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Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

Hell no it's not ending, why would you even think that? Because a few governments only started cautiously talking about breaking apart giants? So what? As if corporate lawyers don't find holes in any new regulation literally the same week. Governments take years to formulate a legislation, and your average corporate legal team defeats it in days.

The big tech era is in fact now just starting. The big corporations finally realized nobody is seriously challenging them so they will only tighten the grip gradually from here on.

I am actually afraid for small tech now. And that one day me using a PiHole might get criminalized. Or a rootless VPN used for blocking invasive traffic on an Android phone might become a reason for some lobbyists to pressure my ISP into stopping my internet access.

Keep your guard up, folks, and improve your hardware operation skills -- and any physical real-life skills in general. We can't all be dependent on the corps, they must always be shown we can do without them and we only tolerate them because they are not too unpleasant.

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Remember, things are never as good or as bad as you think.

'Offline' internet can come back, we can put 32g of microsd cards in special locations so we can share content and /etc/hosts without anyone knowing, maybe go online from time to time to get the newest /etc/hosts from your friends and the new locations for microsd cards near you.

Gopher is making a comeback, and gemini is growing.

Pi zero 2W costs 10$ and with 40$ screen you can watch feynman lectures with mplayer -vo fbdev, it boots into vim for 3 seconds (init into openvt -w vim kinda thing).

Soon the-eye.eu will be back (hopefully).

The new phrack is out.

The social networks are eating themselves, same as google is eating itself, the search is garbage, the feed is even more garbage, 99% of the content is anxiety inducing miasma.

The web is eating itself, with gazillions of GPT(ish) generated articles.

Let it go, life always finds a way.

> /etc/hosts

> Gopher is making a comeback, and gemini is growing.

> Pi zero 2W

Another thing you need to keep in mind is that the number of people with the skills necessary to use this is low. Not to mention that new generations have grown up with the current status-quo and seem to be happy enough with it not to search for alternatives.

If things get really bad (a debate for which I'm not taking either side), only a very small minority will be able to use the aforementioned workarounds and can trivially be marginalized and crushed with legislation and its enforcement.

> Not to mention that new generations have grown up with the current status-quo and seem to be happy enough with it not to search for alternatives.

Even though this is true, it is not impossible to expand their horizon. We still have not figured out the pedagogy or even andragogy of how to teach technology.

Check out my progress with my daughter(10): https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids, We are also making a card game https://punkjazz.org/programming-time/easy.html to play with her and donate to other kids interested in learning.

Spending time with pi zero and arduino and building retropie games, using links2 instead of chrome from time to time, she is making great progress. Make the lights in her room work after few claps, with arduino nano and sound sensor so her code can control the light.

And this is only with 20-30 minutes per day.

You might think that the kids are blind to what is going on, but they do see, they know something is wrong, they know they are being exploited and cheated to buy lootboxes and skins.

her website might spark some nostalgia feelings of the early web: https://punkjazz.org/jackie/

:) at least it makes me feel like things are not as bad.

It’s on this community right here to make these things as easy and accessible as possible for everyone to use.

I don't think that's HN and ycombinator. The original intent of HN was to support yc, an incubator that creates semi-giants like Airbnb and DoorDash. If push really comes to shove, most people here are going to look out for themselves. They may not like the current big tech companies, but probably would have no problem becoming the next one.

> number of people with the skills necessary

I repeatedly run the experiment to pitch a low-tech solution to a high-tech fund and aim exactly there:

Reduce the required skill to 1) signing a hosting contract and 2) copying a single file to that webspace. Really!

So that's several orders of magnitude more people than today. Instantly.

But got it the 3rd time officially now, that such would have no societal impact and isn't considered innovative, either. The time isn't here yet.

> Another thing you need to keep in mind is that the number of people with the skills necessary to use this is low.

Then maybe the Eternal September will pass, and October will finally come.

You download a file and run it on your Pi, its literally made to teach children computing. You can buy a used android phone and do it easier a pi is too expensive or hard.

Questions people will ask:

1. What is a Pi?

2. Where's the keyboard/mouse/screen?

3. What does "download a file" mean?

4. What does "run it" mean?

And as for using an Android... that immediately defeats the purpose since they're basically Google data vacuums.

I don’t see your point. Using the Internet is a data vaccum, you will probably google it even and watch the lecture on YouTube.

You don’t need to do any of this this listen to the Feynman lectures.

we can put 32g of microsd cards in special locations so we can share content and /etc/hosts without anyone knowing

For a short while, when sneakernet was still higher capacity than the internet, people used to embed USB drives in trees and other public places. You'd walk up, plug in, and download the content. Things like full wikis of specialized subjects. Or videos of neighborhood events. Ideally, they were always made somehow read-only. I wouldn't want to imagine what would happen if they were read/write. We'd be right back to the internet we have today.

Still, it's something I do wish would have taken off. Maybe we could still do something like that today by setting up miniature web BBSes on hotspots in or near public parks. Not everything in the world should be open to the entire planet. As long as you weren't in a tourist district, you could be pretty sure the content was at least locally generated.

i am working on putting a pizero2+solar panel as a hotspot in a tree deep in the nearby forest, you will be able to connect to it and get content

i will put all kinds of public domain data on it, from most of gutenberg books to all kinds lectures encoded with h265

will be so cool to have to go to the middle of the forest to download a book :)

the whole thing should cost no more than 30$ (biggest challenge is to make sure that the battery bursting in flames wont melt the case and set things on fire)

Spend a bit more and get a quality charge controller, and a gel-chemistry battery.

Been a programmer professionally for 20 years now and I regret not learning more sysadmin skills. But I'll catch up.

In the meantime, more links about how these things are done will be appreciated.

I've been programming professionally for 30 years now, and I have learned sysadmin skills---the skills required changed at least three times and the skills I learned in the 90s/early 2000s are largely obsolete, the skills from the early 2000s/2010s are on the way out.

You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game.

i dont think thats true

ip, tcp and udp are the same, rip ospf and bgp are pretty much the same linux's skbuffs or bsd's mbufs are the same as before, the linux dma api changed a bit, but the ideas are the same.

there are some changes on the disk layers with geom and such, but nothing super fundamental

there are a bunch of layers of indirection now with VMs and cgroups, but deep down things are the same.

> You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game.

there is nothing to win :) its just computers, dont take it so seriously

>the-eye.eu

The fat that this website is down and only links to their Discord is very ironic.

I'm doing my part:

- Degoogled for three years now - Voting with my money (such as supporting Pine64) - Self-hosting my website and some services - Self-hosting at work as much as possible - Learning and applying basic tech instead of some black box from some giant corp - Shopping regional as much as possible - Shopping on alternative online stores - etc.

