Hacker News Reader

Comment by meheleventyone | Hacker News Reader

I dunno it kind of feels hard to fight the inevitability of trillion dollar corporations running everything. It really does feel like there these immovable forces in an increasingly vital sector of society we’ve abdicated control over. I often wonder if something so amazing and vital as the internet and web could actually get made in the current climate. I feel increasingly worried about future iterations on similar ideas like the metaverse/AR which seems to be gearing up to be a fight between Facebook and Apple with Unity, Epic and Roblox on the side. I think we’re going to end up with something pretty closed and dystopian.

Visiting the Bay Area, the spiritual home of it all really hammers home that dystopian quality. There is such a stark contrast between the glass palaced elite and the poor.

Sometimes I find it very hard to feel positive about “tech” and it’s future.

View on HN

I’ve been around long enough to see many mega-corps rise and fall. Seemingly unstoppable juggernauts falter and disappear seemingly overnight. None of this is new; you just haven’t lived thru the cycle yet to see giants fall.

> I often wonder if something so amazing and vital as the internet and web could actually get made in the current climate.

I’d say the answer is no, it couldn’t. The internet was created during the tail end of powerful antitrust in America, which had the government actively fighting against the monopoly size of corporations. Both IBM and AT&T, had they not been kept in check with antitrust regulations, would have likely stifled the internet and the growth of the personal computer.

Hell, even the last dying gasp of antitrust in its feeble attempt to check Microsoft, paved the way for Google and the monopolies created since.

The answer is to actively support the ideas of anti monopoly and antitrust. To break up companies and punish them for suffocating the good parts of capitalism.

Part of Microsoft's "punishment" for monopoly practices was to give away free copies of Office to schools. With that, every parent has to have a copy of Office to read .doc files from their school. Ingenious! They use their punishment to increase their market share.

I don't think breaking up companies should be the emphasis, but rather the merging of companies. AT&T was already broken up once. Now look at them.

Yep, preventing the mergers first is part of the solution too.

Unfortunately, we’ve allowed too many, and need to break up companies across industries.

edit: and figure out a way to tell future generations not to give up on these laws next time? To your point, they may find themselves in this same place again.

This possibility of corporations running everything is exactly why we have FOSS licenses. Despite what this article says, many FOSS projects are doing fine and there are a lot of people who do work on making FOSS computing viable.

The practical solution is not adopt communism, but to use FOSS software and not accept any gaps in the FOSS ecosystem.

> I feel increasingly worried about future iterations on similar ideas like the metaverse/AR which seems to be gearing up to be a fight between Facebook and Apple with Unity, Epic and Roblox on the side. I think we’re going to end up with something pretty closed and dystopian.

I fail to see how this lawsuit you speak of is relevant to FOSS. Are you aware of Godot engine, an increasingly viable unity alternative? The important advantage of Godot engine over Unity is that the incentives of the developers are more aligned with the incentives of the users. Unity subjects its users to a terribly complicated EULA that many don't fully understand. It restricts the amount of copies you can install, how much money you can make, what you can use it for and so on. Godot doesn't have any of that, and they're well-funded.

Godot engine is an example of a FOSS project that exists simply because the open source development model is more efficient than closed source. Companies realized that a FOSS game engine would be in their best interests and therefore they decided to fund development. This goes to show that FOSS is not totally at odds with capitalism. Sure, the corporation funding Godot could try to take the project in a bad direction. If that happens, the people who care about FOSS rather than "Free software as cheap labor" could fork it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com