Americans' confidence in technology firms has dropped | Hacker News Reader

Americans' confidence in technology firms has dropped

brookings.edu

73 pointsjruohonen120 comments

Big Tech needs a reckoning.

They are stagnant because they outsource almost all real R&D to startups they can buy only after they've done the hard work of proving success

I know it's not a monopoly per se, but it's anti-competitive and there's too many walled gardens

Pushing these companies to return money to their shareholders instead of keeping it in huge war chests used for buying up any potential competitors would be a good first step. Maybe something along the lines of "any company whose average market cap over the course of a fiscal year exceeds 1% of GDP is automatically broken up". Companies that don't want to be split into pieces would need to find ways to reduce their market cap, one of the quickest being sending dividends to shareholders, who could then invest that money into other parts of the economy or even other potential competitors.

> Pushing these companies to return money to their shareholders instead of keeping it in huge war chests used for buying up any potential competitors would be a good first step.

Companies already do that with dividend payouts or share buyouts. Also, the shareholders control these companies. If they wanted the profits returned to then, they would vote for it.

> Maybe something along the lines of "any company whose average market cap over the course of a fiscal year exceeds 1% of GDP is automatically broken up".

I prefer over 33% market share. I think every market/industry should have at least 3 players. Any company that goes over 33% market share for X period of time gets broken apart.

> Companies that don't want to be split into pieces would need to find ways to reduce their market cap, one of the quickest being sending dividends to shareholders

Not necessarily. There are companies that don't have a profit or cash on hand with huge market caps. Amazon notoriously made no profit for decades. I think enterprise value is what you are looking for.

It would be easier to limit companies to fewer than 200 employees

Edit: just a passing thought, I don't advocate for any of these ideas. Just complaining, I have no answers

Would need a world government to enforce, else China would dominate with huge firms.

How many people do you think are involved in creating the phone or computer you are writing this on?

That's not an excuse to continue

I'm not even anti-corporation, but to pretend everything is fine seems silly

I find this "I don't feel good about X, so I am going to propose abolishing X without realizing all the consequences of that" vibe silly and dangerous. From my car to my computer to the clothes I wear, to the medical equipment for my kids' births, etc - everything was produced, sourced, and sold, by a fairly large organization that has optimized for delivering that thing to me. Both the necessities and the comforts of my life are powered by this - and same with you unless you're pretty much living off the land.

If you don't like Amazon having your data, or whatever your issue is, don't use Amazon.

I literally said I'm not in support of my own dumb idea

I know things are more complicated

You, however, need a mirror. Everything you just said is a wonderful display of willful ignorance. Your head in the sand does not protect you from the world

Big Tech, in 2023, is effectively a governmental body. I mean all 7 (or whatever) of the largest companies. They operate in a wildly anti-competitive and anti-free-market way, rivaling even the Railroad tycoons of a bygone era.

I'm not anti-corporation, but there needs to be some effort put into correcting this. It's not going to fix itself.

Our country would be a lot better off with a lot of small businesses rather than a few gigantic businesses.

// Our country would be a lot better off with a lot of small businesses rather than a few gigantic businesses.

Is that true? Plenty (in fact, arguably most) countries have a much smaller ratio of "big" to "small" companies and many of those are not "a lot better off" than our country and quite to the contrary. So I don't buy this assumption.

Fine if those investors put the proceeds into startups or their own R&D. It has no effect if those investors are largely giant institutions, pension funds, and university endowments that automatically reinvest buybacks and dividends into the same blue chips. That is just giving brokerages an automated way to passively skim profits. They get to just sit on both sides of the finish line with their hands out while money runs laps.

Many other countries would love if the US would break their Crown Jewels. The value they create is incredible, the whole market moves with them and USA owns the great majority.

I don't care what the rest of the world thinks or wants

Value created for whom is the real question.

For the customers in the first place. Then for the society through the advantages brought by those products/services. Finally for its investors - which may as well be us with how easy is to buy stocks nowadays.

The thing is half of those startups wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for big tech acquisitions.

The fact that a startup without a viable business model can still have a $1b+ exit simply for having good tech is part of the reason why startups attract so much capital and can afford to be innovative.

