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The problem is that we are dealing with large concentrations of power. These tech corporations have power in the form of money; additionally many technology corporations have power in the form of the ability to selectively amplify or silence people and ideas. Many of these companies have monopolies, but many of these companies, while jot monopolies, participate in very small oligopolies. How many credit card networks are there? How many microblogging sites?

Effectively if you piss off one of these companies, they can exclude you from entire swathes of tech, media or the economy. In such situations many people will choose to self censor. Personally I don’t believe that is healthy; it leads to situations like the US 2016 election when all the polls were well in favor of one candidate and then the other won.

Another thing about corporate power in general is that it is not the case that the corporation uses its power proportionately representing either its employees or shareholders. The corporation uses its power in accordance with its officers’ desires. In this way corporations are the ultimate anti-democratic institutions as they concentrate the economic power generated by many diverse people and centralize it to one or a few people. Hence Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc.

And the combination of skill, hard work and luck that led to their leadership of these corporations doesn’t in any way relate to their values or judgment and the ways that they will use their power.

That's a pretty strange take of the political consequences of Big Tech power, especially the US 2016 election. Polling for that election put Trump at a low chance of winning (FiveThirtyEight had it at ~30% IIRC), not practically impossible odds. I don't understand how bucking the statistical favorite is some kind of disastrous or unhealthy outcome.

I also don't have any idea what that has to do with Big Tech. Big Tech did and continues to discriminate against right-wing/alt-right views* which you say leads to self-censorship, and that somehow led to an electoral outcome where the right-wing/alt-right candidate won; So Big Tech's corporate power is so immense & influential that it led to...the opposite outcome?

I'm sure there's an argument there somewhere about the dangers of excessive corporate power but I can't make sense of your connection between Big Tech corporate power and your example of the 2016 election of the most anti-Big-Tech US president ever.

* I'm assuming you're referring to right-wing/alt-right discrimination because I don't recall many significant examples in which Big Tech excluded people/partners from "entire swathes of tech, media or the economy" for left-wing views, but feel free to correct me!

I think that we are in agreement. Clearly right leaning voters self censored in 2016, leading to an outcome that was opposite of what the polls predicted. How big tech relates to that is that it magnifies the tendency to self censor opinions that differ from the tech companies’ preferences.

We definitely don't agree. The 2016 outcome was not the "opposite" of what polls predicted, it was simply the less likely outcome. Again, polling put Trump at low but plausible odds. If I tell you that you have a 30% chance of success and you succeed, that is not an "opposite" outcome.

And your Big Tech self-censorship narrative has no discernable substance. Unusual levels of self-censorship would be reflected in unusual levels of polling error, but the actual polling error wasn't unusually high in 2016 [1].

Election polls aren't even conducted by Big Tech AFAIK and they don't have access to personally identifiable poll responses. Pretty hand-wavy and baseless to suggest that people were somehow afraid of Big Tech punishment based on anonymous third party polling. The Big Tech censorship issue centers almost entirely on user content submitted voluntarily on Big Tech platforms.

[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-werent-great-...

As I see it, the problem is essentially an antitrust issue, but our notion of antitrust hasn't evolved since the early 1900s to cover the realities of today's economy. Whether a company has complete market domination is a red herring used to dismiss other types of market failure.

Cartel behavior does not involve monopolies. Vertical integration of supply chains does not require a monopoly to be a problem. Markets are defined in a way that makes it look like on paper the leader doesn't have a dominant position simply because they don't have 100% market share, but it hides that market share doesn't tell the whole story. Facebook should have never been allowed to buy their most promising competitors in Instagram and WhatsApp, for example.

Intentionally confusing the market for phones with App stores is an example of a problem that 20th century antitrust never had to deal with. Just because two products look the same doesn't mean they compete with each other if there are other reasons, such as identity politics or vendor lock-in, which cause people to not treat them as replacements for each other.

All these things are issues which government should legitimately be regulating, and at one point did regulate. But there is no will left to do that anymore, and the poor quality of our politicians is partly to blame for it.

>Intentionally confusing the market for phones with App stores is an example of a problem that 20th century antitrust never had to deal with.

