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Comment by causality0 | Hacker News Reader

A digital public sphere cannot exist when the entire internet is privatized and dependent on competition for scarce revenue. Every company is therefore incentivised to control what is on spaces they control and to influence discourse in such a way as to maximize profit.

You want a digital public sphere? Vote for the government to open a digital post office. Until we have the right to access, at cost, public services that do not discriminate and cannot be denied us by anything short of a court order, digital freedom is proportional to how much money you can make for someone else.

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Giving the post office funding to run as an ISP and grant funds for FTTH would be a huge game changer. Maybe work with the department of energy to colocate datacenter next to power generation facilites to become a public cloud.

Well said. Digital freedom is inversely proportional to digital fiefdom.

That's where a decentralized internet changes things, and honestly that's what we should be prioritizing.

"But commoditization!" exclaimed the corporate finance types and assorted growth hackers.

As someone who transitioned from law and finance to tech, it's apparent that a greater reckoning must take place. Trying to graft tech on to what is essentially an early 20th century paradigm bodes well for the entrenched interests.

People don't seem to understand that some people are intrinsically motivated to create things, and don't need to be incentivized with money. And that in fact, when you set out to make money by creating things, the results are shittier, because you're setting out to make money, not to create things.

maybe the people who understand it are human individual persons and the people who don't are corporate collective persons.

There is probably an element of truth to that. But given the number of individuals on HN who are deeply concerned how we'll fund content creators if we get rid of ads on the internet, at least a pretty significant portion of individuals have drunk the corporate kool-aid with regards to this.

While I appreciate the distinction you've made in your post, I would encourage you to not use the word "person" to refer to corporations. I understand the judicial precedent--I'm saying that the law is wrong and we should absolutely not adopt the definition of corporations as persons in to the English language. Corporations don't have rights; they exist to serve people who do have rights. Legal precedent granting corporations rights under the law is a morally reprehensible mistake which should be corrected.

I think we're dealing with much older paradigms than the 20th century

gotta transition from a mindset of trading merchandise to a mindset of (technologically possible) non-scarce digital assets.

and we've traded merchandise for more than a few thousands of years, so I see a problem larger than just 20th century paradigms.

but trade is a bit nonsensical on digital stuff, as NFTs clearly demonstrated, so it's not a trivial issue

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