I guess just be careful what you wish for. It can be anti-competitive, but it's also in part what's driven a lot of recent innovation.

Do the big companies really use and develop the acquired technology though? It seems like most acquisitions end up being shut down and/or crappified within a few years.

Sometimes they do, sometimes they just buy companies to eliminate competition or future competition. Sometimes it's some of A, some of B. It really depends.

While innovation is very important, I think that there is an unhealthy obsession with it. That obsession has a great deal of harmful effects and is a part of why people are increasingly holding tech in a dim light. The extreme focus on innovation leads to companies being abusive. Being abusive is a thing that has become normalized in the tech industry.

largely true of pharma companies as well - they are largely big marketing organizations, where most of the real R&D is done by small startups that can be purchased when necessary.

It feels like part of it is a cultural issue. People in the startup space largely seem uninterested in starting companies they will run their whole life

They just want the fun of experimentation and a payday

And like that's fine whatever, live your life, but it's creating a really crappy feedback loop of monopolization and buy outs

Different stages of the corporate life cycle require different skills and attract people with different temperaments; someone who launches a startup is not necessarily going to be great at running it for their whole life, nor feel fulfilled by doing so.

I prefer to work for startups whether they yield a "payday" or not - they usually don't - because huge organizations and complex bureaucracies leave me feeling miserable and demotivated.

Any single Nx buyout results in N additional startups being funded. This is how VC culture operates and grows. It’s one of the main ingredients that build Silicon Valley’s success. Other countries are desperate to copy this model.

I'm not arguing that it doesn't work and create a feedback loop

I'm arguing it's destructive long-term by creating a Goliath no one can compete with

Or several Goliaths in this case

Consolidation leads to stagnation

Goliaths were and will always be around. But as long as there is an unregulated, free market - there will always be startups competing. It’s not easy, but it’s doable through innovation and creativity. The Goliaths are always more conservative, slower and less agile.

In the absence of regulation, goliaths will inevitably become monopolies and startups have no real chance to compete. The best a startup could be is to hope to be bought by the goliath.

How exactly will startups will have “no real chance to compete”? What is the mechanism that will stop them?

Unless prevented by governmental regulation or similar (like patents) startups move faster and are more innovative and creative. They are not the cheapest but competing on price is not a good idea for a startup anyway, and the monopoly cannot be the cheapest possible since that would diminish profits - then what would be the advantage to be a monopoly?

A monopolised market is ripe for disruption and VC are dying to fund startups who can claim a chunk of that market. Any startup bought out by a Goliath will fund another 10 in its stead.

I know zero cases of unbeatable monopolies in a free market. All monopolies had government support. Do you have any examples?

> How exactly will startups will have “no real chance to compete”? What is the mechanism that will stop them?

The established monopoly company will, either by strong-arming suppliers, service providers, and marketplaces into not doing business with the startup, or by just buying them.

At least, that's how it's traditionally been done.

> strong-arming [...] into not doing business with the startup

Isn't that illegal already?! I don't see how extra regulation can change anything. Any company is liable to try anti-competitive behavior and that is why it's illegal, monopoly or not.

And even if the government fails to stop Goliath from doing illegal stuff, a free market will route around it. See how Microsoft/Intel - monopolies in the 90s got out-innovated and made irrelevant by pure market forces while the anti-trust government action merely delivered a slap on the wrist.

Free markets work. Unless we regulate them to discourage startups.

Example of highly regulated markets: health care, energy, transport, education, telecoms. The result? It's almost impossible to compete, prices are high and products crappy.

> or by just buying them

Thus funding 10 new startups in the field since it's now known that the Goliath is exiting newcomers. Gold rush for any VC!

> Isn't that illegal already?! I don't see how extra regulation can change anything

I'm not sure what you mean by "extra regulation" here. Yes, it is illegal, and that's an example of appropriate regulation. I had the impression you were arguing against regulation, though. I think I don't understand your stance here, so my responses may be off the mark.

> Free markets work.

They do, although they aren't a magic panacea. And a free market cannot exist in the absence of appropriate regulation.

