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Comment by Blikkentrekker | Hacker News Reader

I feel there should be a legal principle that services as large as Google, that essentially have a monopoly in such a field could be legally ruled a service of public interest, and held to certain standards and essentially be told by governments how they be run.

How to escape this fate? Do not become a big monopoly.

We live in an age where various resources that are essentially indispensable public resources are provided by private, for-profit companies at their own whims and the law should recognize that.

Even non-profit services such as Wikipedia of course have the power to influence and steer the world to a degree that no non-democratically elected organization should have.

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I'm going to need you to think very carefully about how much you trust the government to protect the public interest when it comes to dictating how a media platform operates.

The government is unlikely to be able to dictate algorithm changes, but reacting to and forcing favorable behaviors to the current regime to be preserved is certainly within their power.

What third avenue for protecting the public interest do you recommend between corporate control and government regulation?

In a democracy, government is theoretically the mechanism by which public concerns are aired and addressed.

There's a difference between ensuring competition and effectively nationalizing a company's business practices because they happen to be successful. Declaring Google search results a "public space" is the latter and leads us down a pretty obvious path as to what's actually going to happen with that.

If we wanted to encourage competition it would be an idea to start thinking more carefully about which bits of infrastructure should be in competition: i.e. stop letting social media companys buy out other social media companies (there's no reason Facebook should've been allowed to acquire WhatsApp given that they also had Messenger), and maybe require Google to run Chrome as an open-source project to prevent them vertically integrating the experience of "web browsing" under related technologies.

This can, and probably should include, public funding for alternative open-source products under the foundation model for different web technologies and vital services.

The utility model seems like a potentially promising third way between a breakup and nationalization.

All of the above, though, require government action, as the current status amply demonstrates.

So back to my question, how do you do this without government? Or is that not what you were suggesting in your original comment?

You need bigger systemic change for that. Under neoliberal capitalism the optimal theoretical end state of any (for profit) corporation is to own absolutely everything and be the last one standing. It‘s just the nature of a corporation.

Hyperbole, yes. But you get the point.

It just so happens that big tech firms have a shot of actually achieving it.

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