Mammon is the only thing that matters to a lot of primates.
There will never be market pushback as long as those externalities aren’t priced in. And Imho the only for that to happen is for governments to introduce regulation, e.g. by taxing the externalities so that “free” service providers are forced to be more upfront about the actual cost of their service.
First, haven't we learned already that any government regulation always ends up favoring the status quo? FAANG will be able to eat those costs right away and make it impossible for any competitor to rise up
Second, what happened with personal responsibility? We can still choose to patronize companies that do not rely on ads, we can still promote/fund the development of Libre Software that is focused on the users' welfare and not the corporations' bottom line. Most of us here on HN can even help other less tech-savvy people to avoid falling into those traps and educate them about less invasive alternatives.
When you say "the government should do X", you imply that we can not do it ourselves. And we pretty much can.
That premise is wrong. Government regulation has lately been mostly done on account of corporations which want to protect their monopolies and strengthen their position, but that doesn't make it inherently so.
If by lately, you mean "basically always", then I'd agree. I'd be hard pressed to think of any regulation that was successfully enacted and led to actual distress and disruption in the big corporations.
> that doesn't make it inherently so
Why would it be different this time? Can you think of any kind of policy that has any slim chance of passing and would get us rid of Big Tech? And by "Big Tech", I mean all of it, not just the ones that you don't like.
Yes, I do. The FSF does. The IndieWeb does.
> Just reign it in.
To think that this is possible without any type of damaging side-effect is a huge delusion.
Trusting more power to Big Government to try to control Big Tech is like saying "Look at all the destruction that Godzilla is making, we need to unleash King Kong to fight it".
The only stable solution to avoid global systemic catastrophe is by removing centralized power and redistributing it to local communities.
GDPR does not help, quite the opposite. It gave people some illusion of control but did nothing but scare smaller players into compliance.
Messaging standardization might actually turn out to be good, but only because none of the dominant companies are from Europe.
What are their options for search? I know DDG is an option, but even it seems to rely on Big Tech.
> Trusting more power to Big Government to try to control Big Tech
But it's definitely worked in the past. Government successfully reigned in a ton of industry. Sure, it hasn't reigned in Big Tech, but so much other stuff.
They're however doing whatever they can get away with, which is arguably way too much
The point is not about what the regulation stopped them from doing locally, the point is that no regulation that came into existence ever broke the power structure. It was never a threat to the ones connected to the elites.
Any regulation that does get approve ends up weaponized in favor of the big companies.
To illustrate: look at Dieselgate. If the regulations were actually meant to be serious, any scrappy company from Poland, Portugal or Bulgaria would have been absolutely dismantled out of existence. But VW got what? A symbolic fine, some Casablanca-style reprimands, perhaps a expiatory goat... but they will continue to have the support from the government.
What about tech? What real benefit has GDPR brought to the people? Nothing! It made only the small business owners scared of violations, got them out of running their own sites and into siloed Facebook/Amazon pages, and with their "social Media presence" on Twitter/Instagram. Tell me with a clean face how that "regulation" was in your favor and not of the status quo?
A lot of government interference was to the betterment of society, which you initially claimed to be impossible or at least to have never happened.
With that in mind, please tell me which part of "haven't we learned already that any government regulation always ends up favoring the status quo?" or "regulations only get to be enacted when they don't threaten the status quo" is goalpost-moving...
While you are at it, take your time to think about the question I asked you in the first response. What kind of policy do you believe could have any chance of being enacted and offer a serious change for Big Tech?
Not at all. A ton of government regulation is to fix an ongoing problem by changing the status quo. Meatpacking regulations after "The Jungle". The EPA, Clean Air and Clean Water act. Mandatory seat belt laws. The list of "government saw problem, fixed with regulation" is huge.
In particular, with FB/Google, the status quo might crumble without ads. Or maybe they'll go to less targeted ads and only make a ridiculous amount of money instead of an insane amount.
How do clean water requirements, power grid requirements regarding frequency and such, and things like the USPS favor the status quo?
Also, do realize that even these requirements never translated into any kind of service guarantee. It does not solve the overall issue.
Case in point: "clean water requirements" in the US did not stop mega corporations from turning bottled water into a multi-billion dollar market, and it only pushed "dirty" manufacturing to China.
>It does not solve the overall issue.
It makes it a whole lot better then it would be otherwise. Power companies can and do get fined for not doing what they should, a power that would be beyond the ability of an individual to do.