> Unless we regulate them to discourage startups.

I agree. Appropriate regulation is not intended to discourage startups.

Rule of law stays at the base of any civilized society. Contract law, antitrust, anti cartel and the like are necessary to simply establish the rules of the game. It is the government’s role to implement them, together with taxing externalities. Simple and clear. I am not contesting that. I am not an anarchist.

What I am against is crap like “don’t bundle a browser in your OS”, “you must have an USB-C port”, net neutrality, “censor your users”, “your cars must have backup cameras” and even “you’re too big so we’ll call you a monopoly and split you up” or “you’re a billionaire we should tax your wealth. These regulations (even if well intended) will always have unintended second order effects and a significant chilling effect on startups. Compliance costs add up and are much easier supported by incumbents. Startups are fragile and founders easily discouraged.

I want competition and startups and looking around us and at history it is clear to me that the less regulated (freer) a market is, the healthier it is. Just look at computing and the Cambrian explosion of hardware and software we enjoyed during the years governments were too surprised to wreck it.

Reversely, I look at heavily regulated markets (against, with good intentions, I am sure) and I see huge market failures. Take housing for example: countless rules, zonings and regulations - it takes years before you can even start building. The result? People are paying through the nose to live in places that are illegal to build today.

The free market mechanisms work and they are incredibly powerful. We should be extremely reluctant to mess with them every time we feel something is not quite right in the world and just a little regulation would fix it - the odds are we’ll do more bad than good. Free markets are after all the best wealth creation engine we know and we owe it the incredible abundance we are living in right now.

That’s libertarian religious scripture that needs to be backed up by solid facts.

the only solid fact that you need is that tech giants of the past are not tech giants today, and the same way MS missed mobile market, Nokia failed with touchscreen smartphones, atnt and its parts failed to innovate, ibm lost and left pc/x86server etc, current giants are likely to loose. The only difference now is that the biggest competition today is from foreign companies that leads to them being able to get support of government and therefore compete not on the basis of merit, but in a political way.

> the only solid fact that you need is that tech giants of the past are not tech giants today

That's far from the only solid fact you need to know, though. You need to know the conditions and circumstances around it all.

well, there is an assumption, that the circumstances are a political/economical system which is the same one. But there is an argument to be made about deterioration of institutions

And it's a huge assumption. To the level of "you can ignore friction" for middle school physics class.

You need to look no further back than the robber barons to see "tech" (yes they were tech, not in the modern sense but industrial) and how it required massive political mobilization to get rid off. It wasn't "free market" that did it, in matter of fact it perpetuated the monopolistic behavior.

We can cherry pick history all day. The point is that "only required argument is historic" is stupidity, and often requires assumptions, cherry picking and nitpicking

> no further back than the robber barons

The fact that you have to dig back to the 19th century speaks volumes.

And if you knew your history, you'd know that, for example in the case of Standard Oil competition and free market already broke their monopoly before any government intervention.

And there are many other closer examples where free markets brought wealth and prosperity together with competition and innovation while turning away from them only brought poverty and authocracy.

My favorite example I actually lived through was the incredible success story of Eastern Europe after getting rid of communism. From cold and hunger to high-rises, iPhones, luxury cars and city breaks. All thanks to a minimally regulated free market.

> where most of the real R&D is done by small startups that can be purchased when necessary.

Or by governments.

Maybe that’s fine? A company that can do cutting edge research and a company that can manufacture and market at scale don’t have to be the same company.

There is a invisible incentive filter though- nobody will create a startup that is not worth buying for a large company - or whos product would cannibalize somebody elses product in the oligopoly.

I am not sure that's true (is it?) but more so, don't see how that follows from Pharma's alleged focus on acquisition. Can you give me an example where in a different world something good would happen that isn't happening now and why? I am not trying to be difficult just genuine don't see it yet.

You're right. More and more pharmaceutical manufacturing is contracted out to CDMOs. So one day big pharma might only do marketing.

This has a practical aspect that is different from software though. Bringing a drug to market requires a huge amount of capital and very specialized manufacturing. It’s very difficult for a small company to do that.

