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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

We desperately need new companies emerging and taking over FAANGs. It’s been too long. I think about big tech same as what we thought of HP, Oracle and IBM 20 years ago. Time to conquer them and make them obsolete. If we don't, we're guaranteeing absolute stagnation of the society in many insiduous ways. Always watching, always controlling Big Tech dystopia.

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Unfortunately this won't happen unless something or someone takes actions. If governments is not going to bother to do the enforcement of the laws, then nothing changed until they do it.

If there is a new player in the field, what or who is going to stop FAANGs from buying the competitors (even it violated the antitrust law)? Sure we do have Sherman Antitrust Act for this... but no one bothering to do the enforcement and the companies are not going to stop for the goodness of their hearts.

We cannot expect the small/newcomer companies to try to compete against FAANGs and hoping thing changes. The only way we can get the enforcement seriously is the Congress itself. Frankly, the Congress prefers to listen to their corporate masters over their constituents.

What prevented Oracle, IBM et al to buy out Google, Facebook and Twitter ?

Yahoo refused to buy Google.

Nothing more than complacency, maybe? A mistake I think the newer batch of Big Tech is eager not to make.

And just there's the rub: everyone's eager not to be complacent... until they're not - at least historically speaking.

AFAIK, Zuckerberg was systematically refusing ton sell. He wanted to keep the company.

Then new entrepreneurs can also refuse to sell to faangs. Parent asked who is going to stop faangs to buy competitors.

Zuckerberg is outlier.

> Frankly, the Congress prefers to listen to their corporate masters over their constituents.

There's the crux of it all. We know firsthand that our addiction to companies like Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon are unhealthy, but the only thing stopping us from keeping them in check is our government. I've been saying this for a while now, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the SEC cuts deals to FAANG companies in exchange for NIST compliance or unwarranted data requests.

>but the only thing stopping us from keeping them in check is our government.

Lots and lots and lots of people in the "us" group find using Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon convenient (and cheap). Otherwise, there is zero friction for people to type in a different address in the browser and use Libreoffice or Pinephone or Mastodon or whatever competing alternative with open standards there is.

Everyone hates these companies but there's enormous disagreement about the "why".

Josh Hawley, Bernie Sanders, Mitt Romney, and Nancy Pelosi all hate big tech. Their reasons and suggested interventions are about as far apart as you can get.

There's also an enormous amount of cross-ideology jealousy about the amount of money FAANG nerds are making.

This seems like a hard to substantiate claim, IBM, HP and Oracle didn't become "also rans" due to government intervention. I'd like to hear the pitch for why FAANG is "different".

Microsoft arguably did.

The anti-trust action against them did not cost them a lot of cash directly, but it did lead to heightened scrutiny on further anti-competitive practices. And it wasn't too long after that the FAANGs came to displace Microsoft as the dominant technology companies.

Could be a coincidence, but I personally feel like there was a connection.

You'd have to think that if Microsoft hadn't been hit with the anti-trust baton, that they would have never tolerated a program like Firefox becoming as popular as it did, let alone Chrome, and that they would have been much more successful at keeping the web neutered or at least highly captive to whatever they let Internet Explorer define, and at that point how do you get things like Facebook and Google coming about and becoming as big as they did?

Imagine a world where IE6 never has to compete against Firefox because every version of Firefox is mysteriously "broken" by the latest windows update. "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run" for the late 90's early 2000s. I think that its a very realistic thing to think that anti-trust played a huge part in allowing the open web to flourish as it, even with MS fighting as hard as it could to stall it out with IE stagnation.

I think a large part of Googles initial success was that is had many users viciously defending them. I was not a super fan but did too when I was younger, configured hundreds of devices to use Google search and people stayed with it.

They became victim to the same corporate diseases that plague all public companies after a while.

We don't need new companies, we need open protocols to become A Thing again. For open protocols to develop and succeed, we need to modify the business environment so capturing users isn't the #1 goal of online megacorps. That probably means passing really, really strong privacy laws, and the death of mass individually-targeted advertising.

I don't think we'll do that, but it's what it would take. Replacing the companies won't help, except maybe very briefly.

Technology companies were really the ones to drive new protocols, and beat the proprietary protocols in the open market.

There were a lot of proprietary "information superhighway" projects by various companies, that were all made irrelevant by the success of the web.

Sure, and new companies will arise to develop and use open protocols if that's incentivized, but as long as not just attention or eyeballs, but capturing as much user activity and generated content as possible, is monetizable pretty directly (customize ads; feed your ML models to gain competitive advantage over those without the same reach into users' lives, and sell your ML capabilities), I think we're in for more of the same, even if we shuffle the chairs around.

Why do we even lump together FAANGS and compare them to tech companies of that era? Sure, some of them have products (devices, applications, and operating systems) but many are primarily service providers who mostly need tech to function. To my eye, the social stagnation will come from the part of those conglomerates which is more in line with the big media, marketing, and info brokers of the same era. Do most of us even know who those companies were?

Agreed on all counts. Responses like this are why I continue to find HN an inspiring community.

I wonder sometimes why there arent more grassroots non-toxic (?) social platforms for more localized communities.

For instance what is preventing there from being a community-funded simple instagram-like app for individual arts communities in non LA/NY cities given that its never been easier / cheaper to build this kind of platform?

The answer my be that it still isnt easy to build reliable / scalable apps that people actually want to use. But sometimes I wonder if theres not something more sinister going on...

>The answer my be that it still isnt easy to build reliable / scalable apps that people actually want to use. But sometimes I wonder if theres not something more sinister going on...

Why would there be anything more sinister? It obviously takes a ton of work and money to operate a service like Instagram. And if 99.9% of people are happy using Instagram in exchange for being tracked and/or giving another entity the power banish them from the network, then the community funded app is going to have problems competing.

HP, IBM, and Oracle ruled for decades though. It will take at least another generation of new ideas, and the existing companies need to fundamentally "miss" those new ideas.

People forget that there was a time when mobile was considered an existential threat to Facebook. But they navigated it well.

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