Unfortunately you were never the target audience. Companies like Google operate on the scale of billions, and the vast majority are completely unsophisticated and only able to use whatever software is easiest.

The point of technically-minded people switching away from these companies isn't that we expect everyone else to all follow our example at the same time. Instead, the goal is to support these alternative services financially; and with bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests; so that those alternative services become the easiest to use, at which point the rest of society will switch without having to be told.

That may seem unrealistic, since billions-scale companies have much greater resources to invest in user experience, but you have to think of this as asymmetric warfare, with their size being a liability rather than an asset.

For example, large services need to justify their expenses by maximising the amount of money they extract from users (just look at the latest controversial feature of Edge[0]). Also, keeping these alternative services running provides an existence proof to regulators about how services don't need to be exploitative, giving them cover to write rules that re-balance the playing field, such as requiring social media and messaging companies to make their services interoperable.[1]

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59492429

[1] https://marketresearchtelecast.com/digital-markets-act-meps-...

Yep. Same thougts here. But I feel that a turning point may come at some point though

> the vast majority are completely unsophisticated and only able to use whatever software is easiest.

Not really "the vast majority" ...

I believe the problem on Google's side is that it is easier to do good services on easy stuff, like mail and simple search querries like "who is the president in Finland" or "when does X close".

So Google prioritizes trivia searches over searches an unsophisticated dentist would querry to look up some procedure.

Programmers just seem to rely more on websearches where other fields have like magazines, workplace courses and conferences.

You don’t need everyone to change, the commoners imitate the elite.

Who will the masses ultimately follow: solitary tech savvy geeks who warn of naked emperors? Or armies of corporate-sponsored feel-good social influencers who entertain by promoting only themselves and the fad-du-jour?

I know none of the former who have built self-promotion-based $multi-million empires. I wish that were true of the latter.

The masses will do the easy thing, signal was made and adopted by WhatsApp for example.

The magic and evil of software and hardware is that you don’t have to understand it to use it. Elon musk memed people into crypto.

Im on the same page but personally I think it won’t make a big difference.

You don't always have to make an impact on the world. Sometimes making an impact on your world is enough.

It's not so much about making a difference as it's about living by principles.

I boycott Facebook, Amazon, and Disney.

I agree that living by principles is worthwhile. But so few people do it that it will have so little impact on market forces and inequities that they are wholly irrelevant to the OP topic. You may as well tell us that you've decided to take up flying by flapping your arms.

You may as well tell us that you've decided to take up flying by flapping your arms.

How is having and deciding to live by a set of personal principals, even if there isn’t an outcome on “market forces” in any remote way comparable to believing you’re a bird?

> It's not so much about making a difference

A comment about one aspect of big tech, i.e IT infrastructure (think AWS, GCP, Azure, and now Cloudflare etc.):

I don't see this mentioned enough but it wouldn't be surprising if some companies will want to start owning and running their own IT infrastructure. Buy your own servers and setup a small data-center for a small to medium business. This will be a thing again. The pendulum has to swing, but the question is -- is there money in enabling this for companies that want to go this way? I expect some startups in near future to target this opportunity and help shift towards decentralization (again).

Currently I work in a company that's very cost-conscious about hosting. They are generous in salaries but are mercilessly practical about IT costs and the abilities of computers -- especially the latter part is something that most of the programmers today have almost completely forgot.

I have 3 spare laptops lying around; weakest of them is with a Celeron J4155 and I have put a web app with no caching on it (it does have a persistent DB) and hammered it with my workstation until it finally started giving up at ~2500 req/s (Elixir/Phoenix stack). Again, that's a Celeron J4155 with a SATA III SSD in an M.2 factor (so disk speed caps at 550MB/s at best; usually 400-460) and 12GB RAM. Most programmers wouldn't touch such a machine.

I imagine I can buy 2 more of these laptops and make a completely replicated 3-cluster of the entire stack of our company and the slowest requests (on admin UI where we have a lot of SQL JOINs) would likely never go above 200ms. That totals at about 600 EUR (yep, I bought the laptop second-hand for 200 EUR). Then 500 more EUR for a good UPS to plug the laptops and my routers to. Boom 1100 EUR and several weekends later I can likely charge my own employer for hosting at 100 EUR a month for their entire infrastructure and I would likely still be ripping them off even with that.

The only real cost is human time and energy invested in making it work. But for most companies that's not a 24/7 fight so that cost is fairly low. You can do it twice a year and you're likely never going to have problems.

So yep, I am completely with you here (if my rant didn't make it obvious). Infrastructure costs are already being heavily optimized by companies out there.

> The only real cost is human time and energy invested in making it work. But for most companies that's not a 24/7 fight so that cost is fairly low. You can do it twice a year and you're likely never going to have problems.

If this were true, what made the cloud providers popular in the first place?

Outsourcing culture. Nobody wants to nurture talent -- that would also mean to invest in relations with your employees and not alienating them. Shareholders prefer to sacrifice a little more of their profit so they deal with less potential problems. And the pull of the idea that every human in the org must be an inter-changeable cog is too strong (even if that idea continues to be absurd, and always was).

Hosting apps in the cloud was a fair exchange 10 years ago because operational tooling in general was more immature. Nowadays it's much easier to self-host many pieces of software though.

This isn’t it, you might not know or if you haven’t been in an environment like it.

Without a cloud you’re always running up against limits, out of power, out out cooling, out of rack space, out of hardware. You get new resources by adding to wish lists and seeing if the end of quarter budget will agree with your request which might be filled in a few months, maybe next year, often never.

You hoard hardware that ends up doing nothing most of the time so you have it when you do need it. Management spends a lot of time and energy managing the datacenter budget.

With cloud you get what you want without asking too much and management periodically spearheads savings efforts to show off, but ultimately usually spends a lot more than they would have otherwise with less friction.

A big part of cloud adoption, according to my theory, is getting executives out of the way of computing resource needs and freeing up their time to fill with something else like bothering employees for more status updates (which are easier and require less skill).

> Without a cloud you’re always running up against limits, out of power, out out cooling, out of rack space, out of hardware.

I grew up in this era and keep hearing this repeated but it simply wasn’t true. Enterprises would plan ahead and buy enough hardware for years and it would work fine until you bought more. The myth that you need to scale your infrastructure 10x in a day doesn’t apply to 99% of enterprises, and even if it did it’s probably a result of bad planning on the part of leadership. As a result of the current paradigm businesses end up renting servers at a substantial markup for fairly obsolete hardware.

In general it's really the opposite. In 2004 you needed a rack full of $3000 servers to run your medium business. Now it's two physical machines using 5% of the power to virtualize everything that used to run on two dozen.