I’m not saying it’s a good system necessarily, but it’s a big factor worth acknowledging and different from a tech start up.

How do you expect more competition when most people in tech support more government regulation that inhibits smaller firms to compete?

Serious question.

I don't expect anything to improve at all, TBH

I would like to see the government break up a lot of these mega corporations, but it's not a great solution

Our global economy just means overseas companies will buy them, or they will move offshore and compete where we can enforce anything

I don't have any answers, but I think we can all recognize something's not working here

I think you're absolutely right there's something extremely wrong going on.

My point was the people who supported the policies that got us into this mess need to recognize that the solutions they want don't exist with what they supported in the past. So sacrifices need to be made.

More government regulation doesn’t automatically mean it’s harder for small companies to compete.

It depends on the regulation.

To regulate something is to restrict it by very definition. If something is less accessible how exactly does that make it easier for smaller companies to compete and navigate the new regulations?

You can have regulations only apply to companies that operate in multiple states or countries, that are based on cash-on-hand, number of employees, amount of revenue, etc.

Not every rule need apply to every business.

Regulation is always favoring the incumbent. Always. The mere act of acknowledging, studying and respecting regulation (even if favorable) is a discouraging factor for a beginner founder.

I think if studying the rules of running a business is enough work to discourage you from founding a business, then it’s probably not the right path for you anyway.

Who would you rather have building businesses? Those good at creating, innovating and leading? Or those good at studying and following rules?

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

― Steve Jobs

One has to go back decades to a time before this sort of stifling M&A activity began. Looking at the innovation that occurred in the era before zero interest rates and so-called "Big Tech", it blows away what people call "innovation" during the period of "tech startups" and mega-sized websites.

"The 2021 survey, on the other hand, was well into the pandemic, which we would have thought would increase support for companies that brought people goods (Amazon) and information (Google) during a crisis."

I think it actually worked the other way. A lot of folks had only occasional interactions with these companies before. But during the pandemic they had to use them more, so they had to experience more failures. Since negative experiences tend to dominate in our minds, the overall "trust" decreases.

Everyone had time to focus on it

> experience more failures

Like what?

Censorship, bad automation, bad support channels.

Dropped? How can they get any lower?

They're all spying on us and then losing the private data at incredible rates. I think I got three breach disclosure emails this month already.

> How can they get any lower?

As long as these platforms have one single user, they have someone’s trust.

Yeah people trust them to steal their data and sell it.

I think a big contributor to the public's lack of confidence is just worse product quality. Pretty much every non-search Google product I've used in the last 5 years has had major issues. It's not that we didn't have bugs before, they were just handled better. Nowadays when things error out the most helpful message you'll get is, 'something went wrong' giving you no clear way to work around an issue or report a bug. My confidence has certainly dropped in general tech.

Why did you omit Google's search product? It leads to so much clickbait AI-generated garbage content that it's basically unusable now unless you already know where you want it to take you.

Not to mention the obvious and manual manipulation of specific search results

You know...for our own good because we can't be trusted to read

Some important takeaways, which are nevertheless not surprising:

* its not about political affiliation (confidence drop higher in right-leaning groups)[1]

* it is about education, the least educated show less confidence drop

* it is about addiction, heavy users show less confidence drop

[1] Though ultimately it is about politics, in the sense of what kind of market regulation one supports, the role of the public sector etc.

I think it is political. Given the right's current love affair with being told what they want to hear and misinformation suppression efforts it isn't too surprising that the end result is nobody is happy with them. The right is obvious. But the left has a knack for showing their usual level of gratitude and reasonability. They demand precognition, telepathy, and also a magical pony with wings. Thus they consider tech companies guilty for not delivering the impossible, the existence of all the problems of the world, compounded with the heinous crime of being a company.

> * its not about political affiliation (confidence drop higher in right-leaning groups)[1]

It's funny that you have to mention that its regardless of right-leaning groups suffering the greater drop. I guess we can now openly say that these companies do have left leaving political affiliation, but in some cases this simply isn't a factor.

I'm not seeing the causation. Would you say government and taxes are left leaning concepts because right wing politics have goals of smaller government and less taxes?

