UK Labour Leader proposes a publicly-funded alternative to Facebook | Hacker News Reader

UK Labour Leader proposes a publicly-funded alternative to Facebook

techcrunch.com

12 pointsAnatMl243 comments

He didn't really propose a publicly-funded alternative to Facebook though, at least not in the sense people seem to be inferring. He threw out some vague ideas to create a digitally focused sister organization to the BBC, which "could develop new technology for online decision making and audience-led commissioning of programmes and even a public social media platform".

That is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard in my life. It's like saying "Hey, NSA and GCHQ are tired of having to copy your data from Facebook's servers, so let's cut out the middle-man".

Thanks, but NO thanks.

If GCHQ access is assumed a common "feature" of both Facebook and "GovBook" then it's irrelevant when choosing between the two.

So assuming all else is equal, if GovBook has a charter to harness data only for the public good (and Facebook certainly does not) then GovBook wins.

Except in (most likely) features, people on it (would non-UK people allowed?), support.... but I suppose it would have JC's assistant posting stories about how great the government are on it... what a draw.

fair points but different issues entirely to what I was replying to.

A hypothetical UK-govt-run real names location-sensitive communications tool could also be used for operations intelligence services usually wouldn't bother about and Facebook usually wouldn't respond to requests for, like police dragnets or political sentiment analysis

If GCHQ access is assumed a common "feature" of both Facebook and "GovBook" then it's irrelevant when choosing between the two.

But we don't know the specifics how much easy it is / how much they access / etc., w/r/t NSA & GCHQ access to data from Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. But with a State run site, I think we can safely assume they will have access to everything, no questions asked.

That said, this seems like more of 1a / 1b thing, and neither option is exactly appealing. For those of us in the public at large, the real answer is probably some variation of "the only way to win, is to not play".

So assuming all else is equal, if GovBook has a charter to harness data only for the public good (and Facebook certainly does not) then GovBook wins.

I don't trust any State government to do anything "only for the public good" and I can't imagine how anybody could think such a thing. Our governments are tools of the rich and powerful and exist to protect their interests. Any "public good" is an incidental side effect at best.

While I don't use FB, I absolutely, 100% would not use any government social networks, out of both principal and pragmatism, period.

Money would be better spent on building statues of Ed Miliband. And that's saying something.

Would you consume news from the BBC, a government news network?

I don't want to get into a political argument, but just for the record, the BBC is not a government news network. It is funded via tax, but it is independent.

Like the mooted BDC is?

I was replying to a narrow point that the BBC is a state broadcaster. If these things go uncorrected, misinformation can spread, especially given the global perspective.

I've not read the proposal. But some things, like telephone common carriers, ISPs should be regulated to the gills. Do I trust British Telecom Open Reach now they've been privatised? No, not really, but that's the way natural monopolies work. I don't trust them any more or less than I would have done pre privatisation.

aside from the fact that for a variety of reasons, the BBC is not truly independent, if it's possible to build such an independent media company "funded via tax" then why isn't it possible to do the same for a social media company?

There's a continuum of infrastructure from electricity, telephone, ISP, email, social media and beyond. If we can run national utilities at the start of that scale, not necessarily nationalized, but nationally regulated, I don't see why we can't run them at the other end of the scale.

I think the real problem is that current models of social media are dreadful, although I don't know of anything better.

and it's worth looking at what effect just the existence of the BBC has on other news and media here in the UK.

Take the childrens television the BBC produces - extremely high quality and very low cost. Raises the bar for all other (private) childrens television production.

Does the BBC have all of my personal info and chat logs with my friends?

Does the BDC have those things?

What it does have, and it makes me very uncomfortable, is the log of all TV and Radio I listen to online. And with the TV license changes, it's only a short step from actually forcing me to use my real contact details.

For now, the get_iplayer tool is an option.

Radio live/archived streams are available with no login in a web browser still I believe?

