exists for speech.
I was talking about the trinet hypothesis, where (roughly speaking), Facebook is the internet. If I was banned from that, I couldn't even have a blog.
> Freedom of speech means the government can't limit your speech or punish you for it
Replace "government" by "no one", and I would agree. (I'll accept one exception, though: judges, when punishing me for some bad deed.)
> it doesn't mean you have a right to every broadcast medium that exists for speech.
Correct. But it does mean I have a right to at least one broadcast medium. By the way, freedom of speech only become real when the masses got internet access. Before then, only a select few could exercise that right: those with write access to radio, television, or journals.
No. In the U.S. which is all I care about, no one but the government can violate your right to free speech. You do not have a right to not be censored by anyone nor should you.
> But it does mean I have a right to at least one broadcast medium.
No it does not; it doesn't remotely mean any such thing.
> By the way, freedom of speech only become real when the masses got internet access.
That's nonsense. Anyone anywhere can walk out into any public area and speak to the crowd; freedom of speech does not in any way imply freedom to wide area broadcast mediums, it means only that you can't get in trouble from the authorities for holding unpopular views. If your views are popular, they will gain an audience from word of mouth alone. You never had a right to TV, or the paper, or any other medium.
That's freedom of thought.
Reducing freedom of speech to the kind that doesn't have any influence (that would be "speaking to the crowd") is utterly ridiculous.
You can't be that stupid, and I'm not sure I mean that well.
---
PS: I don't care about the legal definition of the term "freedom of speech", it was defined at a time when it couldn't mean anything significant for the common people. Just understand that I'm talking about something broader, more powerful, enabled by the internet. Maybe you don't care about that broader freedom. But then imagine for a second being stripped of all your accounts, including your blog if you have one. We'll see how you don't care.
Don't be absurd, thought can't be policed absent being made public via speech so it must necessarily involve speech to even be an issue. You're stammering to find a position because your own isn't logically coherent; that's what's happening here.
> Reducing freedom of speech to the kind that doesn't have any influence (that would be "speaking to the crowd") is utterly ridiculous.
No, it's what's always been intended; no speech is guaranteed to have influence, what an absurd notion to even ponder. Such a thing cannot ever be guaranteed.
> I don't care about the legal definition of the term "freedom of speech"
Well I don't care about this nonsense freedom you're making up because it imposes on other people's rights and can't be called a right. You do not have a right to other people's services, period. This broader freedom you're proclaiming is actually toxic abuse of private property, it's not freedom.
> But then imagine for a second being stripped of all your accounts, including your blog if you have one. We'll see how you don't care.
You don't have a right to have accounts on other people's systems. If every business you have an account with bans you, you're the problem, not them.
Do you Libertarians realise that permission without ability means nothing?
Permissive zealots argue that such a restriction is unacceptable, on the grounds that any restriction is unacceptable. Apparently they don't even approve of the insurance policy that prevents the very restrictions they say they loath.
The present thread has the same structure. Someone says it's unacceptable for an entity (not even a person!) to restrict one's freedom of speech with no recourse, and the moral equivalent of the Permissive Zealot snaps that forbidding that power to forbid is unacceptable, "because freedom".
Do libertarians realise that permission without ability means nothing?
Google and Facebook appropriated the natural course of the evolution of information exchange between humans and should be regulated.
Every monopoly should be regulated and, preferably, broke up.
No, they shouldn't be and the law doesn't agree with you. You have to be a bad actor before such laws apply, you shouldn't be broken up merely because no one else can compete.
It's just a matter of time – their bad acting grows and it has become more visible already.
I gotta say this breathless free-market purse clutching is getting a bit tiresome.
It is if you have a monopoly.
>Your freedoms don't include a right to other people's services against their will.
They do if you have a monopoly.
Are you arguing that in sum total, humanity is better off allowing private organizations to control communications in order to adhere to free market principles than the reverse?
Private companies don't have the "freedom" to dump chemicals into rivers (or they shouldn't), they don't have the "freedom" to not pay taxes (or they shouldn't).
Likewise, once the well-being of individuals largely depend on having a Google account or a Facebook account, or once the ability to go from one place to another rests on having an Uber account, or the power to buy anything, including groceries, supposes one has an Amazon account, then those companies, private as they may, should be regulated so that they cannot unilaterally decide to ban individuals (real people), with no appeals process and no alternative.
It's a huge stretch to go from we the public have a right to regulate private companies-which I agree with-to those companies require regulation.
Hypothetically, if there was plenty of alternative, but in practice everyone used FB/Google/etc., would that change things in your mind? It's not a technical monopoly, but practically it would be.
Mind, I'm not saying that I think this is the case, and I think we shouldn't preemptively do something about it quite yet. But I do feel the article at least makes me uncomfortable about the possibility.
Basically, I guess my question is: does it matter whether something is technically not a monopoly when, practically, it is? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
To make things even more extreme: assuming that practically speaking all internet users get 100% of their content via FB (whether FB proper or WhatsApp), and perhaps Google, and assuming that FB and Google were free to do as they please, in that extreme case would you still argue that because technically a person could enter a non-FB or non-Google URL, buth FB and Google should not be regulated in any way?
Again, I'm honestly asking because I respect your views. I do realize that as far as making any kind of case this a reduction ad absurdum. I would just like to hear more elaboration to bridge the gap between your point of view and that of others here (many, based on the downvotes you're getting)
Exactly
The need to limit our freedom to harm others through our freedom and the need to protect the majority from the power of the singles are two concepts specifically stated in the universal human rights declaration
My country is bound by the Constitution, not by some bullshit the UN came up with. I don't believe in one world government and never will nor does our own supreme court which in 2004 declared that the declaration "does not of its own force impose obligations as a matter of international law."
We have no obligation to that document.
And that's why you are savages
> We have no obligation to that document.
The fact that you believe you have no obligations to other people's right to "not be harmed" by bullies it's the reason why you're the only country in the world where kids kill other kids with shotguns.
That kind of shit doesn't happen anywhere else, not even in the so called third world.
Congrats!
wasn't 9/11 enough?
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12309403, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15107762, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14608370, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819316, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10252505, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10065872, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9404465, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7824349
Until all peering agreements become null and void, you can always create another ISP to compete in a free market. Sure, it's expensive and complicated to bury fiber, and radio spectrum is limited. But it's not technical or logistical difficulty that keeps people restricted to specific providers. It's usually political, and incumbents always have a huge upper hand.
The reason OSPs like AOL became so ubiquitous in the 90s was they made everything easier, and people were willing to pay for that, even if it effectively locked you into a 'smaller internet'. It still provided you internet access because that by itself was still a value-add. Will ISPs & OSPs charge you differently to access different content? Of course, because they know their customers don't give a shit about some romantic vision of unrestricted peering agreements.
There's one big elephant in the room that nobody talks about in discussions like this: Content. Whoever controls the Content gets to swing a multi-Billion dollar dick around, and they keep a hundred-Billion dollar advertising dick on a leash. Most people are obsessed with media & entertainment, a 700-Billion dollar industry, and the rest is cat memes and bargain bin chinese vacuum cleaners.
The leading lights of the web barely break the budget of a fraction of M&E. They are constantly dogging at each other because the web industry knows that without content, they have no leverage. Which is why Amazon & Netflix make their own content (though a very small amount, and not very valuable). If Google lost its advertising catbird seat, it would die screaming (almost all of its money comes from ads). And you can't sell ads if you can't get access to eyeballs or earholes.
If your post needs clickbaity embellishments it's probably not worth my time to read it, if it doesn't need any, the post should be able to reach frontpage without them.