14 ms·

Why Tim Berners-Lee is no friend of Facebook

165 points by kurren 10y ago

labster 10y ago
I don't get why the issue of Peter Thiel and Gawker was grafted onto this article. Even if you do think something of value was lost when Gawker was shut down (and I don't), I can't see how it's relevant to the issue of the walled garden Facebook is trying to create. They don't even mention Free Basics or internet.org. Rather than elevating an issue of real concern, it makes the whole piece come off as "kids these days are ruining my internet".
- helloworld 10y ago
  Thiel’s strategy [to shut down Gawker through litigation] demonstrates how tech money...can now also suppress freedom of expression.... I think the writer is pointing out the irony that an investor who has benefited enormously from an open web has now effectively made it less open, because of the potentially stifling effect of lawsuits like his.
  - 2opdude 10y ago
    The argument was not compelling nor well reasoned.
    - Melk 10y ago
      I disagree. >As that uber-blogger Dave Winer observed: “Gawker is gone because Peter Thiel financed its murder-by-lawyer. It’s legal to do this in the US, but until now as far as I know, no one has crossed this line. Now that the line has been crossed, it’s fair to assume it will become standard practice for billionaires like Thiel to finance lawsuits until the publication loses and has to sell itself to pay the judgment.” >I wasn’t ever a great admirer of Gawker, but Dave Winer is right: Thiel’s strategy demonstrates how tech money not only talks, but can now also suppress freedom of expression, even in the land of the first amendment.
      - kirrent 10y ago
        He financed their murder by lawyer but it's a vulnerability that only affects the weak and diseased. Expecting not to be punished for egregious illegal actions simply because your victims don't have enough money to make use of the court system is even more cynical and worrying than the alternative. As someone in a country without a first amendment equivalent, I think it's great. It's fabulous. It also doesn't give you free reign to say whatever you want to about anyone in public and that's entirely reasonable. As for a party with more money tying up someone else in multiple expensive lawsuits. It's certainly not a practice limited to tech billionaires alone.
        vonklaus 10y ago
        > expecting not to be punished. I suspect Denton expected to have negative ramifications. I do not believe he expected to be held personally liable for the actions of a corporation he was part of and that both the personal and corporate liabilities would have unprecedented magnitude. Further, the article says that benefactor style lawsuits are fairly novel and thus it is unreasonable to expect someone with a vendetta for publishing a true statement about them would relentlessly pursue and finance litigation until the company was destroyed. > it only effects[sic] the weak and diseased I would hope, but would not expect that to be the case. The government and large scale corporations can certainly make headway sueing companies like wikileaks for publishing damaging media they do not control. This is quite a dangerous precedent and how bad things can potentially get is up to the creativity of very powerful companies & lawyers.
        Chris2048 10y ago
        > someone with a vendetta for publishing a true statement about them So if I publish all your personal details online: address, contacts, workplace, political leanings etc, it'd ok? The only problem here is that non-billionaires aren't able to easily do this. > This is quite a dangerous precedent So is the behavior of Gawker going unchecked.
        sangnoir 10y ago
        > He financed their murder by lawyer but it's a vulnerability that only affects the weak and diseased This is in no way true! Everyone is vulnerable because win or lose, a lawsuit costs both sides money. Repeated enough times, the side with more money wins. If I had the motivation and the resources, do you think I would fail to fund a suit by someone who has a valid grievance against you for something you did in the past 5 years? Are you certain you are not "weak and diseased"?
  - S_Daedalus 10y ago
    It would be a powerful argument, except that Thiel's money wasn't as instrumental in killing Gawker as Gawker's own behavior. The same attacks levied against, say, the NYT wouldn't have accomplished anything except losing Thiel money.
    - shard972 10y ago
      I feel like we are getting to a scary place in society when you can spin funding a successful lawsuit into suppressing free speech. I mean if Tiel was pouring millions after millions into failing lawsuits that just aim to drain whatever money he can sure but a single successful lawsuit?