Amazing. So glad I unburdened!

Well quite apart from the BBC being very much NOT a government news network[0].

I think one of the more constant features of UK politics has been every single government criticising the BBC.

[0] One very specific aspect has been greyed. The Tory party, who supposedly should care more for independence, required the BBC to take on funding of the World Service. Previously Foreign Office funded, now in the budget of the BBC.

Would you use a publicly owned, municipal, isp or telephone company?

I might be in the minority to think this is a great idea, if it were basically "pump government money into developing and hosting instances of the Fediverse (GNU Social, Mastodon, Friendica, Hubzilla, or Pleroma) AND building those data centers in collaboration with the Open Compute Project (Facebook is publishing the blueprint on how to build a facebook datacenter, take advantage of it.)

Its important to note that when Corbyn talks about nationalisation he is talking about something more similar to this than top down state control.

There is a partial critique of the post-1945 wave of nationalisation in John McDonnell's speeches where he recognises that they were undemocratic and far too centralised and inefficient. There was a conference on this in London this year.

Is all of my traffic encrypted? Can they shut off my access if I do something they don't like? How much will they charge? How frequent are the black outs? Are they a monopoly?

Would you accept wages paid to you in Venezuela's cryptocurrency?

Water, gas, and electricity have provided no benefit to the consumer from privatisation. The spare capacity in the grid has markedly reduced, safety is no better, leaks are still ignored far too long, and consumers are often price-gouged with some pretty regressive pricing schemes that penalise all except those who supplier hop every single month.

"Competition" appears to have provided benefit for shareholders and no one else in those industries. It has provided opportunity to expand for one or two other nation's nationalised utilities to benefit their consumers.

I wouldn't expect anything else from him. The man despises private enterprise and had the urge to nationalise everything.

I'd think it would be really funny to see this being attempted, where it not for the huge amount of money that would be wasted.

He causes so little outrage because his ideas are mostly from cloud cuckoo land. It's hard to muster a response for something so pathetic. Oh, he also wants Google and others to bankroll investigative journalism or face a hefty tax.

That latter story expanded upon https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/aug/22/jeremy-corb...

This is absolutely ridiculous and I must say I cannot be surprised coming from Labour.

What escapes the left completely, is that there is a free market. Which can and always does a better job than central planning.

Nothing is stopping anyone from buying a cheap laptop, an external webcam if need be and a decent microphone and then to start streaming to youTube and other decentralised platforms if they want to do vlogging. Hell, nowadays even a cheap android phone will do to stream live to YouTube to get the message out.

There are also cheaper solutions if they want to startup a blog and then syndicate via medium, wordpress, ghost, tumblr, guest blogs and rss channels.

Bottom line, there is nothing. Absolutely nothing stopping anyone from providing their voice to the internet and crafting an audience. The government doesn't need to be involved and those who value a free press should tell him to butt out in the strongest terms.

Except however and this is what we must be careful of. Is that Labour will want to impose restrictions on what is acceptable. There is a UK firewall coming and I'm sure some Labour and Conservative MPs are licking their lips for the day this comes.

I'm too busy to provide citations but links are out there, go do your own research.

Now there is a ray of hope. It's coming in the form of decentralised networks and also Elon Musk's global satellite network. In fact, I will go so far as to say. In the very near future, space-intranets will come into play. Where crowd-funded projects will elect to launch satellites that are outside of government control and mobile phones will have dual capabilities. The first to connect to the internet and the second to be on the space-internet with no government oversight.

"What escapes the left completely, is that there is a free market. Which can and always does a better job than central planning."

It might escape them, or it might not be universally true.

You might not be from the UK but surely you're aware of the BBC, which provides extremely high quality media and raises the bar here for the "free market". Our media companies here are better because of the existence of the BBC.

That is true, but there has to be a balance between public and commercial, and "balance" is a lacking feature with most (if not all) political parties, and in particular with Labour at the moment (this idea beggars belief and is an example of that). Come to think of it, Balance is a lacking feature in the world right now in general.