Over a given period of time, computers get faster/cheaper by more than most businesses expand. When you need to expand, buying a newer, faster machine may cause you to save money because the faster machine uses less power than the existing one.

You are talking big businesses here, I've seen people just ask the CEO if they can buy 3 brand new servers and him agreeing, verbally, and the servers arrived next week, and two weeks later were completely setup and were useful.

This lasted for 11 years and only stopped because two of the 5 senior engineers retired and because the company was bought a few weeks earlier.

So again, don't look at this through Silicon Valley lens. Most of the companies in the world have a very different mold compared to SV.

Then there are service contracts to make surr the systems keeps running with little downtime. Which may be impossible to get for 11 year old equipment. Then there are pesky details like needing a disaster recovery site.

Professional hardware is expensive and server h/w is a small part of it.

> Without a cloud you’re always running up against limits, out of power, out out cooling, out of rack space, out of hardware.

I bet most customers of cloud services are not in a high-growth phase, so this is scenario most organizations aspire to ("What if we suddenly got popular?" is a fantasy that's hard to disabuse someone of internally, if you want to be known as a team player

> Management spends a lot of time and energy managing the datacenter budget. With cloud you get what you want without asking too much...

I fully agree, this is the core reason why most companies gravitate towards cloud: management abdicates control of costs to engineers, resulting in less friction - but its OpEx, not CapEx, so the bean counters are chilled about it. If the same low-friction approach were applied to DC equipment, you'd get similar results, but cheaper.

I used to be a big proponent of self-hosting. The raw hardware cost makes it look like a great deal. However in my experience hardware is less than 5% of salary cost and having enough admins on hand to make your infra reliable is usually going to end up costing you more in the end.

Don't some of those salary costs transfer over to the cloud. Someone still has to manage it

You need a lot less people per computer when you have millions of computers like big tech has than when you have 10.

The cost of these services is not because big tech has to use that much to run them, but because big tech would make less money if they lowered prices. AWS generates tons of profits, why lower that for no reason?

> You need a lot less people per computer when you have millions of computers like big tech has than when you have 10.

That's not the people we're talking about. Racking a server and setting it up to do virtualization takes maybe a few hours for one person, if that, over a period of years. Maintenance on the host itself is the same.

The real labor cost is in setting up and maintaining applications for your specific needs. None of that goes away by using someone else's hardware.

> The real labor cost is in setting up and maintaining applications for your specific needs. None of that goes away by using someone else's hardware.

But AWS does a lot of that for you by offering cloud services and not just hardware. That is why people pay so much more for AWS than other just hosting solutions.

That doesn't explain why their pricing for generic VMs or bandwidth is so high, or why anybody should want to pay them for that.

It also doesn't really work. Some textile company is going to have some line of business software to run their textile mill. Amazon doesn't provide that. You still have to do labor to configure it. These are the hard things, because they're custom and don't have a huge installed base of people who already encountered and solved all the problems you're going to have. But for the same reason, they're the things AWS doesn't provide.

What they provide is common things like DNS. But DNS is easy to set up and maintain, because it's common, and so already has smooth edges. That's not where the labor was going.

> Outsourcing culture. Nobody wants to nurture talent.

Also, outsourcing moves the blame to someone else if things go wrong. (and things in infra go wrong nearly constantly).

The problem with this kind of thinking is ofcourse, that there is no risk taking and innovation in suchs an organisation..

AWS lets me provision servers all over the world at any point, which is required by customers both for compliance and for latency SLAs. Even billion dollar companies are going to find that a huge lift to build out themselves, and they have opportunity cost while they try to do it.

What about scaling down? Once you bought hardware for self hosting you are stuck with it.

What about it? We're talking small businesses here, this will not be a warehouse full of racks worth of machines to try and sell. We're likely talking 3 to 10 PC-sized machines in a closet or storage room. You can sell those on 2nd hand market pretty quickly and even if you sell them at 30-40% loss you are extremely likely to have already paid off the other 60-70% during the machines' service time.

old laptop is fine then :)

The costs the OP described are pretty minimal.

You never know. While working in an ITAM role, I've had a manager point out a line item asking why we need 30 DisplayPort cables. This was in an org with multiple sites, 2000+ employees, using dual monitor setups both in house and remote. Whether physically, or in the cloud, companies whose primary business isn't tech-related see the IT side as an annoying cost center rather than a cost of doing business in the 21st century.

This selfish outsourcing culture is killing all the Gilfoyles out there!

I'm curious as a hosting and cloud noob, do you have an estimate how much that would cost monthly or yearly if hosted on a cloud?

Not really, because AWS costs aren't transparent. You can't drill down properly and even where you can, the prices are disappointingly high.

It gets really tempting to setup a backup/failover node on one of my spare laptops lately...

Interesting. I am not intimately familiar with the subject matter, so I will be curious then to see how the next 10 years play out.

Beancounters love OPEX and avoid CAPEX

beancounters are not in charge of the direction of the company. In a lot of cases, it makes a ton of sense to go for capex vs opex.

My old employer had a strategy which basically boiled down to owning everything inside this company expect for the coffee machines and cleaning crew. His reason being? This made it possible to run on very thight margins when the economy takes a downturn without having to scramble for money because of leased/loaned equipment etc.

In the 2008 crisis, this is how he stayed afloat with his company, and even made a pretty profit during a time of crisis too.

Surely the beancounters can also see the effects of capex on the valuations of the cloud providers.

If they're publicly traded, no one's going to give Bob's Consolidated Widgets a 65x PE or 2x+ PEG ratio, even if they have the best IT strategy in their market.

Curious, can you explain why? In my experience (just one company where I had some interaction with accounting), there was a preference toward CAPEX. The costs of building a product, ie software development, was prefered over OPEX, in this case, analytics. Since I was doing both development and analytics, they preferred me to account part of my time as CAPEX. Not sure if this is normal but for context it was a non/pre-public company.

OPEX is just an expense in the current fiscal year. CAPEX depreciates over N years. This alone means that a one-time payment is much simpler on the books.

I don't think your salary counts as CAPEX, it's a normal monthly expense for the company.

Keep in mind that most big clients of cloud providers are startups running on VC money. It's not their money and they don't care about wasting it, and VCs don't particularly care either.

This has now created an entire ecosystem of developers and "devops engineers" (what we used to call sysadmins) who know little beyond the cloud and have to keep using it for career-related reasons. This in turn pushes companies to use the cloud as finding talent for old-school on-premises infrastructure is difficult.

Infinite scale up (direct fan-out to mass market), high margins (able to overpay for commodities), and outsourcing production work to stable businesses are all facets of the Hollywood business model that Surveillance Valley adopted. Once the concept was socially proven, then nobody gets fired for buying IBM.

