Tim Berners-Lee shares his disappointment on World Wide Web’s 29th birthday
tecknowlogic.com
tecknowlogic.com
I think that now this isn't an internet only phenomena. It seems its bleeding over into other markets as well. Amazon has already taken over much of retail, and even traditionally non tech companies (see Unilever or Pearson) have, through mergers, acquisitions, and other traditional business processes taken over massive portions of their respective markets.
This is just something, as a sideline observer I think could be happening, still chance observations, general stock market watching, and news articles are horrible guides for understanding what's really going on. Does anyone know what the research says? Do we have, in general, a convergence of markets into oligopolies dominated by a few big players like what's happened in much of the tech world?
Amazon only covered 4% of US retail in 2017. I couldn't easily find the global figure, but it would obviously be much much smaller.
As for the overall idea, I think it depends on the time scale you look at. Compared to the late 20th century things do seem more consolidated now, but if you go back any further we're still probably in one of the most distributed modern economies ever.
Where did you get that statistic? Was that before the wholefoods acquisition? That seems very high to me, especially when you consider what retail covers. [1]
> I think it depends on the time scale you look at
Thinking about the time scales provides an interesting perspective. I think the core question is whether or not consolidation is a net positive or net negative for features we want in society (like innovation, freedom of choice, ability to self actualize, efficiency, productivity, etc). Even then it most likely depends on how we weight those feature priorities.
1. https://www.thebalance.com/us-retail-industry-overview-28926...
Long story short, he says what's currently happening with the internet has happened before. New mediums follow "The Cycle", which means they progress from decentralized to centralized.
Of course it isn't. It happens to pretty much everything. Pareto's Principle in action. It's so frustrating that this happens but I see no way of fixing it.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/12/tim-be...
If open technology failed by becoming closed, it should be another open technology that defeats it, not some government.
Instead if regulating old tech, they should come up with ways to encourage implementation of open and decentralized technologies.
This pendulum swing between centralization and decentralization is almost a given and I'm sure it will happen in one way or another if history is any evidence. It sucks that the world works the way it does, but this frustration is exactly what will spur innovation.
Trying to solve this with regulation will do more harm than good because it will only slow down the potential innovation that will inevitably come as the frustration intensifies. It will come naturally because people become fed up with all the bullshit in the world.
No amount of innovation outside of Bell Telephone could have broken it up. TBL might be correct that we are near that point today with the Internet. The big players either buy you our or copy your innovation and crush you.
In fact it's worse than that. Look at all the advise given to startups. Create something that one of the big players will need and get bought out -- that's been the dream for most startups for a long time now. This is reinforced and required by VC investors. The whole idea of building an small or medium sized Internet company that intends to become profitable and remain in business is now the exception rather than the rule.
Everything in the Silicon Valley ecosystem is designed to reinforce the big players.
TBL might be right that it could take a Ma Bell breakup kind of intervention to space where innovation outside of the big companies can have a chance. It's not that there isn't a level playing field. There isn't a playing field left at all -- it's branded multi-billion dollar stadiums all the way down.
The phone network was completely and physically owned by Bell.
This is different from the Internet. Bell had the absolute infrastructure advantage and no new entry could compete with them because of the existing infrastructure, because competing would mean investing in infrastructure and that was near impossible.
That is different from how the Internet works. It is true that the WWW layer became centralized but the lower level stack already has all the ingredients we need to realize a revolution. There is no physical and absolute monopoly or oligopoly on the low level Internet protocol.
My point is, trying to fix this with regulation is superficial because all they're trying to do is solve it on the application layer instead of trying to fix it fundamentally from a lower level.
Regulation may help a bit in the short term, but as I mentioned, in the long term it doesn't help because it will only slow down true innovation because people won't suffer enough. All revolutions naturally occur when people start suffering and the suffering crosses certain threshold.
I wouldn't say this if it was physically impossible to disrupt the status quo, but I do believe it's possible without any government intervention and in fact will be more effective if governments don't intervene and let the market take care of it eventually.
You can already see the sentiment moving towards this direction and I think it's a matter of time that there will be enough critical mass to shift away from these centralized "big players".
How is your little startup going to compete with the economies of scale Amazon or Google can leverage? They can't, which is why a lot of startups build right on top of Google or Amazon's infrastructure.
Decentralized technologies have very shitty UI, and no one would ever adopt them at its current state, but with a combination of the recent hype around them plus the societal change that will frustrate people enough to jump ship regardless of the relatively shittier user experience, it is very possible to change.
And once that starts happening, more talent will flow into this area and innovation will accelerate. This was never possible until now because the society was relatively stable and nobody needed these solutions. Not so anymore.
You have control of your browser to improve your experience in poor network situations, you could set it to not load images by default or use your browser's responsive design mode to make it lie about your screen's pixel density.
On the other hand, our other options were plugins such as flash, using apps outside of the browser for video sites, or browsers each going their own way with proprietary technology. Or some mixture of those three.
I would still prefer that than including DRM into web pages, at least it's a bit harder for users to use DRM.
Secondly it would be very hard to convince the likes of Google and MS that DRM doesn't belong in the browser, especially because the industry wants it. The inconvenience of separate apps is precisely what would make them look for alternatives.
The danger with DRM in the browser being universally available is that more and more content will get locked behind it(say YouTube), but lets not pretend that content providers have not been willing to forgo some revenue in favor of locking things down. E.g Netflix, HBO etc.
With this "plugin interface" the DRM only has to come from the OS vendor. This is why you're now starting to see certain Netflix resolutions only working on certain browser. The browser vendors have already started abusing the real power of DRM: control over competition.
That said it's true the standard should have done more to mandate browser agnosticism, seeing as big media doesn't care. Of course they still could have ignored that mandate.
The higher risk is that we will have DRM of everything. Imagine the implications if the whole web page is behind DRM.
> Of course in practice it was designed for DRM (and makes little sense outside of that)
So "WELL ACKCHYUALLY" but in defense of DRM?
Perhaps if the veneer of legitimacy is so transparently thin that you can't even be bothered to defend it yourself, you could just not grant it that legitimacy. The academic points really don't matter compared to the fact that you are defending stuff that is hurting us.
LPT: the cause that you are exercising your debate skills in favor of actually does matter, all causes are not actually equal.
"I, for one, welcome web canvases with ads that I can never block or dismiss." That's what you're saying, right? Because that's what Google wants, at the end of the day.
Those apps will be no less intrusive, and significantly more powerful than what exists today. In fact, you are welcoming a reduction of our freedoms.
edit: God, RMS was right all along, there are no freedoms but end-user freedoms.
So much DRM will force you to use some particular software in some particular way with seemingly arbitrary restrictions. Frankly consumers would be much better off without DRM in the world.
It won't be after we expand the powers of plugins to get in underneath the layers you know. You can't block elements or code that you disagree with when there are no elements because everything is a web-canvas or plugin that is rendering underneath you.
Remember when Flash existed? Nobody could block dangerous elements of Flash, it was all or nothing. Why would you ever want to go back to that?
> Frankly consumers would be much better off without DRM in the world.
Great, we agree! So why do you think the powers of DRM should be expanded?
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2lfyou/alan_ka...
Tim Berners-Lee, Alan Kay, (and to a lesser extent) Richard Stallman do a lot of messaging that is "this is not what I had in mind." It's good but it might be interesting to see each of them talk about what we've gotten right for a change.