>Now there is a ray of hope. It's coming in the form of decentralised networks

Do you have anything against governments developing and funding decentralized networks, as a push back against an oligopoly of messaging and distribution silos?

To copy and paste my comment from elsewhere in this thread: I might be in the minority to think this is a great idea, if it were basically "pump government money into developing and hosting instances of the Fediverse (GNU Social, Mastodon, Friendica, Hubzilla, or Pleroma) AND building those data centers in collaboration with the Open Compute Project (Facebook is publishing the blueprint on how to build a facebook datacenter, take advantage of it.)

> "Which can and always does a better job than central planning."

Does it though? At what? Resource allocation? It is hugely inefficient and wasteful. Is that the same free market bootstrapped into existence by the state and bailed out by the state periodically? (and I am no fan of the state)

> Does it though? At what? Resource allocation?

Yes. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Societ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

> It is hugely inefficient and wasteful.

In comparison to what?

> Is that the same free market bootstrapped into existence by the state and bailed out by the state periodically?

Government bailouts are the opposite of a free market.

With regard to the economic calculation problem.

In the first instance Cockshott and Cottrell have demonstrated how with the computing technology of 1993 could create a system that allocated resources efficiently. It is now 2018 and computer technology is significantly more advanced and big data systems process more information at higher speeds than at any other time in human history.

Second large corporations such as Amazon function as hugely effective resource allocation mechanisms at the scale of states and further - internationally - but without using the free market within. Hayek even admits as such in his work that corporations internally operate by planning, he is just opposed to planning outside of corporations in the general economy.

Worth saying that the other argument commonly made for market efficiency, general equilibrium theory, rests of strange and blatantly untrue assumptions when compared to the real economic system. At least as an Austrian economist Mises had the good grace to start with more realistic assumptions!

> In the first instance Cockshott and Cottrell have demonstrated how with the computing technology of 1993 could create a system that allocated resources efficiently. It is now 2018 and computer technology is significantly more advanced and big data systems process more information at higher speeds than at any other time in human history.

As computers have gotten more complex, so has the economy.

> Second large corporations such as Amazon function as hugely effective resource allocation mechanisms at the scale of states and further - internationally - but without using the free market within. Hayek even admits as such in his work that corporations internally operate by planning, he is just opposed to planning outside of corporations in the general economy.

Free markets don't negate the existence of large corporations which use central planning for internal operations. It is possible for such corporations to arise naturally due to economies of scale and other factors. But such structures are discovered and tuned by market mechanisms, not the state.

Don't trust politicians.

He's taking advantage of the public's frustrations with their privacy being invaded by FB to propose a tool that would ultimately be made in his image.

The only way a political leader or party should get involved is by popularising existing open and ideally decentralised platforms and suggesting laws where non-governmental semi-randomised working groups review source code to check that privacy and security are being maintained and not coerced.

but of course, its not about democracy it's about rightthink

Wasn't there a country that ran an XMPP chat server or similar for it's citizens? I'm trying to find the details but failing. I'm sure I read about it in the last couple of years.

"Do you honestly believe that Britain is better off outside of the EU?"

[You have been banned from CorbynBook]

1983 - 2015 : Jeremy would answer yes. 2015 - present : Would answer no, or be evasive.

He spent the vast majority of his political career aligned with the values of his mentor, Tony Benn.

He chose evasive.

(See recent Channel 4 News video. Alas, I don't have a link to hand.)

I wonder if he realizes he's actually proposing a government funded global CDN - or that for it to have a usable low-latency and storage capacity for billions of users would cost billions of pounds in infrastructure cost if it were to actually be at the scale and level of success of Facebook...

Nah... of course not! These are the same idiots who think leaving the EU is a great idea!

why would a public UK social network need a global CDN and storage capacity for billions of users?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com