Any system in which network effects and winner-takes-all exist result in centralization and monopoly. I don't think you could design the Internet differently to avoid this.
I am completely confounded that I have not heard of any real legislative proposals to establish a clear separation of duties in regards storing data and selling it.
There is an obvious conflict of interest if you both have my data and are granted free reign to do what you want with it (via click through agreements that modern society is now dependent upon) you have unfair leverage over me.
If you are able to do this en mass without much competition... I'm thankful things haven't gotten worse than they are.
Something similar to Glass-Steagall is desperately needed in the digital era. Hopefully somebody is working on it...
So I guess that's another reason the existing concept of intellectual property needs to be torn down and rebuilt. Would winner-take-all effect be so strong if all user-provided data was owned by users, and data processors (like social network) were forced to implement protocols allowing for easy and unconditional sharing of all data (including metadata forming a relationship graph) with any other service the user desires? That is, force services like Facebook or Twitter to be just UI frontends to what would become an implicitly federated social graph. Then, social media companies would hold no power over people.
Right now this can't happen, because the companies own the data on their platform, so competitors are not free to create alternative services for perusing that data.
The data siloing concept doesn't make any sense on a networking and design level in the first place. It would call for the user to implement all data desired by the service in their form and pass it back and forth - which in practice would involve a lot of redundant dataschelping, especialally if everything was designed to be stateless by making websites not store any data permanently! Indeed the only point to the design is as a passive aggressive way to tell them to "fuck off, if I wanted you to have it I would give it to you".
On a technical level it is a bad reinvention/implementation of cookies and using them to store all state essentially.
I'm thinking more of "your car only accepts Exxon's gas", or even more accurately, "your car's engine only runs on a very specific type of fuel, and Exxon has a complete monopoly on producing and distributing it".
> especialally if everything was designed to be stateless by making websites not store any data permanently!
That doesn't follow. Websites should be able to store the data from the moment I give them consent, process it within the scope of my consent, and delete it when I revoke my consent. That doesn't imply they need, or should, be stateless.
> Indeed the only point to the design is as a passive aggressive way to tell them to "fuck off, if I wanted you to have it I would give it to you".
It's not about them having it, but about them taking ownership of my data and siloing it in.
And it's not (just) about telling them to fuck off, but about mitigating the strong positive feedback loop that causes centralization of the web - which is the topic in this subthread.
On a more abstract level, I'm thinking of ways in which "data intermediaries" could be made more transparent. For instance, I see no reason why Facebook should own the social network - which is defined fully by the graph of connections between its users. So e.g. if I friend you on Facebook, that edge in the graph is data that belongs to us both. If I share some photo to "friends only", you should be able to see it through an interface of your choosing. What happens instead is that it's Facebook that decides what interface you can or cannot use, and trying to disagree can cause them to terminate your account (and take away access to your data) or even sue you.
We could say that roads are a natural monopoly (since they have to intersect everywhere it would be inefficient to have competitors fight and negotiate about every intersection) ...however, the consequences of that natural monopoly can be limited or extreme. For example: do we get to own private cars that drive on those roadways? Or must we all rent a national transportation vehicle at a non-competitive price? etc. where exactly does the “natural monopoly” begin/end and how natural is it?
I caution against letting your thoughts rest on the words “natural monopoly”.
(I think it’s natural for gravity to bring things down to earth. It’s physics. But the NTSB don’t seem to be satisfied with the notion of “natural plane crashes” just being unavoidable.)
For example: If the DNS was initially designed as such as https://handshake.org could be a better place to lay the foundation of Internet.