Because of things like the USPS damn near anyone in the US can mail something to anyone else for a decent price which is a net positive for society.
> Power companies can and do get fined for not doing what they should.
Yet, they still manage to be profitable and in some cases even get government assistance when they fail, when the long-term, "systemically healthy" solution would be to have a framework that allows more diversity in service providers and that does not depend on the survivability of any single entity.
Look at Texas and the winter brownouts. Their grid fails whenever it gets so cold to the point that generating energy is not lucrative. Paying the fines is favoring the status quo.
"Being a net positive for society" is at best an accidental side effect, not the point of any regulation that gets to be enacted. And there are other ways where we can get the societal benefits without giving away power to these corrupt institutions.
My local non-profit power company is a data point against that position. There are many others.
>Look at Texas and the winter brownouts. Their grid fails whenever it gets so cold to the point that generating energy is not lucrative.
The portions of Texas not on the ERCOT grid which are connected to the federally regulated grids preformed much better than the ERCOT grid because they have regulations, with punishments if they don't follow them, the government requires.
>And there are other ways where we can get the societal benefits without giving away power to these corrupt institutions.
How is the USPS corrupt to the scale you imply?
Was "your local non-profit" responsible in the elaboration of any of the regulation? Are they in any condition to threaten the status quo? Can they disrupt the market at a global scale or are they just sticking to being a "local, non-profit" entity?
It seems we are talking about two different things. You want to defend regulatory action as a valid mechanism for societal progress. What I am saying is that these mechanisms historically only worked when the status quo could benefit (or at the very least not threatened) from it.
The problem is that I am feeling like I am arguing a strawman (regulations are always bad!) when my point is that calling for regulations for Big Tech will do jack-shit to actually solve any of the issues affecting society, and more likely than not it is just going to help Big Tech cement their dominance.
This breaks down when some body else's lack of personal responsibility impacts me. For example, a drunk driver colliding head on with me on the highway. In this case, it's everyone else gravitating to "free" services which in turn make them so ubiquitous that it's near impossible to escape. Even though I don't use Gmail, I'm still impacted when all my contacts use it to send me email.
Sure, I guess I could be personally responsible by disowning those contacts, but that's in the extremes.
> This breaks down when some body else's lack of personal responsibility impacts me.
Climate change and the ongoing environmental collapse is a good example of such failure.
No, you are not. Even if you wanted to treat it as such, you could drop all incoming email from google, or auto-respond to people saying they need a different email address to reach you.
And if you think that doing that is a bad idea at the individual level, ask yourself why would it be acceptable at the global sphere.
/s
Seriously, the free market and personal responsibility have not worked. Let’s try something else. At this point, I’ll take some potential negative externalities over this shitshow.
Wherever I get to maintain a proper "digital hygiene"*, I don't have any of these issues that people love to complain about. But I would bet that whatever regulation gets to be approved, it would not only be ineffective to solve the issues that affect the majority, it would make it harder for the minority that still manages to get away from them.
* a simple set of rules to live by.
- prefer free-software solutions for all use cases that satisfies your hard requirements, even if they miss on the "nice-to-haves".
- self-host as much as possible: see all services you are paying currently and look for existing open self-hosted alternatives. Get an old computer or laptop and run these. Invite your friends and family. If you are not technical, find someone in your close circle that is and ask if they are interested in doing it, offer to help with the costs.
- If you don't want to self-host, find service providers that offer these open source services.
- use Brave: complain about crypto all you want, it is the only web browser that gives control to the user and that promotes a business model where creators are rewarded directly by the consumers.
- use the received BAT to be as generous as possible with open source developers. 5 bucks a month might not mean much, but if 10% of internet users did that I guarantee we would kill all the app stores and their abusive practices.
- Do not rely on streaming services. I'd rather pay for a private tracker to download what I want than finance Disney/Comcast/HBO/Amazon/Apple to increase their cultural dominance even further
- use alternative frontends whenever you have to access youtube, twitter, medium.
telling a bunch of software engineers to do things themselves is never going to solve the problem, it’s like telling the pope to go to church
the problem is everything else happening to the average people in the world around you - you’re subject to it whether you like it or not. As long as you live in a society problems that facebook twitter and other social media platforms you dont use are causing are going to be your problems too, no matter how deep you bury your head in niche web browsers and self-hosted blogging platforms.
Did you read the part where I said "invite your friends and family", or you just jumped to write such a thoughtful response?