That human time happens to be quite expensive.

Not in small companies.

It's most of the cost at small companies. A lot of people underestimate the total cost of having employees perform tasks at unpredictable scale with unpredictable problems versus just writing a check each month.

It's true that cloud providers aren't reliably cheaper as some assumed at one point. But there's something to be said for cutting out the fully burdened costs of some number of employees (especially given everyone is saying tech talent is expensive and scarce at the moment) and just letting AWS deal with it even if you could theoretically do it cheaper yourself.

Not only that, but if you have a business that actually makes, sells, and ships something, your AWS bill is probably a tiny fraction of your expenses. Switching to physical servers would be a little like getting solar installed on your house - great in theory, but if the most expense it will displace is $150/month, is it the right problem to focus on?

True. Although I’d argue most companies are small enough that AWS itself represents more overhead than is optimal. They’d be better of on Heroku, or even just a single VM.

Certainly you can overcomplicate things with any of the big public cloud providers. As you say, many smaller companies would be better off with a SaaS, maybe a PaaS, and some VPSs, whether from one of the big guys or someone else.

I had to laugh at someone's comment around re:Invent last week that just because Amazon has to offer 17 types of databases for its customers (or whatever the exact quote was) doesn't mean you have to collect them all as if they were Pokemon.

What if the cheap guy quits?

I'm aware of the risks. That's why I said a culture of long-term relationships must be fostered if you want to pull such operations off.

Where I work right now people don't just quit two days later. They like the company and if they feel they want to go someplace else they're not being difficult about it. They cooperate in passing down their knowledge to colleagues before they go.

You are vastly overestimating the IT capabilities of most companies. The human time and energy cost that you handwaved away is a real killer because that is expert knowledge capability that is highly valued by the market. Maintaining an IT staff and infrastructure to support a large organization that has to perform any kind of reasonable SLA for services eventually puts you in direct competition with Major Cloud Providers at scale. A scenario where you can outcompete them with their large customer bases becomes very difficult to imagine under current technological and market conditions.

It's not a matter of outsourcing culture. Cloud providers really do provide computing in a cost efficient matter since they practically provide IT infrastructure at wholesale, and it produces an anti-trust risk because, as you pointed out, the actual hardware that can make it go is not nearly as expensive.

I am not handwaving anything away. We're a company that has less but very strong programmers (we don't even have DevOps / sysadmins, our CTO is doing it and I'll likely be taking part of his responsibilities at one point).

And we don't have the requirements of most big Silicon Valley companies that you reference. It boggles my mind why so many commenters IMMEDIATELY assumed we're a hyper-growth startup or whatever. We're an expanding data provider and our growth is super predictable, and our set of requirements changes like once a year.

So really, not sure why you and others keep repeating things I already agree with. The cloud wins from one point / scale and on, absolutely; otherwise it wouldn't ever take off. I am saying that people give up way too quickly and run to the cloud long before they need it -- that's all.

If running your tech stack on local hardware is right for you guys, than more power to you. That is also what works for me for my personal and hobby computing requirements, where I maintain a home machine. But there is kind of an implication that most people who start developing on cloud services are just clueless programmers who never learned the basics of system provisioning.

Even with the specs you mentioned, you can rent a lightsail server that is comparable on AWS for like 80 usd a month, so I would push back against the idea that using cloud services in pretty much any scenario is a purely technical decision.

Part of the context of discussing things this way is the original article: do the prevalence of service companies signal the end of big tech? I would say no, because the only way to not be reliant cloud service providers is to do what you describe and compete directly with their infrastructure services by forming your own technical infrastructure. But the logical conclusion to doing things this way is that eventually whoever can control more physical infrastructure has an advantage. What if Amazon is able to replicate your service offerings? They would be able to immediately able to offer their version using their cloud services at a fraction of the price because they can amoratize the cost of computing over their cloud business. Then, when they have eliminated you as competition, they can recoup everything by increasing the price. This is a HUGE anti-trust concern, and one that all tech companies should be at least a little bit concerned about in the long term. It doesn't go away because you can have an (in your case more expensive than lightsail) up front investment to own your companies computing resources.

If they can do it at the fraction of the cost then I'd use it. Trouble is, AWS pricing is hard to parse, especially post factum. In my company's case, the leaders are not happy with the lack of billing transparency.

I think that's not only a good reason not to use AWS, but also the fundamental problem with the position that cloud service providers pose. It would be much healthier for companies and organizations to directly own their own computing resources, rather than effectively leasing them from one of three cloud service providers, but it is absolutely more of an investment for companies to make.

Sure, agreed. I am on the opinion that Amazon does not have to be that monopoly-oriented but alas, humans being humans right?

Give me an AWS service with predictable billing and ability to put hard limits so you don't have your credit card charged for surprising amounts if you get bursty unexpected loads, and I'll be all over them without thinking of on-prem hosting.

Honestly, I don't even think the billing is that untransparent - all their services have pretty straightforward pricing guidelines, and certain services are load limited (going to point out light sail again). It's pretty fair - you pay for what you use, and that works a lot better for most cases if you know what you are doing, you just take on a bit more risk that you have to guard against.

It would be a lot preferable for there to just be multiple computing resource providers, rather than just three, but the reality is that setting yourself up as a cloud provider is quite inaccessible. Democratizing the industry of cloud services will probably require regulation.

But you yourself admit that you have an unusual setup with a few very strong programmers. Few are like this even in Silicon Valley. As for other industries, they're not even close. So your company's setup won't transfer well to the rest of the world.

I would not be so sure of your last. The SV mold is the outlier but most USA programmers can't see it because they don't work for non-US companies. Everywhere I was all around the EU in my 20 years of career so far, the SV way of doing things has not been the norm.

So it pays off to be wary of filter bubbles. The SV way of doing things assumes a ton of VC money to burn, something that, to this day, is still not a wide trend in the EU (even if it happens here and there).

Plus that company's setup is not unusual in any way per se; the only "unusual" thing is "we don't run to the cloud at the first IT problem". A ton of other companies are like this, I'd bet even in the US.

What happens when your local internet connection goes out and you can no longer serve traffic for your business? What if there is a power outage? Who will spend the time replacing disks as they fail? Where is the data backed up to, so that a failed disk doesn't lose business data?

I like where you're going with this but you could take it a lot further with little expense. Amazon and MicroCenter have a huge stock of refurbished HP mini PCs with i5s, 16gb of ram and an M2 slot for about $350. Throw in a small m2 ssd in each (~$50) and keep your UPS, that's about $1700 you have a decent cluster for an efficient stack like phoenix.

How much money would your company save by hosting on some old laptops instead of in the cloud?