      - sangnoir 10y ago
        > I feel like we are getting to a scary place in society when you can spin funding a successful lawsuit into suppressing free speech. It's not spin if it is true: a suit does not need to be successful to ruin the targeted victim - simply defending yourself from a lawsuit costs a lot of money, good luck defending yourself from a well-resourced nemesis. Without commenting on Gawker's culpability, I will draw parallels to Mother Jones, which was also sued by a billionaire[1] (Vandersloot), but they managed to beat the suit. Incensed, VanderSloot set up a million dollar fund available to pay the legal expenses of people wanting to sue Mother Jones or other members of the "liberal press."[1] MoJo even weighed in on Thiel v Gawker, stating For the likes of VanderSloot, Adelson, Thiel, and Trump, the courts have become an avenue not so much for vindication, but for exacting a price[2]. They've been in the trenches, I'll take their word over people who assume only the guilty get punished by the justice system. 1. http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/10/mother-jones-vandersloot-melaleuca-lawsuit http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/10/mother-jones-vander... 2.http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/thiel-trump-vandersloot-lawsuit http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/thiel-trump-vand...
        Chris2048 10y ago
        > likes of VanderSloot, Adelson, Thiel, and Trump > They've been in the trenches Thiel isn't like the others in that list. And was Thiel and the others not "in the tranches" too?
- unfunco 10y ago
  The article links to a story about Free Basics, specifically the sentence: And the whole thrust of his company’s strategy is to persuade billions of future users that Facebook is the only bit of the internet they really need. I think mentioning Thiel is valid, I outright disagree with what Gawker did, but Thiel then hid behind a different and unrelated lawsuit to enact his revenge, both Zuckerberg and Thiel have the money to oppress those that can't match the size of their wallets and they're doing so, the comparison is fair.
  - labster 10y ago
    One sentence with a tangential reference. Whoop-dee-doo. This is not good for an article about how Facebook is closing the web. The print edition won't even include a link due to technical reasons. The comparison to Thiel may be fair if a comparison was made in the article. Instead we get this: Interestingly, Thiel is also a member of Facebook’s board of directors. Super-convincing. Actually, parent post is far more convincing than the article, which seems to think that illegal speech somehow deserves first amendment protection.
    - Melk 10y ago
      Scroll down. There is an entire paragraph about Thiel.
- orionblastar 10y ago
  Gawker was basically a Supermarket News Rag Tabloid on the Internet and sort of like TMZ trying to dig dirt on celebrities. Hulk Hogan got hit really bad when they found he was using racist words in the video, and they tried to blackmail Hulk Hogan and threaten to release the sex tape if he didn't pay it. Hogan didn't pay, the sex tape was released and he lost his job at WWE and they erased him from most of their history. HHH and the McMahons want a PG rated show, and won't allow R-Rated stuff on their show as they try to appeal to children now with the action figures and other toys.
- bambax 10y ago
  Because Thiel is a board member of FB. If Zuckerberg is committed to openness and "freedom" he should distance himself from Thiel; that he doesn't highlights his hypocrisy.
- throwanem 10y ago
  Your use of the present imperfect strikes me as unduly optimistic. Facebook's user base is roughly a quarter of the species. It mediates the social interactions of a sizable subset thereof. Network effect implicitly penalizes those who don't behave so as to generate value. To do so requires that you participate. It is trivial to enter, and as difficult as can be made practicable to exit. Those within often enough distrust those without, simply because the distinction exists. What is this if not a walled garden? What is a walled garden if not this?
49531 10y ago
There are a lot of other organizations and corporations I would say are doing more to kill the internet than Facebook. I don't think everyone who builds something on the web should be compelled to be open. Who cares that Facebook is a walled garden? I'd say their investments is open source tools has outweighed the fact that my grandma spends her browsing time in a silo.
Aqueous 10y ago
I think that in spite of Facebook and other 'walled gardens' or 'silos,' the web is more open now than it's ever been, even if it's tempting to argue otherwise. Everything you need to build a web application like Facebook is free to try and use, up to a certain amount of traffic at least. AWS, Heroku, and other platforms make it possible to develop and host a complete web application for free and to make it publicly available on the Internet for anyone to use for free. Most of the technologies that underlie Facebook are freely available as open source. There are billions of freely available tutorials and communities built around programmers helping each other for free (some of whom, I'm sure, work for Facebook). So I don't buy the notion that FB has 'pulled up the ladder behind them' so to speak, as the article insists it has. Nor do I believe that it has the power right now to do so. The only thing Facebook has done that the author seems to object to is to be extraordinarily, unprecedentedly successful. There are a lot of things I find toxic about Facebook, but I don't begrudge it its success.