I'm not sure the right wing is all that libertarian and small government these days. It all seems pretty team red versus team blue with plenty of dog whistling all around. But not many principles.

There was a tax cut that led to a deficit, which is causing calls from the right to reduce spending. This seems like a principled effort to reduce government and taxes to me.

But Trump is still the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, and he is clearly not a small government conservative or libertarian.

He is a tax reducing conservative though. It's his tax cut that caused the deficit. Executive tax cut, legislative government reduction. It's an efficient ratchet.

> He is a tax reducing conservative though.

For the wealthy and corporations.

Yes that is where the money is.

Hey, a monarchy is pretty small amount of people

surveillance capitalism is not "left leaning". get out of your bubble and start thinking

I think the previous poster is talking about cultural left topics.

The time is really right for an open source, nonprofit tech platform that can provide email video conferencing, chat, and file storage.

Just like “this is the year of the Linux Desktop”?

I’d love to have an open non-profit alternative to Google’s productivity suite, but realistically it’s very hard to host those things outside a traditional for profit business. Building the open source software is the easy part, and has been done already. The hard parts are things like email deliverability, and getting people to pay for what’s typically a free ad-supported service.

linux is not nonprofit, it’s no profit. There’s a difference. I would gladly pay for a linux operating system. Problem has been that they’re giving away a great product for free. Open source developers could get paid under a nonprofit model, not under the current no profit model.

Nonprofits aren't a panacea here - I remember a piece recently on how their executive salaries are sometimes very high and detract from the nonprofit's original purpose.

Plus, many tech nonprofit organizations have agendas that are far from the organization's founding mission. These outside interests often come to dominate the organization's spending and the core mission gets neglected.

Wait until you read about the executive salaries of for-profit companies - hoo-boy.

OP has a point - the incentives for tech companies are profoundly fucked right now. We need to get the profit motives aligned with the good of society.

Mozilla is a shining example of that.

Its not just social media. Search is also extremely important. Whether alternatives are open source or commercial it is not so important. Certainly good quality open source solutions would force commercial enterprise to "work for the money" rather than extract rents. What is important is to outlaw practices relating to data collection and targeted ads, and break down monopolistic conditions.

Basically you want a healthy mix of commons infrastructure and private enterprise that respects common values and promotes innovation. Its not rocket science but of-course decades-long inaction makes it feel like having to move mountains.

I've thought along the same lines. I currently have some personal projects going in this direction. My vision is to create a set of tools that would allow you to set up a micro infrastructure to self-host all of these services on any cloud/hosting provider with a reasonable API.

I have professional experience with all of the technologies involved and the biggest hurdles are getting time to work on it and dealing with the absolute horror that is HTML/CSS/Mobile. Once I can get enough built I can farm that out to someone else, though. In the meantime I'm still hoping to win the lottery while not wasting any money on tickets :)

How do you run essentially a commercial business as non-profit? Hosting has cost inherent and those have to be paid for. Either by advertising which won't work in this case or by subscriptions or donations. And I don't think there is enough donations...

not saying it is easy - but 'non-profit' is not 'non-revenue' - there are many big non-profits with thousands of employees and billions in revenue - i.e. MassGeneral medical system for example: 16 billion in revenue and 20,000 employees.

Being a non-profit doesn't mean you can't make money.

The time is right for devs to work for free? Seems unlikely..

Nonprofit does not mean employees work for free, in fact, it’s just the opposite. Do you think linux devs are not working for free right now?

Nonprofit employees have salaries. It was a nonprofit co-op they would have even more control over their lives.

How does that explain nonprofit salaries being trash though? I haven’t seen any that have kept up with inflation, hardly for-profit orgs have.

I suspect you're not saying this in the obvious literal sense. Signal is a nonprofit that provides video and chat you can attach files to and there are various other open protocols that have existed for decades with open-source clients you can use to hook into the network.

If you want one producer to many consumers, many producers to one consumer publishing platforms, those also exist. PBS and NPR are nonprofit platforms anyone can consume from and anyone can attempt to publish to, but they have to adhere to basic content-worthiness and editorial standards.

