Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the "father" of the World Wide Web, has said what many are likely feeling: the centralisation of the network has gone too far and it's time to consider breaking up the behemoths that dominate it to the extent of locking out new players.
The Register has more here: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/01/tim_berners_lee_internet_giants/
The source, TBL's interview with Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-technology-www/father-of-web-says-tech-giants-may-have-to-be-split-up-idUSKCN1N63MV (don't follow the Register link which is wrong).
Excerpt:
“What naturally happens is you end up with one company dominating the field so through history there is no alternative to really coming in and breaking things up,” Berners-Lee, 63, said in an interview. “There is a danger of concentration.”
But he urged caution too, saying the speed of innovation in both technology and tastes could ultimately cut some of the biggest technology companies down to size.
“Before breaking them up, we should see whether they are not just disrupted by a small player beating them out of the market, but by the market shifting, by the interest going somewhere else,” Berners-Lee said.
I'm in violent agreement with TBL, at least on the point of overcentralisation, what about you? I'd be more aggressive than his caution, perhaps, as the barrier to entry seems higher to me than him, and market shifts can be blocked or delayed by counteracting marketing tactics by the incumbents...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @07:39AM (9 children)
Rome fell, and so have many other bloody empires. WTF is a corporation in comparison to those organizations, which were driven the societal madness of glory after death?
Netflix is now in the process of unseating Hollywood; Netflix is producing movies that they'll screen first in theaters and then stream on their own surface, and their upending the traditional structures behind funding projects.
IBM created the PC. Where are they now?
Nothing lasts forever. NOTHING.
There's always a group of young men who gather together to successfully plot disruption.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @12:26PM (1 child)
The Roman empire lasted thousands of years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @12:55PM
The Roman Empire did not have the invisible hand of the market influencing its destiny. With a thumb of the scale, that invisible hand sure can change things quick.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @03:57PM (1 child)
Not really.
They are merely another production company/studio with their own channel. It's just that they have appeared recently and that they have a lot of Internet money, and they hire countless millennial minions to do BS, underpaid work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @05:08PM
They're even less than that, they're a cable channel like Syfy with shitty 1st-party filler amidst a handful of decent old shows.
(Score: 3, Informative) by curunir_wolf on Friday November 02 2018, @05:44PM (2 children)
Well, they still have over $100 billion market cap, and just bought Red Hat.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @06:55PM (1 child)
Surely that's proof of the inherent evil of a corporation, especially one that provided documented support for the Nazis!!111111111
That is to say, what could your point possibly be?
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Sunday November 04 2018, @08:16PM
Corporations are not good or evil, dude. They are just a tool.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @06:13PM (1 child)
I have a feeling this was only small consolation to those it harmed leading up to and during its downfall...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @06:59PM
Didn't Monty Python do a skit about this? [youtube.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Friday November 02 2018, @09:41AM (3 children)
Capitalism is an incredible system, that has vastly increased living standards for billions of people. But - there's always a but - capitalism tends to monopoly. There's no fighting "economy of scale". IMHO, the single most important role of government is to work against this.
Current regulations only nail monopolies if they abuse their monopoly to expand into other fields of business. This is wrong, or at least, not enough. Businesses above a certain size should simply not be allowed to exist. They become "system critical" or "too big to fail" or whatever other term you wish to apply. From that point on, they have too much power - they can extort their governments, as we saw from the banking industry in 2008.
To get the politics out of it, I suggest a simple, one-size-fits-all-badly rule: Any business with gross worldwide turnover above $X is forbidden from any acquisitions or mergers. Any business reaching 4 times that limit must immediately divide itself into entities smaller than the limit.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @10:56AM (1 child)
"...gross worldwide turnover above $X..."
This will become a take home test for accountants (and accompanying lawyers), money will be hidden all over. Alternatively, related companies will all be under the limit, but behind the scenes cooperate (collude?) so closely that for many purposes they are still a giant, controlling a market.
Another option is "more than x employees" but that can be circumvented with temps or through shell companies that look (on paper) like sub-contractors.
Can limiting corporate size be done through education and/or shaming? See A Study of Economics As If People Mattered -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful [wikipedia.org] If society in general frowned on working in large companies the giants might wither on their own, from lack of talent(??)
I think you are on to something, but more ideas are needed!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday November 02 2018, @01:09PM
Perhaps a better test is simply comparing the prices they charge with the expenses they should incur? Of course, can't trust their numbers, must have independent numbers for computing expenses. Then, if they're raking in more than a 10% margin of profit....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @08:08PM
Capitalism is being given the credit that really belongs to the thousands and thousands of scientists creating new tech. Scientists have been doing this forever, Capitalism has simply been the dominant economic model during a period of scientific advancement.
That said your run-down is the most reasonable approach I've seen from one of the more conservative users around here. We can't eliminate capitalism but it does need serious regulation. Well, at least here in the US we need to get BACK to the regulations that seemed to work pretty well.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @10:11AM (3 children)
And... Sir Tim Berners-Lee decided that backing DRM as a Web standard [theregister.co.uk] it's gonna help, how?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @12:49PM (2 children)
And quite frankly, as a result, his opinion means very little to me. Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong, I don't care; I'll look to people that aren't sellouts for their opinions instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @04:43PM
I'll second that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @06:45PM
Tim ceased to be any leading figure shortly after he released HTML and the browser.