- Melk 10y ago
  >The only thing Facebook has done that the author seems to object to is to be extraordinarily, unprecedentedly successful. Where does he say that? You just described an open web and then somehow attributed all of that to Facebook. If Facebook were to replace the Internet like Zuckerberg would love to do then none of the things you described would still be possible. >There are a lot of things I find toxic about Facebook Sir Tim and I agree with you on that.
- S_Daedalus 10y ago
  Less like a silo, and more of flytrap for the unwary and unprepared.
- destructionator 10y ago
  > AWS, Heroku, and other platforms make it possible to develop and host a complete web application for free and to make it publicly available on the Internet for anyone to use for free. I have been running complete web applications from home for free for anyone to use for a long time. That is what the web is about - you don't need a dedicated, centralized host. Anyone can connect to it and anyone can run servers on it. It isn't terribly difficult to do, nor costly, I do it on a budget residential broadband connection. Granted, it might not scale to millions of users, but neither will heroku's or AWS's free/low-cost tiers either.
bluejekyll 10y ago
This is a challenging debate. What does it mean to be open vs. closed. And what would a service like Facebook look like if it was "open"? > the Facebook founder has no intention of allowing anyone to build anything on his platform that does not have his express approval. I assume this is based on the fact that you can not directly use facebooks APIs, and can not utilize Facebook itself. Facebook does allow for people to link out to other sites content, so in that way there is no barrier to seeing external sources in Facebook. An external site can't extend the experience of Facebook though, but I don't know of any successful web business that does allow this. I'm curious of examples that actually meet the definition of open which he's using. Almost all sites require a form of login, many news sites are putting up paywalls, and there have always been private services requiring login to get at secure data. So, the openness that I think people want, is access to the Facebook user base, but I would argue that everyone already has that, in is the rest of the web. The difference is Facebook is not going to give that to any other companies, because that user base is their revenue stream. To me this isn't a problem until people are incapable of accessing anything other than Facebook. This would be like the AOL of 1992, before most AOL users realized there was more to the Internet than what AOL gave them. I don't think people will want to go back to that. But competition will constintently pull on this. Email is not dead, Messenger is not the only messenging platform. Btw, I find myself barely ever using Facebook these days. And a question, what sites operate in the way this article wants? There were no examples. Reddit?
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  > Almost all sites require a form of login Almost no sites require a form of login. You can login to most sites, but primarily so that you can keep a persistent pseudonym and set preferences. You can browse almost every site without logging in. There is nothing that stops you from e.g. linking to a YouTube video from your own site regardless of whether you have a YouTube account. For Facebook you need an account to even see the large majority of the content. > So, the openness that I think people want, is access to the Facebook user base, but I would argue that everyone already has that, in is the rest of the web. The difference is Facebook is not going to give that to any other companies, because that user base is their revenue stream. Which is why people dislike them. Who wants to be somebody else's "revenue stream"? Replacing Facebook with a decentralized social network that no single party controls would be better for everyone but Facebook.
