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Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker writes about the implications that technology monopolies have for culture by asking "Who owns the Internet?". Three decades ago, few used the Internet for much of anything and the web wasn't even around. Today, nearly everybody uses the web, and to a lesser extent, other parts of the Internet for just about everything. However, despite massive growth, the Web has narrowed very much: "Google now controls nearly ninety per cent of search advertising, Facebook almost eighty per cent of mobile social traffic, and Amazon about seventy-five per cent of e-book sales."
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What Big Tech's Monopoly Powers Mean for Our Culture
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squatcho, n.:
The button at the top of a baseball cap.
-- "Sniglets", Rich Hall & Friends
(Score: 4, Interesting) by crafoo on Wednesday August 23 2017, @04:02PM (21 children)
Considering Google alongside AT&T is a laughable and ridiculous idea. AT&T did fundamental and essential research. Google is a gaggle of self-congratulatory SJW hipsters who "write code".
Also, has the author considered that certain governing systems prefer centralized indexing, control, and "curation" of the normal man's internet (*cough*censorship). So much easier to infiltrate and manipulate 90% of the internet when you only have to abuse 1, 2, or 3 corporations at a time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23 2017, @04:11PM (2 children)
both help to setup the big data-collection dragnet people like to call internet these days
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23 2017, @04:27PM (1 child)
will band together to pull it off.
Like the marxist theory says: The people need to wrest back control of the means of production and distribution (whether that is physical or virtual.) Unlike the communist revolution and the general failure of the ideology it represented, the requirements for this one are much simpler: Cooperative corporations with corporate charters limiting the scope of their activities and setting out the specific circumstances under which investor returns are considered rather than money being rolling back into the enterprise. Secondly is the social order. The company needs to be founded with competent people blending both practicalism as well as sufficient idealism to not let the corporation go astray from its charter and the ideals they represent. Third, these companies will need to network with similiar companies in other regions to provide supply infrastructure or peering arrangements to allow them to compete with the big players as they slowly expand their economic influence on the markets.
Doing the above would be a non-trivial and risky exercise for experienced veterans of whichever fields the company focuses on. But this is the ONLY way (outside of bloody revolution and the setbacks it entails) to begin nudging society back onto a path which empowers the common man, rather than the small pool of increasingly wealthy elites to whom we remain beholden, whether we believe it or not. Prove that humanity isn't the chattel they believe we are and do in your region what is necessary to be defeating them. One company, one market, one pool of people at a time. You can create jobs locally, empower the economically dwindling masses, and set a foundation for the overthrow of the incumbent cathedral for something more akin to a cooperative bazaar.
(Score: 1) by pdfernhout on Thursday August 24 2017, @12:11AM
"Star Wars: The Death Star Cantina | WDR" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yl_reBjVqU [youtube.com]
Though if you look around, you can see infrastructure projects along the lines you suggest -- like Matrix.org, Mattermost, and more... One can hope they continue to gain traction...
Ultimately we likely need a mix of approaches though:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm [t0.or.at]
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
Also, healthy economies are a good mix of subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned transactions. So emphasizing creating better exchanged-focused organizations, even if narrowly scoped ones with more idealism, still does not address a need for balance across all four types of transactions.
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday August 23 2017, @04:58PM (10 children)
It's even more laughable when you realize that AT&T includes Bell Labs. Bell Labs gave us breakthroughs in technology, physics and mathematics such as: cosmic microwave background radiation, Transistors, Lasers, C/C++/S, Unix, Plan 9/Inferno, Hall Effect, CCD image sensor and many, many others.
Google gave us Android and walled gardens.
The age of the research wing is dead. Big companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, et al. are only interested in generating revenue by providing services. Research isn't marketable unless there is a clear path to profit. If they want new technology or see something interesting, they simply buy startups or smaller companies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23 2017, @05:29PM
The foundational stuff is always easy; indeed, it tends to come about by accident.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Wednesday August 23 2017, @05:54PM (2 children)
You do realize that Alphabet, IBM and Microsoft invest Billions in pie-in-the-sky tech with questionable returns?