Irrelevant for DECADES.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by acid andy on Friday November 02 2018, @11:30AM (1 child)
No. I say we've already waited too long and that hasn't happened. Far too long. Much of the damage is already done.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1) by messymerry on Saturday November 03 2018, @01:50PM
Dot gov is profiting handsomely from this endless hoovering of every aspect of our personal lives. My better is completely addicted to Fakebook on her phone and she gets downright testy when I gently point out that she is spending about five hours a day on that blasted little flat butler. The megalith FAANGs will not be broken up willingly. It will continue until either this dystopia collapses under it's own weight, or we all stand naked in the panopticon.
Johnny the Greek has spoken,,,
;-D
Only fools equate a PhD with a Swiss Army Knife...
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday November 02 2018, @11:36AM (3 children)
You can't break apart foreign mega corps so you'll just drive yourself out of the market if you try breaking up yours. This is especially true when competing against a managed economy like China which is effectively run like a huge unregulated corporation that does whatever it wants in the market.
You can't prevent usage data collection either. You can regulate all the data collection and retention laws you want. But other nations will just ignore those. And like the case of piracy, the laws to fight it will end up as censorship laws that the government will abuse to limit free speech.
The only solution is to make data collection technically impossible by adopting a decentralized anonymizing blockchain and legally forcing ISPs to use it instead of the current protocols. The stuff you want to keep like wikipedia will remain. And people would be able to host their own social service nodes using their own machines or renting one off a cloud service. But advertisers would have no part of it all and nations won't have the technical means to easily spy on individual activities and censor speech.
Once we have that, countries like China would be forced to join in order to communicate with the west in academic, private and business settings. That, in turn, will dissolve their own mega corps and ad driven social networks as people gradually transition to it. They'll try regulating it of course. Maybe they'll make the computer themselves backdoored and DRMed... But without ad money it won't produce any revenues and will become increasingly harder and harder to maintain as network traffic increases.
Well, regardless, breaking up the mega corps isn't workable in a global market.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 02 2018, @02:44PM (2 children)
that won't work unless it passes The Grandmother Test.
It's not Trump that keeps me up at night - it's old people.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @04:58PM
'nuf said.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Friday November 02 2018, @07:31PM
Grandmother doesn't understand URLs. She types what she wants in Chrome and answers come out "from google". A different protocol won't change that. People will look up someone's profile and google or whatever will serve it. When they'll want to open one themselves they'll click the join button and will be offered a subscription plan for a host. A few will compare prices. Fewer still will look up how to self host and run their own.
We already have bittorrent clients. It's the same only with a built-in search function. Grandma (somehow) figured out napster. A few even figured out how to upload their own stuff. She'll figure this out as well.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Funny) by SomeGuy on Friday November 02 2018, @03:08PM
However he didn't post it on Twitter(R)(TM), the official media of consumetards and orange drooling orangutans, so no one heard him.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday November 02 2018, @06:11PM (2 children)
I'm reading this summary on a small website run by a handful of people as a labor of love. When it comes to serving scientific papers [nih.gov], it serves its purpose wonderfully. Until the big players start locking down TCP/IP -- which I'm not saying won't happen -- legitimately, what's the big deal about some large players controlling the experience for people who come to their sites? It's not as if you can't click away from the site.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @07:10PM
As George Carlin said: "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
An equal voice for unequal minds means you can't just leave the masses to their own devices, especially when most people get their information through centralized sources, which have been captured by powerful, deep-pocketed, special-interest groups.
Either you curate information for the masses, or you diminish the influence of democratic systems (replacing them instead with capitalism).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @07:44PM
Instead of protecting the integrity of web (http/html), he thinks he's some kinda internet crusader. He's got a side project to compete with them big boys.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @09:35PM
Internet of robots. Robots create webpages and write articles with links for robots to click through links and pop them up in search results.
Robots choose content for people to make them produce more information for robots to profile.
Finally robots take care that people be held in extremism, as causing "holy wars" makes more money.
Works well, publishers got rid of news and libraries got rid of books because Internet, Internet got rid of knowledge because robots, robots make people buy more stuff. How wonderful.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @10:12PM
The content providers aren't the problem. This is a blatant call for censorship. It's the service providers we have to take over. They are the new "Ma Bells" we have to break up. They are the gatekeepers we must tear down. They are the single point of failure in regards to internet freedom.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @11:05PM
You're already trying to break the internet with DRM, so your opinions are worthless. Sod off you cunt.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday November 04 2018, @02:44AM
TBL is talking out of his ass. There's no reason why the WWW couldn't be decentralized. You can do it right this moment. Start up a web server, boom, decentralized power. Hell, you don't even have to connect to the Internet. Start your own network, with your own root DNS servers. Boom, decentralized power.
The thing is, you'll find that no one will visit your website and no one will join your network, and the reason is simple physical and social laws.
It's hard to find information without some centralization, whether that be a library or a search engine. And if people can't find your site, of course they won't visit it.
So centralization is a natural consequence of natural laws. There's no point in trying to remove it, since the system will just return to the default state.
It's telling that one of the very first sites on the Internet (the ARPANET back then) was a central index of all of the webpages available.
If you remove the centralization, someone is just going to build a new index, and everyone is going to flock to it, and if you're not listed on it no one is going to visit your site.
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