I'd say that the issues with app stores are a pretty direct parallel to Company Towns[0], whose issues have been known and addressed for more than a century.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

Because the authors, and tech industry milieu they represent, believes democratic government is the only method for resolving differences:

>[Democracy] doesn't mean that there's some alternative way to accomplish that underlying task

>[Democracy is] about a fair process for refereeing in an ongoing way, the contestation of citizens’ own choices and preferences.

Like they said, would you prefer the Pope to censor your tech? Would you wear unregulated clothing? Of course not. "[W]e need to break people out of a kind of binary mindset where markets are good and markets have all the solutions" and people's needs must be decided democratically.

These profs know that democracy isn't a magic fix. The changes made to tech today will come from the democratic system, the same system that is not working great. The current situation sucks but a challenger still has the power, overreaching legislation instead puts that power into the public will which is arbitrary and easily misrepresented. I'm not opposed to a break-up or limits on some of the bigger companies, but it's beyond that which worries me, personally.

It can be, if people are energized by their newfound agency, instead of towed around on cattle cars called Facebook and Google. Like Rob says in the interview, cooperation beats competition. Cooperative community solutions beat greedy private solutions.

I guess my main disagreement is that private solutions dn't have to be greedy and community solutions are often driven by it. I think we want the same or similar things, we disagree about the process?

> private solutions dn't have to be greedy

But they do, over time. This is what competition does. You may start out in a fresh market fully intent on doing a good and honest job, but then competitors arrive. First, they force you to innovate and improve your offering. Then, when improvements start yielding diminishing returns, you're forced to either become exploitative and dishonest, or be outcompeted.

While we live in an idealistic democracy, in truth we live in a plutocracy. Tech has become one of the venues to become a plutocrat and wield influence that a single vote in a representative republic can't even imagine.

It’s a false view that markets will regulate themselves. They tend not to beyond what their clientbase deems acceptable or not. So we have big tech which undermines democracy, and in the US democracy is skewed because people aren’t properly represented because of lobbyists and gerrymandering (and sponsorship by corporations instead of their constituents)

So this vicious circle is hard to break if we aren’t will to break with old ways.

> The people in government do not understand tech. They don't understand how it works, they don't understand where it is going, and they don't understand its ethos.

That may have been true 20 years ago. The people in government understand current tech and its ethos very well, because it's the same ethos as in every other industry: profit over all.

What surprises me is to see people still thinking our industry has any trace of the original "hacker ethos" left in it. It doesn't. Big Tech companies are just run-of-the-mill megacorporations, with all pathologies that come with megacorps run by suits, differing only by the flavor of the products they sell. Startup world is just another Wall Street, with a sprinkling of tech sugar on top of the dollars being gambled.

Governments understand this well. Whether it's Google or GM or Monsanto that's pulling business shenanigans, it's all the same business shenanigans. Hacker ethos? That ended when programming started to pay well.

What you are describing is SV. SV doesn't have to be the tech industry and it isn't.

No, it's just the golden beacon everyone else tries to mimic. No surprise there either, SV-style shenanigans deliver solid money.

The government is the only institution with a monopoly on force. How else can institutional changes be enacted without worrying about defection?

How many people here work in those institutions? Do they not have power to make change or work somewhere else?

Not really... If the market saw an opportunity to make money by defecting from a commonly accepted norm that isn't enforced by law there are people who would be willing to implement the defection for the right price.

There is absolutely zero incentive for any of those people in power to do anything about it. They work in one of the best paying industries on earth, they financially stand to benefit from the very things that ought to be regulated.

How do you think anyone reigned in the tobacco industry? Everyone in the industry just went, "well I hate coffers full of money, let's stop working here" ?

That's what governmental authority exists for. The idea that the foxes polices themselves while they have all the keys to the henhouse is comical.

> The idea that the foxes polices themselves while they have all the keys to the henhouse is comical.

Exactly. "The tragedy of the commons" is a well-known terms that means, "given the keys to the henhouse, the foxes are not able to police themselves well enough to keep themselves from starving" - and this doesn't even begin to consider the interests of hens.

Have you studied creative destruction in your work? Could that apply here? https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/creativedestruction.asp

>... and they don't understand its ethos.

What is tech's ethos?

"I'm very worried that any government action is going to end up being something that only FB, Google, etc can do anything about."

Worse is the likely objective/outcome: big tech and gov't. joining forces.