My parents don't care about Facebook, Twitter or whatsapp. They care about being able to see and talk with their grandkids. If I tell them that they can do that by using a different app, they will install the app without second thought.
If they want to continue using Facebook/Google, they can. But the important thing to me is that now they are less dependent on Facebook and they have an option.
It's always worth remembering that only 5% of the adult US populace can complete a task like finding and applying for a job using only web technology†. Being able to self host is a skill that maybe 0.1% of the populace can do, being generous.
An important life lesson is knowing that just because you can do something doesn't mean everybody, or even a majority of people can.
I don't like to just drop links, but please read https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict... and see if you understand how it applies to what I am proposing.
It requires too many technical skills to work.
Alternatively, it requires too much money to hire the technical skills to work.
If it doesn't work for the majority (even a reasonably sized minority) of people, regardless of being borne of the best of intentions, it's not a viable alternative. Period.
> It requires too many technical skills to work.
What is about Mastodon that requires technical skills that Facebook or Twitter do not? The fact that they are required to know the name of the instance when setting up a client?
Just like they learned (conditioned could be a better word) into putting all their data into their shiny smartphones, people can learn something like "to use this you need your username and the server name, like email addresses". And if you tell me that some people don't even know that and had someone else setting up their facebook for them, why can't this "someone else" set up an ActivityPub client as well?
> Alternatively, it requires too much money to hire the technical skills to work.
I don't think I charged anything from my friends and family that asked to get access to my matrix server. I also don't charge anything from those that got an account on the Jellyfin box I run. I also didn't send an invoice to my wife or parents for helping them setup Element on their phones.
"Ah, but this doesn't scale!"
Sure, if it's just me doing it won't. But there are already other people that learned once and managed to teach others.
> it's not a viable alternative.
Do us both a favor. Instead of making absolute statements based on incomplete information and your prejudices, find a way to prove me wrong.
Get one of your current vices (Twitter? Instagram? TikTok? WhatsApp? iMessage?), and do your best effort to use the open alternatives that exist. For the social networking stuff, you will quickly see that the only "problem" is that the people you are used to seeing are not there. Instead of shrugging your shoulders and going back to the old ways, see how many people you can bring along with you.
I'm not even asking you to delete your current application. I'm just asking you to try to use the open alternative and help as many people as possible to join you. If you find any reasonable justification that prevents you or your peers to adopt the open alternative, then I will believe you.
I’ve been on my local school board for 20 years and the changes happening due to social media are staggering (for children and adults). My lack of participation hasn’t changed anything. Telling people not to participate will not work because you’re rivaling companies that pay experts tons of money to get people addicted to these things. As individuals we’re massively out-gunned.
I’ve started working with and donating to advocacy groups looking to regulate these companies because I haven’t seen anything else even begin to work.
I am also saying that there are a good number of people that think this is not a problem, so I don't want to waste my time and energy trying to convince them otherwise.
Including progressive taxation? Public schooling? Pensions?
If so, how do you explain the end of feudal societies?
> what happened with personal responsibility?
Responsibility comes with power and freedom of choice.
When we can only choose between living under corporate surveillance or living without phone/Internet access/etc there's close to no freedom.
Typically the reason is, that they don't know how to do it any other way.
We are rich in compute and we don't feel the need to optimize anymore. Optimization is an afterthought or a never thought and features run the world.
0: https://spcodex.wiki/wiki/Billy_Corgan_2022-02-06_(early_sho...
We have competent design tools running in the browser now… we’re doing fine.
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/turn-off-office-a...
[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server...
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261148-modern-computer....
Going through dozens upon dozens of layers (ever increasing) just to draw a rectangular box with some text inside is creeping complexity.
So, yes, I am fine on my beast machine, still the direction is wrong for me.
20 years ago software was running locally. Now, it must communicate with mothership for every action you make. Tools running in the browser are slow, because they use the browser to get user input or to display information.
In particular, this image offers a nice comparison of some newer and older pieces of software: https://pavelfatin.com/images/typing/editor-latency-windows-...
That said, typing isn't everything, but there are stark differences even in something so basic.
People noticed that the windows built-in terminal app has noticeable latency, and when the WSL1 team implemented their own terminal app, they ended up with much better latency [1]. I wonder if this input lag test was done using the built-in terminal or this WSL1 terminal.
It barely chugs through on my 2018 iPad Pro. Every click takes actual seconds to load.
In what world was anything faster 20 years ago? Do these readers not remember waiting minutes for their computer to start up?
It took like 3-5 seconds at least, growing up