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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: 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.
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(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.
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(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.
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