What I think you really want, and why YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok became so popular in the first place, is a platform to which anyone can publish anything, provided it isn't illegal or offensive to the platforms' more limited but not completely non-existent content guidelines, and some sort of promotional feed for that content gets directly pushed to consumers to facilitate discoverability of producers who are not already famous by some other means.

File storage seems largely orthogonal from the consumer point of view. People can already put more video than they can watch in a lifetime, more text than they can read in a lifetime, on disks they personally own. It's the producers of regularly-uploaded, new multimedia streaming content that need someone else's disk space to serve their own content from. The dilemma seems obvious here. If you place no restrictions other than it can't be illegal on what anyone can serve to others, you've promised the world effectively infinite disk space. How can a nonprofit do that, keeping in mind that nonprofits need to have some sort of mission that puts them in a legal category making them eligible to incorporate as a nonprofit in the first place? For PBS and NPR, they serve an educational mission that qualifies them under 501(c)(3). But in order to do that, they need to have an editorial standard. They have to publish content that is actually educational.

I'm actually curious now how Signal qualifies, as Signal Foundation is also a 501(c)(3). The IRS gives the following guideline:

> The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals. The term charitable is used in its generally accepted legal sense and includes relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erecting or maintaining public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening neighborhood tensions; eliminating prejudice and discrimination; defending human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency.

Pro Publica's database lists them under the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities category "Community Improvement, Capacity Building / Business and Industry" (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...), but this isn't a legal category.

I guess ask a lawyer, which I am not, but I suspect a prospective YouTube/TikTok replacement trying to convince the IRS they deserve to be exempt from taxes is going to have a tough time.

Also, to all the people asking how developers get paid by a nonprofit. The IRS publishes the tax returns of all US nonprofits and the return includes a list of top compensated employees. Here is Signal's for 2020: https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/824506840_202012_990_...

They have three software developers earning between $457k and $602k per year.

I just wanna publicly thank you for bringing this to peoples attention in a data driven way.

I can't imagine why?

Personally, Apple and now Kagi are the only companies I like to give money to.

Apart from that, I like to donate time and money to open source.

Apple? I hate that company for the anti-competitive practices. They literally tried making everything proprietary. It took the entire EU and a targeted law to make them adopt the USB-C.

> They literally tried making everything proprietary. It took the entire EU and a targeted law to make them adopt the USB-C.

Erm no, my MacBooks have had USB-C for a while, as USB-C is better for data transfer.

Their proprietary version for phones predates USB-C, because it was far better than the alternative, and it presumably added competition that meant USB-C needed to exist and be invested in. That won't happen again, or at least in the EU markets.

I don't think the first iterations of lightning was far better than USB 2. It has some features but overall was about the same. Then USB C came out and apple was left stagnant for more than 10 years with zero innovation.

Also, the new law has nothing against making a better port than C so I think you are mistaken.

Lightning was both way better than the 30 pin connector, and better the micro or mini USB.

It’s pretty obvious (to me) that Apple was going to go USB C on the iPhone, but that they didn’t like the precedent of being told to do so ( they had already done it on the iPad).

Better than 30pin for sure, but compared to regular USB, it wasn't that much of a difference to the average end consumers.

And the reason Apple didn't want to go to USB-C is because of money. Selling proprietary, licensed products to hundreds of millions is too lucrative.

> it wasn't that much of a difference to the average end consumers.

Reversibility doesn't matter to normies? News to me.

I don't think it really does matter much to the majority of people, no.

> Also, the new law has nothing against making a better port than C so I think you are mistaken.

How does that work, if they have to use USB-C?

The law is about "harmonisation of charging protocols" and currently USB C is just the standard for everything, so it is set as the target for people to "harmonise" to. They don't specifically require the standard to be USB C and if a new tech comes out that is clearly superior, the law mentioned a Commission can be formed to make a judgement on switching.

Page 17 of the law document.