5 digits of USD per month. Whereas normal on-prem hosting can be started with almost no dollar cost, tomorrow.

Right now they/we can't do it though, the talent is there but that talent is super busy reworking software that's no longer well-adapted to their new requirements. We'll see if the topic becomes more relevant in the future.

Not to forget - there are more choices than big-cloud and host-everything-yourself.

One can rent VMs from Hetzner at 1/3 the price of AWS (and 1/10 the data transfer fees). No managed services, like Dynamo or S3, but will full convenience of on-demand scale-up

Or, for mid-sized corporations - buying a rack of computers, wiring them together, and installing OpenStack to make an internal cloud - that isn't some black magic wizardry either

Oh yeah, completely agreed. As mentioned in another comment we might just go Hetzner and buy a singular server in another provider for backup and failover. We'd likely be just fine with 6-7 of the smaller Hetzner servers, too.

It seems crazy that you are paying that much for hosting something that can be self-hosted on an old laptop.

that works as long as there are enough of you for every team/app/service/whatever to build and operate all that around the clock and without bus risk.

A lot of these threads end up talking about "scaling" from a pure hardware perspective. Once you start talking about medium-to-large companies, the real scaling headache is people, process, and organizations.

Not sure if I made myself clear but I definitely meant my above as aimed at small businesses (which my current employer is).

Obviously from one scale and on the cloud is very much worth it. IMO the discussion has to be shifted to "before which point you can easily get away without the cloud?".

At some point, an internal cloud starts being interesting and gives a clear org boundary, using cloud-based software and interfaces.

That's true as well. It all depends on how much is the employer willing to invest in their employees in the end; if they foster longer-lasting relationships then many interesting internal projects become feasible or even desirable.

Those invested-in employees will probably still leave, especially if they're very good and you can't match big tech salaries. And, in any case, you need redundancies for when they're on vacation, out sick, etc. Not to say you shouldn't develop in house competencies but you should do so deliberately because there are probably a lot more costs and risks than are obvious.

We're not blind to the tradeoffs. It's a long process to both change culture and nurture the necessary skills in your staff, AND take care of having human redundancy.

My point never was to idolize on-prem; I have agreed in other comments that from one point and on the cloud absolutely wins.

I'm mostly pointing out that there is a lot you can do before bowing your head to Amazon and accept $30_000+ monthly bill for infrastructure that I can fit in my 1 square meter food closet and which would likely cost me (or a few other experienced backenders) 2-3 weekends to setup.

Absolutely. I'm definitely not in the "You're crazy if you don't just use AWS/GCP/Azure" camp. I'm just also not in the "See how cheap it is to just stick a system under my desk" camp. Totally dependent on use case and circumstances.

True. It's not a religion or a credo. We're simply evaluating our options because our cloud bill is way too high for what we do.

Time will tell but IMO it's super important to reserve the right to take a deeper look if you don't like your costs.

We're not as helpless as big tech wants us to believe.

And figuring out those costs can be really hard. People like Corey Quinn have built a whole business out of helping people make sense of their AWS bills.

Yep, but it's all self-interest. At one point you ask yourself: must I really go down this rabbit hole?

>I can fit in my 1 square meter food closet and which would likely cost me (or a few other experienced backenders) 2-3 weekends to setup.

I don't think that setting it up is main problem here. Keeping it up to date and secure is the hard part.

IMO the thing to watch for is regulations around what rules you need to follow to be compliant in how you operate your data center or physical servers. It’s very likely big tech will lobby for rules that appear to be anti big tech but actually will make it harder to operate independent from a big tech provider… think net neutrality (not saying I don’t think we need it just as an example)

>I expect some startups in near future to target this opportunity

https://oxide.computer

But most of the problem isn't with infrastructure. Once you start using AWS's services it is the software that is most problematic. And that is why all these infrastructure / cloud provider wants to do serverless.

Right now there is a lot of money to be made in moving companies to the cloud, I predict that in 10-20 years time there will be a lot of money to be made moving them out of that same cloud.

I hate having to learn all of AWS, GCP and Azure proprietary tech, I’ll take a Linode box any day thank you

I believe this has been stated to be the core thesis behind Oxide Computer Company's business model.

but this is already the case for a LOT of companies. HN seems so focused on cloud and sillicon valley that they forget there are hundreds of datacenters filled with colocated space and connectivity.

Colo is cheap, connectivity is cheaper then it has ever been, and most bussiness don't require massive scaling to do their bussiness.

Also, owning your own infra allows you to innovate and play a game outside of the borders aws, gcp and azure are drawing up for you.

On a related note, I run noscript on my browser and overall it's not a bad experience. The conveniences IMO outweigh the inconveniences.

However, Cloudfront, JSDeliver, etc are a pain. I understand the benefits of caching javascript locally to me, but I want to see companies start hosting their scripts all from their own servers.

If FontAwesome isn't already a tracking company, it's only a matter of time. Cringy-cool name, tentacles throughout the web, all for _fonts_. I'm a senior fullstack dev and I get tradeoffs, but the technical-societal-tradeoffs of the web are bewildering.

I was thinking the exact same thing recently. If you can setup and manage an infrastructure by yourself, you have pretty good advantage in term of cost.

Why? Especially for small and medium businesses, the capital costs involved rarely make sense, and if you're leasing, might as well lease from a cloud provider which saves you time and people. There are many smaller players which are OK depending on uptime requirements - OVHCloud, Digital Ocean, Hetzner, Scaleway, Linode, etc.

The capital costs are very easy to make back. For us, the payback period was <1 year, and our machines provided unbeatable performance with very good transparency into issues, which made it relatively easy to track down issues. Dedicated machines are really, really powerful now, and you can do with a few what it used to take racks. I feel like the perception of “it’s too hard” or “it’s actually more expensive” is subtly encouraged and reinforced by the myriad companies that stand to benefit - all those hosted services, the cloud providers, etc. And they make it easy for individual employees to appear more productive, but in exchange for costing their companies much more in the long run, and introducing a lot of inter-service latency and complexity. Misaligned incentives.

The major exception for us is S3, scaling storage seems like it would suck terribly.

>...is subtly encouraged and reinforced by the myriad companies that stand to benefit..."

Not just companies. Web developers love the complexity of their stack. Some monolith written in native performant language and put on a decent hardware can cover needs of the most reasonable size business. This simple fact makes them very uncomfy when presented. Many of them would not be even aware that such things are possible. They'd rather be spoon fed by the likes of the Amazon telling them how to develop their wares. The fact that the more inefficient their software is the more money said Amazon will make is ignored. They'd invent all kinds of largely BS arguments to avoid going a simpler route. One can just read numerous articles on HN describing "our stack". On a client site they have this React atrocity. Sure this thing works well for orgs the size of FB. But they're not FB and never will be.

this happens lower down the stack too.