Facebook is looking at high-altitude wireless internet coverage, Amazon at new distribution and warehousing efficiency concepts... Sure, that's to eventually improve the bottom line, but it's not tomorrow's revenue.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday August 23 2017, @07:26PM
Well, to be fair, FaceBook is working on wireless "internet" coverage, where they get to pick what you can see, if you're referring to their Internet.org efforts. They have made some nice contributions to open source tools though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23 2017, @07:36PM
I used to think that as well but became disillusioned after reading this [ieee.org] interview with Astro Teller. He's the head of "X" which is Alphabet/Google's innovation lab and the one which you're referencing whether or not you realize it. I'd recommend reading things in context but a telling quote or two from Teller is:
...
...
The whole division is far more pragmatic than the moonshot reputation. What he's talking about in the first quote about trying to kill the project is that that's generally stage 1 of any idea at X. 'How can we kill this project?' If they can kill it, they do - and move on. And the reasons for a project being killed do include there being no crystal clear path to profit. When pressed on the value of such a system Teller ends up stumbling over his words trying to explain why Google isn't pursuing it without simply saying they're concerned it won't produce sufficient revenue. For a ctrl+f the question includes "Robots aren't the best solution, is that what you're saying?"
I still personally believe that Google is covertly cooking up some exciting progress intermingling between AI and robotics - e.g. DeepMind meet Boston Dynamics (or whatever was yielded from them before they moved on.) But logically, I think that belief is probably more emotional than rationally justified. They're just a big corporation trying to make lots of money. That's not where innovations come from. On the other hand Google is supporting initiatives like DeepMind but that's likely because that whole team is capable of likely operating on a budget of $1 million a year excluding extraneous costs like hardware which vertical integration ensures will have a price approaching $0. And their product is likely already being directly integrated into things such as Google's search.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 23 2017, @07:20PM (4 children)
Bell Labs gave us breakthroughs in technology, physics and mathematics such as: cosmic microwave background radiation, Transistors, Lasers, C/C++/S, Unix, Plan 9/Inferno, Hall Effect, CCD image sensor and many, many others.
This one is not like the others: Plan9 hasn't seen any use anywhere outside a research lab or someone's pet project. It might have some interesting ideas (I haven't looked too closely), but almost everything else you list here has been a major commercial success, whereas Plan9 simply has not. (CMB isn't commercial, but it is an important thing in astrophysics.) If you could magically go back in time and eliminate Plan9 before it even got started (and then come back to the present and remember both timelines), I don't think you'd notice the difference. It's unfortunate when technically superior things end up not gaining any popularity, but that's the way it goes. (And I don't know if it really is or not; that's been argued about Beta vs. VHS but others will counter that Beta had fatal flaws.)
Another thing to remember is that Bell Labs did all this because they had a huge monopoly and could afford to plow tons of money into questionable research, some of which panned out brilliantly. The cost to this was high communications prices for consumers, and a real lack of innovation in what was supposed to be Bell's core mission: telecommunications. You weren't even allowed to own your own telephone for a very long time! How is another company supposed to, for instance, develop and market a cordless phone when consumers aren't even allowed to buy phones or plug phones into an outlet (only Bell technicians could do this for a time)? The lack of competition really held things back until they finally opened it up to alternative long-distance providers and equipment makers in the 70s/80s, and then suddenly we had much cheaper long-distance calling, answering machines, cellular phones, etc.
Finally, Alphabet and MS do do a lot of research, though it's questionable sometimes how much benefit it is (I think MS came up with the first workable photo-stitching algorithms, not sure). And they're doing it mostly the same way Bell did: enjoy a giant cash-cow monopoly (or near-monopoly), then pour some of that into pie-in-the-sky research. Maybe things were just easier back in those days, and all the low-hanging fruit is gone.