> The Commission shall continuously assess market developments, market fragmentation and technical progress with the view to identify categories or classes of radio equipment capable of being recharged via wired charging for which the inclusion in Part I of Annex Ia would lead to significant consumer convenience and reduction of environmental waste. The Commission shall report such assessment to the European Parliament and to the Council, for the first time by [3 years after the date of entry-into-force of this Directive] and every 5 years thereafter, and adopt delegated acts pursuant to Article 3, paragraph 4, first subparagraph, point a) accordingly

How will a new tech emerge if they have to use this tech?

Same way it happened before. By being implemented on devices that are not limited to just one port first, prove its superiority, then get adopted on phones where they can't have more than one port.

Laptops with USB 2 ports were still popular after C was introduced. They just get phased out eventually. Your Mac now only has USB-C isn't it?

It happened before by it being on phones for a long time.

The correct answer is that it will be proven in markets that promote the sort of competition that got us modern smartphones in the first place.

I recently gave Apple $800 for some smart watches. UPS never delivered and lost or stole them while returning them to Apple. I've been on the phone with Apple once a week for the past month. It's all been very cordial. They have repeatedly "issued the refund", said I'm not at fault, etc. but the money has not been returned to me. At the end of the day they are holding a fair chunk of my cash that would be earning interest in escrow indefinitely. This is a case where a chargeback would be warranted, but if I did that then my Apple account would be locked out. This made me realize I have too many digital eggs in one basket. Even if I liked Apple more than other options I was taught that I should never put myself in a position where it is painful to walk away.

Would have been fascinating to see what names like Apple would have looked like on this list. Macro the trend is correct but I’d be curious to see how different it would look for what is commonly regarded as a more trusted brand. FB, Google and Amazon are sort of the “worst of” players in the space reputation wise.

Matches made in heaven: Twitter, Congress, political parties, and Facebook, in that order.

Tech companies have been working very hard over the last years to achieve this drop in confidence: sketchy use of people's data; incentivising/promoting hate-speech and misinformation in exchange for engagement in their platforms; micro targeting for advertisement, etc. etc.

Not surprised at all to see the massive drop in trust in Twitter for example. I think it was a healthy choice to drop all my social networks utilisation - happy I did.

Google, Microsoft are leading the way in enshittification.

Google is packed with advertisements now, their browser is now a direct feed to advertisers. Windows 11 is an online-always garbage OS that bombard you with unwanted promoted noise you can’t remove. LinkedIn is inundated with ads now.

Something has got to give. We are going to make new solutions that don’t have all this bullshit.

Completely false, about Windows. There are (debunked) rumors that the next version of Windows will be online only, but it isn't now. And I don't see a trace of promotion in Windows 11. I forget how I disabled that 2 years ago when I installed it, but it wasn't difficult.

Ubuntu, on the other hand, tries to sell me on Ubuntu Pro and Expanded Security Maintenance for Applications every time I log in. But I haven't looked into how to disable it so I won't make a false claim that it's something "you can't remove."

Weird, I've been using Ubuntu for quite a few years now, both in my work laptop and personal desktop, and have never even heard the terms "Ubuntu Pro" or "Expanded Security Maintenance for Applications."

I checked recently, and Windows 11, you cannot even use it without a internet and a Microsoft account. You used to be able to use a local account. And then after that enshittified, they made it so you used to be able to disconnect from the network and use a local account. And now, there's a terminal workaround that must be used now.

I will throw shade at Ubuntu, as well. There's a ton of privacy and UX switches you need to flip just to make it your OS. And even then, it's got snap, so who needs it?

Thankfully, we're seeing a surge of alternate options. Mastodon's user base continues to grow and add user focused features [1], Firefox performance is on-par with Chrome, Bing/duckduckgo reached Google's search quality a while back and now exceed it since Google search added shit.

1. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/09/mastodon-4.2/

We need to do more to educate people about privacy violations and behaviour control. They (the average joes of the world) thought it was through "chips", when in fact it was as simple as an app sitting on your phone or in your browser, tv, car...and everything else capable of running software. Now the same data will be used even more aggressively to control people's behaviour. Spread the word and educate non technical people. It's working.

Care to educate? I know what you're referring to, but besides mindless zombies walking around, what's going on?

About time

Reply on news.ycombinator.com