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Comment by bennysomething | Hacker News Reader

How is big tech "stifling everything". Big tech has provided the amazing hardware advances over the last few decades. Amazon Google and Microsoft provide amazing platforms that make it way easier for anyone to boostrap a scalable business. I no longer use Chrome, I just prefer Firefox but at the very least chrome gave browsers the kick up the back side they needed, mainly through V8 giving us JavaScript that runs fast. Also I'm pretty certain Google fund a lot of Firefox Dev.

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Actually much of the "hardware advances" were engineered with public money: internet, GPS, GSM, GPRS, battery, touchscreen etc. Big tech certainly takes more than it gives back in taxes. Even worse, some are polluting the planet with their unrepairable e-waste.

I am pretty much as anti-big-tech as it can get, but I can't lie to myself: YouTube has improved the world tremendously and provided me with tens of thousands of dollars of value. I cannot even fathom.

Yes, I like YouTube, but it was great even before Google bought it. Now it does come with privacy concerns. Luckily, there are other similar offerings.

Those things where invented with public money yes. But Moore's law wouldn't have been a thing without profit incentive.

It's not at all uncommon for monopolies to provide benefit to the public. They're uniquely capable of doing so, given their vast wealth and power. The problem is that they ALSO cause harm, and that benefit ends up not being worth the harm.

What harm has Big Tech caused? We don't have an Internet anymore thanks to them. Not a real Internet. Seven or eight major sites and a smattering of others you occasionally visit is not the Internet. The Internet is supposed to be a vast sea of individual sites, small communities and small businesses each discoverable, each doing their own thing. Instead we have a few walled gardens you barely even need two hands to count.

It hasn't gotten any more difficult to host your own website - the reason nobody does it is they don't want to. It's hard to keep up with spambots and things like that, but it's not like Facebook is running the spambots.

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