Distributed redundancy is a good example. There are very, very few situation in which this couldn't be resolved with a simple BGP daemon on a server and anycast.

I don't disagree with you but I wonder if you are underestimating how many years of useful service can you get out of dual Xeon E-2690v3 systems. Almost no business actually needs the latest and greatest -- the only serious concern when hosting on-prem is energy consumption and heat dissipation. If that can be covered well the rest is much easier to cope with.

I do have some server hardware on premises (well it is in my basement and I have fat internet pipes) but I do not mind going middle road and renting dedicated servers on Hetzner and OVH. They're surprisingly cheap for whet they offer. The same performance / resource wise hardware on Amazon would make one bleed the money.

Agreed, and that's just what we might end up doing btw. A bit more manual sysadmin work which we end up doing on EC2 instances currently anyway. And a lot of money can be saved by EU dedicated server hosting.

Are any companies selling a package to make this happen. Your Own Cloud Starter kit only $1.5M

>Hell no it's not ending, why would you even think that? Because a few governments only started cautiously talking about breaking apart giants? So what? As if corporate lawyers don't find holes in any new regulation literally the same week. Governments take years to formulate a legislation, and your average corporate legal team defeats it in days.

In some way wish it is ending. As human society, we don't need any more mega big company. Everything ought to kept local and small and diverse, so there is no central control, it is only resilient way to thrive for tech and innovation.

Apple sells billions of iPhones, all with the same hardware and OS. As a result it can afford to spend a lot of money on design.

You would not enjoy an iPhone made by your local electrician.

Not local, but small and competitive was nice. Electronics were so much more fun twenty years ago. Nowadays a company is a bold risk-taker if their glass sandwich has an extra button on top.

Consumer stuff sure, but we didn't have today's proliferation of hobbyist platforms back then either. The fun things are still out there, they are just different.

Have you tried the Framework Laptop? It's a great example of how small start-ups can build better devices than the giants. Difficult, yes -- impossible, no.

The Framework is only better than a MacBook Pro if you care about repairability, customizability, freedom, etc., which most people don’t. It’s also worse in many ways — less polished OS UI, worse screen resolution.

> The Framework is only better than a MacBook Pro if you care about repairability, customizability, freedom, etc.

Those are three pretty huge things... For me personally, repairability is secondary to their very convenient modular IO port system.

> Less polished OS UI.

You can have them install Windows without the typical manufacturer bloatware or you can put *nix on it. For me, that's better than macOS.

> worse screen resolution

The resolution on the MacBook Pro 13 and the Framework are nearly the same: 2560 x 1600 vs 2256 x 1504.

Imo people overstate how good the macOS UX is. It's fine if you're used to it, but when I started using it for the first time there were lots of little unpleasant surprises and inconsistencies. The way people talk about macOS' design gave me expectations that macOS did not meet.

It's a niche product for hardware hackers. (That's why its sales are so low.)

Whether it's a niche product or not is beside the point. The point is that a small entity can build a device that is arguably better designed, better reviewed, affordable and readily available for purchase.

Me, an economist: if it's better, why does nobody buy it?

People are buying it... so much so that Framework has been struggling to keep up with the demand. All of their early batches sold out well in advance. I placed my order two months ago and it was backordered for a month. Batch 6 (the current batch) is the first batch they've had all year where they haven't been massively backordered.

I'm glad, but Apple ships millions of Macs every quarter. When Framework catch up, then I'll agree they're better and not niche. Of course as a hacker I might prefer Framework, believe it is better, even evangelize it. That's a different use of the word, though.

The original question was whether a small company can make a better device than a very large company.

Here you've defined "better" to include "can ship very large quantities", which is almost a circular way of defining the answer to be negative, no matter what the company does.

If it can ship very large quantities, it's not a small company.

Indeed, my original point was that there are huge economies of scale in design. That's why it would be a bad idea for everything to be small-scale and local, which the GP was arguing for.

It doesn't really matter that it's a niche product. The mere fact that it's out there does show to less tech savvy people what's possible. That's very important because many of them are not even aware things can be done differently.

Framework laptop is not possible without the supply chain investments made by large conglomerates.

True, but is that relevant? All companies, big and small, depend on all manner of services, materials, infrastructure, etc that are provided by other entities.

Even if that's true, what does it matter and what are you implying? No innovation because the big good corps paved the way before that?

Imagine what would happen if Rome made those big and long roads all across Europe and then nobody used them out of respect of all the labor that went into them. :D

I agree that there are things that are possible only from a giant organization.

However, IMO both Apple and Microsoft are at best indifferent to their customers. Not fixing bad UIs even when people complain, putting ads in products you paid for, requiring centralized accounts just to install free apps. You've heard it all before.

I wouldn't enjoy an iPhone made by my local electrician, but I want software to respect me. Linux DEs have genuine flaws and yet I truly miss nothing and gain everything when I move from my work Macbook or my gaming Windows partition to my Linux desktop.

I don't think the decision is between a vertically-integrated big-corp device and a vertically-integrated small-corp device. Even just the current iPhone hardware (which is absolutely incredible engineering) with free software would be a big improvement.

with new technology such self printing IC, 3D printing. Designs specs can be easily shared, why is it not possible? The whole idea of have one big factory making one thing is quite inefficient. Decentralisation always is more resilient.

Hmm, Many corps, government, humans etc. aim to become bigger and global. So, there is no easy way to keep them local, small and diverse. And once they grow big most of them turns blind eye on small local companies just like how amazon is doing now.

This is a problem that will prevail forever and can't be solved easily. We can experience today too in china the government do crackdown but most of us hate it right? If they don't regulate they grow beyond party.

(Taking example of china because I don't know other country which does crackdown on big giants like this)

You can largely achieve this by barring companies from managing or owning even pieces of other companies directly or indirectly and taxing based on number of employees. Add a scaling tax on assets including IP and it becomes very hard to have Walmart sized mega corporations.

It’s a more interesting question to ask if this would be more economically efficient.

> "It’s a more interesting question to ask if this would be more economically efficient."

it's almost self-evident that it would be more efficient. the more interesting questions are how and why. fair and efficient markets at steady-state would largely be composed of a few medium-sized companies and a bunch of small companies, with new entrants occasionally. that would enable healthy competition that would drive progress while keeping chaotic upheavals mostly at bay. it would also distribute wealth more widely, which means we'd get more diverse ingenuity and more interesting entrepreneurship, rather than having the capable simply stowing away at large companies taking their safe and boring little toll on the income river.

