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Comment by dustingetz | Hacker News Reader

Network effects are inherent to networks; you can't regulate away the very thing that makes them valuable to people (well, i dont see how at least)

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Network effects can occur in federated networks as long as different platforms cooperate and communicate.

Currently, the Fediverse[1] exists through multiple free software platforms and online communities. (Like Mastodon[2])

This can and should expand to include Twitter/FB/others but that would go against their mantra of owning the platform to ensure maximum profits/rent-seeking and power over information. (Platform Capitalism[3])

[1]: https://medium.com/we-distribute/a-quick-guide-to-the-free-n...

[2]: https://joinmastodon.org/

[3]: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Platform+Capitalism-p-9781509504...

We make natural monopolies into public institutions. Roads, sidewalks, parks, copyright registrars, postal services, land surveyors, courts, law enforcement, etc, etc.

And then we take an active role in their management.

Notice the difference between the physical activity of helping to maintain these institutions and the physical activity of sitting at your keyboard and typing into an HTML form and hitting the submit button.

Look at what is actually occurring and not just at what is described in what you are reading.

Sure you can "nationalize" facebook or the world wide web (by like the UN or something?? these are international Earth-scale entities)

But there are a lot of tradeoffs there too and some really chilling consequences.

Those tradeoffs are as chilling as a nationalized postal service.

The "chilling consequences" that you are imagining are as speculative as any other work of science-fiction that you've read online.

Ask yourself: where did you get the idea that creating new public institutions would have "chilling consequences"? Did you personally experience this in reality or did you read about it somewhere?

What are the chilling experiences that you've had with public roads, the postal service, or the hall of records that holds the deed to the private property you live on? Do these negative experiences align with the "chilling consequences" that you imagine with a public social media?

"when the State becomes a computer"

I think reading that sentence is enough to be bone-chillingly horrified, and nationalizing the necessary data is the first step towards making it inevitable

Becomes? Many modern states were designed to be that way from the start. The Constitutions are their core operating-systems, running on a substrate of human decision-making.

At least we can both agree that we are talking about how we interpret and react to hypothetical utterances on the internet.

i see your point that this is all hypothetical stuff from intellectual books.

BUT, the people in power get to decide the course of the earth. It's humans all the way up. The hypothetical becomes real over time and when it gets here, it is too late to plan.

TLDR books are important

It might be that nationalising the protocols is enough.

A similar situation arises with the public railways in many countries. Most railways are actually private — the big ones in Japan, the German railway, the various Italian railways. In Italy, multiple companies run trains on the same tracks with competing offerings.

Most of the major European “national” railways can run their trains on each other’s tracks. TGV can go directly to Milan in Italy, and makes multi-stop trips in Switzerland (Basel and then Zurich after crossing the border).

There is a defacto “European railway” that is centrally coordinated but not centrally owned.

I suppose I see consolidation which is a function of the mechanics of the market as a good reason for nationalization and consolidation which isn't as a good reason for antitrust. So maybe Facebook/Google should be nationalized? I think the real test of that though is to break them up and see whether consolidation reoccurs. I'd love to have lots of competing Googles and I prefer that world to the one with a nationalized Google but I prefer either of those scenarios to having just one private and unaccountable Google.

maybe! i don't see how it's possible to have two competing world wide webs, or two competing facebooks. The fact that there's only one of them is why they are valuable.

It's interesting that facebook wants to be the world wide web, and if they pull that off, they'll have just eaten the one network and merged it into theirs.

Its as if the only way to compete with a network is to swallow it up by a bigger, more powerful network. Iterate that over 20 or 50 years. We're in trouble :(

The difference between Facebook and the web is that Facebook is a monolithic service run by one company and the web is a set of open protocols that can be implemented by anyone who cares to do so.

It's easy to imagine a world where social media worked the way email already does: you'd pick your own provider, and they would interoperate with other providers through standardized protocols.

You can have one network that isn't run by one entity.

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