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Comment by juandopazo | Hacker News Reader

When did HN become so... radicalized? There's nothing inherently wrong with these companies being big. The problems are with them being too board. Should Google own the creation of content (Blogger, Youtube), finding content (search) and transmitting content (fiber)? Should Comcast transmit content (TV, Xfinity) and create content (NBC, Hulu)? This is where the problems arise like conflicts of interest, diminished competition, etc. We saw this clearly in Argentina, when as soon as the government started working on legislation to prevent the telecoms from becoming monopolies, since they own newspapers and TV news, they started bombarding the public with negative press.

It shouldn't be hard to regulate this. Just split them up.

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>When did HN become so... radicalized?

More and more hackers and programmers from outside SV/startup culture started showing up. Outside of that bubble, hacker culture leans far more anarchist, and fundamentally mistrusts large scale power structures and centralized authority. And then Snowden and Aaron Swartz happened.

So in a way, HN isn't becoming radicalized, it's becoming normalized.

HN used to lean very libertarian. I might need to say "right-libertarian" to be specific enough. That philosophy tends to tolerate large-scale power structures as long as they're not violating the rights of others and remain subject to competition.

I've noticed a shift away from that in the past couple years. The grandparent post doesn't seem to be left-anarchist though; more like state-socialist. It proposes that some central authority, presumably the US government dissolve or split up large tech companies. The problem I have with that is I fundamentally mistrust large scale power structures and centralized authority. The US government is one of the most extreme manifestations of those things.

I only know state-socialist people who did not live in a socialist state.

I would argue the opposite. From time to time the SV crowd can be very good at driving off those who don't drink the cool-aid.

Recall every Tesla thread.

> It shouldn't be hard to regulate this. Just split them up.

Actually this is exactly what I suggested. The bigger question is 'how' to split them up - and to be able to do it consistently across ever shifting market dynamics.

The telecom case is easy to define and split cleanly. The ads/search/browser and the like marketplaces will take the entire US government to make sense of.

And then there is stuff like Bitcoin and AI.

The world has become radicalized, and HN is no exception.

I would like Europe to either hack up or straight up block them so we can develop our own products.

Like China does?

By invoking China you're implying that blocking US monopolies would be bad because everything China does is bad. Doesn't seem like a compelling argument to me.

Maybe not, but it becomes compelling when you consider what it means for a state to go as far as to block web sites in such a manner. It isn't merely a simple act of blocking. It brings with it an entire mindset as to how the state should behave, and how much freedom it allows for its population.

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