I don’t think it’s clear because economies of scale do exist. Honda can simply spend more on R&D than a company 1/10th it’s size. Large companies definitely have their own issues, but there isn’t some clear maximum size where companies universally become less efficient at say 1,000 employees. It’s more a question of management overhead and flexibility etc.

economies of scale taper off because other effects (like coordination problems) tend to overwhelm it with scale. also, capital becomes less efficient at scale due to opportunity costs and the innovator’s dilemma, for instance. there are many more reasons why economies of scale aren’t the be all and end all of market economics.

I agree, my point was it depends on industry. You can’t build a modern Fab for a 100 million it simply takes billions to be competitive. Further, you need a pipeline of Fab’s to afford the R&D etc. At the other end a McDonalds franchise can be as profitable as their corporate restaurants.

there's no intrinsic reason a capital-intensive industry can only be winner-take-all. capital-intensiveness is primarily a financing issue, and assuming capital finance has been corralled into being a competitive market, it isn't a particularly insurmountable problem. tokyo public transportation is an example of a capital-intensive market that still has competitive dynamics.

It’s not just about capital, my point was the benchmarks where different between industries. You can scale a soda bottling plant in the way you can’t scale a single sit down a restaurant simply because you can ship soda hundreds of miles without issue.

Fab’s are built at such scale in part because finished chips are really easy to ship being both durable and value dense. They also benefit from that scale because of the nature of the lithography process which has many individual steps which need to be done in the same factory, but each step is very fast and operates on a full wafer at the same time. Millions of chips per year is basically the minimum scale that’s in any way reasonable.

sure, the scales of various industries can be very different, but that doesn't imply that economies of scale (or other economies, like scope) will necessarily dictate winner-take-all dynamics in any of them.

A competitive market sure, but you can’t have 100+ competitive and independent companies running Fab’s worldwide while you can have literally 100,000+ competitive farms, restaurants, etc.

That’s a small enough pool that individual failures starts to seriously consolidate the market. It’s already down to a handful of companies that can currently manufacture modern chips and if anything that number is likely to shrink rather than grow.

I'd like to just see them distribute their actual profits instead of being allowed to "hoard" it. That would also go a long way in fixing the stock markets supposed "growth by any means" criticism. I'd argue that the hoarded profits are one of the main drivers of all these acquisitions that reduce competition and lead to consolidation.

> So, there is no easy way to keep them local, small and diverse

I was lately thinking about some kind legislative action against network effects. Let's make it easy to migrate to other platforms.

Obvious way to do this is to require big companies to implement "data export" feature with specification.

This has limited utility in practice because the data models reflect the underlying implementation and architectural details, particularly in the kinds of scalable systems big companies have. Specific tradeoffs are made in data models that reflect the tools available to the designer that might not apply to your environment. Moving data models between two systems that were not designed together can create a several order of magnitude difference in performance, cost, etc in using that data model.

It is a common problem for data model migration, even outside the context of the big tech companies. I've had cases where the systems were effectively not replicable even though the data was made available because the source system relied on some bespoke piece of data infrastructure software that no one else was likely to replicate. (Even hypothetically open sourcing this infrastructure isn't that helpful because it is usually extremely specific to the operational environment for which it was designed -- you can't drop it into your operational environment.)

All of which adds so much asymmetric friction and cost, which the source provider does not incur, that merely making data models exportable tends to generate limited user value in data models that inherently encode network effects.

The GDPR pretty much requires that already. You need to be able to export your data and another service must be able to parse them automatically, if reasonably possible.

Not easily, I agree, but it could be done. For example, there could be higher taxation rates for larger companies.

The interesting thing about big tech in that regard, is a 50% income tax rate wouldn't be enough to stop them.

Big tech piles up large amounts of cash as it is and they have no idea what to do with it (other than shovel it back to shareholders). They have far beyond the margins they need to keep expanding, even with a 50% income tax. So the first thing it would do is cut into shareholder returns (less cash), their multiples would contract as investors would find them less appealing. Half of America is invested in big tech (in one form or another), and those are by far the most active voters. If they see their portfolios tank due to a huge hike in corporate income taxes, they'll promptly punish the politician/s that are responsible for it. Big tech would keep growing at 50%, so what's the alternative? 70%-80%? It's unlikely to ever have the support required to get it passed, it just plain sounds very egregious as a policy. At very high levels it comes across as: we like to punish success; and that's how it would be run against politically by the other side (Republicans).

It's always interesting how people view taxation as punishment, as if the money just disappears into a black hole instead of being used for bettering the lives of everyone in the country. America could easily fund universal health care, which would be a massive boost to quality of life, if they taxed bigtech a bit more.

Instead you have Americans refusing to go to the doctor because they're afraid of the bill.

The us government already could fund universal health care and chooses not too. People in the US are wary about taxation because we already have a comparable tax rate to other developed nations, with more prosperity, and yet we get comparatively far fewer public goods in return. It's a raw deal. Where's our high speed rail, our public transit, our health care, our public bathrooms? Why is that money going to Raytheon instead?

Could it?

> https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-federal-budget-breakdown-3305...

Total Revenue is $4T, Total Spending is $6T, and

> Social Security will be the biggest expense, budgeted at $1.196 trillion. It's followed by Medicare at $766 billion and Medicaid at $571 billion.

That is $1.35T spent on healthcare just for old people (over 65) and poor people. And it is not even the whole amount, since most 65+ people still have to buy insurance. Even if you cut out the 5% profit margins of managed care organizations, or even 15% assuming their function is wholly unnecessary, it still seems unlikely universal health can be offered without increasing tax revenues.

In 2019, total healthcare spend for all of US was $3.9T.

https://www.cms.gov/files/document/highlights.pdf

> That is $1.35T spent on healthcare just for old people (over 65) and poor people.

Aged, blind, disabled, and poor, plus less poor children and pregnant women.

And notably, many of those categories have disproportionately high medical costs.

True, but somehow still only $1.35T out of $4T total healthcare spending.

The original claim by smus was that the US could pay for all healthcare, presumably without increasing taxes. I find that hard to agree with. Even if we assume we can cut 25% overhead from the $4T total, the US would still need to come up with $1.5T+ to meet $3T total healthcare spending.

I do not see it happening without increasing taxes. Which may not make any effective difference other than to redudant employees of managed care organizations (MCOs) who get laid off, because presumably the premiums currently getting paid to the MCOs simply get collected as taxes.

Yeah, I don't have a strong opinion on the original claim. I don't think it's clear that it's impossible to fund the kind of universal healthcare we'd want without raising taxes but I do think that's likely. I think it's probably "easy" (in terms of having the money available in theory, not politically) to fund universal healthcare at the level we'd want while raising taxes on each individual by less than they were paying for private care. But these are guesses.

> True, but somehow still only $1.35T out of $4T total healthcare spending.