Also, I'd like to point out that UNIX, while commercially successful, was really a smaller, cheaper take-off of MULTICS, which had a lot of features that UNIX never did. It wasn't like they came up with the UNIX ideas all by themselves in a stroke of brilliance.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23 2017, @08:23PM (2 children)
Plan9
>This one is not like the others: Plan9 hasn't seen any use anywhere outside a research lab
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#Impact [wikipedia.org]
"Additionally, in Plan 9 from User Space, several of Plan 9's applications and tools, including the sam and acme editors, have been ported to Unix and Linux systems and have achieved some level of popularity."
Plan9 was specifically for code development in a research environment, that's why it was made. There is no point in having Plan9 on one computer, it only comes into its own with multiple computers. It's a "distributed" OS. I see no reason it couldn't morph into an enterprise-level os, it's just not mostly used that way.
> It might have some interesting ideas (I haven't looked too closely),
It's pretty freaking sweet, if you ask me.
http://9front.org/ [9front.org]
THE PLAN FELL OFF!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23 2017, @08:26PM
Bell Labs best invention was 9gag [9gag.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 25 2017, @12:15AM
Zero is some level of popularity.
(Score: 2) by Lester on Thursday August 24 2017, @11:36AM
UTF-8 was designed for Plan9. Good contribution, isn't it?.
By the way, Plan9 was also the first OS using unicode
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday August 24 2017, @12:06AM
> It's even more laughable when you realize that AT&T includes Bell Labs.
I assumed that the OP was alluding to Bell Labs when writing "AT&T did fundamental and essential research." Do you interpret that differently? Bell Labs is now part of Nokia.
http://www.nokia.com/en_int/news/releases/2015/04/15/nokia-and-alcatel-lucent-to-combine-to-create-an-innovation-leader-in-next-generation-technology-and-services-for-an-ip-connected-world [nokia.com]
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday August 23 2017, @08:28PM (3 children)
It's even easier for the leadership of those 1, 2, or 3 corporations to decide of their own unelected volition to censor the internet themselves. For their own reasons. With no accountability. And there's no reason to believe we could tell if they were doing so already.
When will you anti-government types finally realize that government isn't the only big bad? At least the feds are kept from causing too much real harm by their crushingly massive bureaucracy.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @01:07AM (2 children)
It's not just the anti-government types that have yet to realize the danger these giant companies pose, since I routinely see more liberal people suddenly advocating that we unleash the True Power of the Free Market (TM) when it comes to corporate censorship. You can see examples of this in just about every article posted here that is about corporate censorship.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday August 24 2017, @01:49AM
That's just because liberals have heard about the magical Free Market for so long they have started believing in it. And much like conservatives have believed for decades, liberals believe the Free Market will magically solve their problems because something something invisible hand.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1) by crafoo on Thursday August 24 2017, @05:58PM
Actually, what people are calling liberals today are really regressive authoritarians. Corporate censorship falls in line with what they want to achieve - authority over what others can view, talk about, and ultimately the ideas they can think about. So, whenever corporate censorship is brought up a gaggle of clucking "liberal" regressive geese show up to inform everyone, "This isn't censorship! The 1st amendment only applies to government agents! Corporations are PRIVATE businesses and are free to do whatever they want! Except bake the cakes they want. Not that."
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Thursday August 24 2017, @03:56AM (2 children)
Whisky Tango Foxtrot!! What the hell does this have to with "Who owns the internet"? Does it belong to the Big Telcos? Or does it belong to the Big Service Providers? Does it belong to the Big Government? Does it belong to the Big Retailers?
Maybe, just maybe, it actually belongs to the people who use it.
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @09:29AM
If we pay to use it, and if we can be baned from it, then it doesn't belong to us.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @01:01PM
The internet belongs to whoever owns the cables and routers.