The federal share is not the whole public cost; Medicaid is a state/federal cost sharing program.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/u-s-spends-public-money-hea...

We already spend more per Capita than countries with socialized medicine, so it stands to reason we should be able to socialize our medicine with a reasonable increase in expenditure on health care.

That extra money doesn't need to come from raising taxes. It can come from our incredibly bloated "defense" budget

it's not that weird. no one talks about raising taxes for the people who would see a net benefit from more public services.

50% income tax is the standard upper echelon tax rate for individuals in the developed world.

I wonder how this would work, considering higher tax rates hurt the profitability of a company.

Sure, but do we want to optimize for creating trillion-dollar companies? They can hardly even find ways to spend their fortunes; we could tax quite a bit from them before anyone except accountants notices. And that money could be used for social good.

I wish that too, believe me, but the interests of the corps is to pull us towards a cyberpunk future when they can stop your (artificial and cloud-connected) liver from working if you post something vaguely anti-establishment somewhere. They have been very trigger happy lately.

This is why we need to protect free speech.

IMO the far left challenging free speech is a bit of a trojan horse. Yes, you can use censorship to suppress distasteful ideas, but it's also obvious that if you give corporations the power to censor whatever they want, they will also use it to censor anything you say to criticize them. Look at what the Chinese government is doing, they can basically erase anything that makes China look bad from the internet in less than 30 minutes. Is that what we want here too?

Free speech is not a "far right" idea. It's the basis of democracy.

Turning important society-wide (and hell, world-wide even) problems into yet another "us vs. them" diatribe seriously does not help anyone and it's just a distraction.

I don't care if I group up with "lefties" or "righties" to make important societal changes happen. If they are on board with the vision, let them believe in Santa if they need that to sleep better.

it's a truism that free speech undergirds democracy, but you get to it via a false dichotomy (left vs right) handed down to us by surrogates of power (political scientists, in this case) to distract and divide the populace. the only useful (but not wholly accurate) dichotomy regarding political economies is the one between the powerful and the powerless. this is the timeless and unending conflict, not left-right, liberal-conservative, or any of that other bullshit. free speech is one tool of the powerless populace to keep the powerful in check.

Absolutely agree. There are powerful politicians promising all sort of ideologies. There are weak politicians promising all sorts of ideologies.

In the end the powerful remain powerful, and the weak remain weak. IMO much of democracy is a smokescreen. With apologies to Marx, the opiate of the masses is democracy.

perhaps democracy gives the people an (outsized) illusion of control, but i'd disagree that democracy itself is the opiate. democracy is more open to a diversity of rhetoric, which can facilitate ideologically-driven diversions used by the powerful to corral the powerless.

> IMO the far left challenging free speech is a bit of a trojan horse. Yes, you can use censorship to suppress distasteful ideas,

Yeah, and rightwing is a bunch of saints that never deplatformed anyone?

But what if one of those local, small, and diverse communities doesn't conform to the globally approved ideology? Diversity in modern culture means physical window dressing. True diversity of communities might lead to people with no-no values living with others with the same no-no values. How can that be allowed?

If anything introducing new legislation clearly helps out big tech in the end by raising the bar for their (smaller) competition thus deepening their moat even further.

It's no wonder FB is pretty much always positive about this law or that law that will supposedly regulate tech in one way or another.

>I am actually afraid for small tech now. And that one day me using a PiHole might get criminalized. Or a rootless VPN used for blocking invasive traffic on an Android phone might become a reason for some lobbyists to pressure my ISP into stopping my internet access.

Big tech is unlikely to attack that way. It's far better for big tech to stop these things via new technology, rather than try a political process which will require expensive brib^W lobbying and is subject to backlash. Big tech have a far bigger advantage on the tech front than the political front.

PiHole could be trivially sidestepped by hardcoding the DNS server and then encrypting DNS in the name of security (Didn't some Androids have Google hardcoded?). Android/iOS could allow some apps to ignore VPNs (this already happened with some Apple software).

IMO they attack on all fronts, the one both me and you mentioned included.

Gmail is pretty much a standard right now (even if there's no public technical standard involved; only Google's apps can communicate with Gmail). That's monopoly dressed as "new technology".

In the meantime the pressure in the EU is mounting between the both camps of the encrypted messaging ecosystem.

So yeah, both things are happening in parallel.

> PiHole could be trivially sidestepped by hardcoding the DNS server and then encrypting DNS in the name of security (Didn't some Androids have Google hardcoded?). Android/iOS could allow some apps to ignore VPNs (this already happened with some Apple software).

Yeah, you're sadly correct. I dread the day when this will start becoming the norm. But it's also true that many common citizens can stop using service X or Y and it would cost them nearly nothing (with some prominent exceptions like Gmail or Whatsapp).

I think big tech will attack that way once they start to feel threatened enough by competing innovation, or they can't hang on to their advantage through softer means

Right now big tech just acquire all threats. If anti-trust starts to get more teeth, and shifts towards regulating scale and power more directly with less focus on ham-handedly trying to regulate specific outcomes based on political fashion or poor analysis of feasibility or second-order effects then we will likely see the lawyers come out in force. Which is okay if we can find the right political leader, because the facts on the ground for small business is hanging right there for a savvy leader to craft a killer narrative. The problem is democrats have completely lost the thread on what benefits real people, and the republicans are still hungover from an era where facts were meaningless so they really have no platform or principles at all anymore. I do have hope that a grassroots leader can emerge though.

It's like saying, "Oh no they're talking about breaking up Ma Bell. Telecommunications is over." Sure Bell got broken up but the industry as a whole ballooned.

> Governments take years to formulate a legislation, and your average corporate legal team defeats it in days.

Cynically I suspect the lobbyists defeat it before it is even signed (ensuring the legislation has appropriate loopholes, etc).

So apparently the US government is very responsive to the concerns of anti-competitive behavior when it's between one corporation versus another.

But they seem particularly apathetic to the privacy considerations, robocalls and all things telemarketing, junk mail, insane product placement, and the blatant manipulation of our dopamine system by such corporations.

Does that sound like something that's going to end the big tech era or just keep driving it further?

> PiHole might get criminalized

That would suck, I hate ads but also just like split up subscription shows, not sure if I'm willing to pay for that either. There's so many I am currently subscribed to 3 different shows and maybe watch 1% of their content. I wanted to watch a movie and I would have had to get Paramount Plus like wtf... at least a lot of things show up on YT where I can rent it there.

My response is primarily about YT and mobile phone usage (where I don't have a browser extension adblocker). On mobile I don't open websites, just scan the suggested articles.

Agree feel like we have entered Blade Runner style future where mega tech corporations essentially run everything.

Agree that it's small tech in danger

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