20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
Violating someone's privacy by publishing them having sex is not protected by the first amendment. Maybe you think it should be. I personally think it is protected if the people being photographed consent to the publication, and a violation of privacy if they don't. (Privacy and free speech are both human rights, they don't conflict.) We can have that conversation, though, if you think that privacy isn't a human right. But the people who are upset about this don't seem to be talking about that. They don't talk in terms of human rights, they paint Theil as a bad guy and try to paint him as being opposed to freedom of speech. But can you cite a single quote from Theil that has him on the record as opposing freedom of speech? We should not accept this kind of smear as if it were legitimate argument. It doesn't appeal to reason or argument it is characterization. And it is eating all discourse. For every time I see an actual argument against a policy of Trumps (notice how they dragged him into it?) I see at least 150 claims that he is a racist. Not quoting him saying something racist, just a smear. And that ratio is probably higher, because to be honest I haven't seen any coverage of Trump in the last 6 months that makes a good reasoned argument against one of his positions. It's not like it's hard. Here's one of Trumps positions I disagree with: We should have open borders. Closed borders is really saying that a company can't hire who they want to hire- that you can't hire the best and the brightest in the world and bring them to america, one of the things that made america great in the past. We shouldn't nationalize talent we should have a free market in it and let anyone who has a job offer (at least, there are legitimate arguments for an even lower bar) come to the country. There. That's an actual argument against a Trump position. A similar argument could be made against Theil. They almost make one against Zuckerberg (but in the end they resort to characterization of Facebook as a "walled garden", which by that definition means The Guardian is a walled garden because the editors control what is published on their site.) Discourse is dying. Don't let it.
shitgoose 10y ago
this article reminds me of an old Soviet joke: an army psychologist shows soldier a brick and asks "what do you think about when you look at this?". Soldier answers "chicks!". Psychologist "chicks?? why?". Soldier "i always think about them". some bizarre chain of reasoning: Lee, Zuckerberg, Thiel... Trump???
intended 10y ago
Wow, the article is terrible and doesn't do anything to express the hypocricy of Facebook. Heres why Facebook and Zuckerberg are hypocritical - Freebasics and net neutrality. Freebasics is a closed system, with FB as the gatekeeper. In its previous iteration it was internet.org. Only the utter debacle (for FB) that was the Indian Netneutrality debate, caused FB to rebrand to the more accurate :freebasic. Before that they were happy to portray themselves as providers of the internet to the poor. When asked why they needed a model that created them as gatekeeper, instead of cheap/free/advertizer supported internet with actual openness, they tweaked their model but were tone deaf to the gatekeeper role. With NN, they support it in the states in order to combat telecoms. In India and in other places, they support telecoms and Anti NN positions to further their ability to be the only site users go to. Zuckerberg is old enough to know the difference between walled gardens and open internet, as are most of his engineers. Discussing hypocrisy would indicate some sort of moral center in the first place. Facebook is for itself, and is a creature for the perpetuation of its existence.
jondubois 10y ago
The ending of this article reminded me of Peter Thiel's article "Competition is for Losers" http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536 http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-l... Peter Thiel's article is really well researched but his conclusions about monopolies are wrong and dangerous. Monopolies are terrible for society - Monopolies allow companies to enforce arbitrary rules which everyone must follow with no means of escape (it's essentially a total dictatorship). If you got fired from such a company, where else would you work? The CEO could literally just rape anyone they wanted and no one would be able to speak up. Worse than that; the media will probably tell you that it's actually an honour and you should be thankful! What sort of world is that? Then he uses past history - The fact that monopolistic companies like Google tend to encourage and reward innovation as an example of why monopolies are good but he completely omits the fact that Sergey and Larry were raised in a highly competitive environment (and that's why Google is like this). Wait a few generations and you're going to see the elite 'inheriting' class develop into a generation of spoiled entitled brats who have no interest for innovation because they're too busy having fun. It sounds like Peter Thiel wants to turn Facebook into a mega-corporation to take over the world. He has a very black-and-white view of the world which I find really dangerous. He thinks that there is one correct way to do things and that this way is always correct. The biggest problem is that as soon as you allow a corporation to get a world-dominating monopoly, there will be NO WAY OUT - That corporation will always have the power to manipulate the media and keep everyone locked in their places - There will be NO GOING BACK. Peter Thiel severely underestimates human greed and ego (both of which he has plenty of). His monopoly idea is only good for people like him - The fact that he thinks it's good for EVERYONE just shows how out of touch he and his friends are.
throwanem 10y ago
This could have been a great article, but its author mistook a strong position for a weak one and dragged in Thiel, Gawker, and Trump. This foolish attempt to bolster something that didn't require it has totally confused the issue, to the point where everyone here is arguing over matters that have no significance to the question ostensibly at hand. It's a real shame. There's a conversation around Facebook that needs very badly to happen. A better article than this one could have done much to advance it. But the structural flaws evident here render the work useless, or worse than that.
atnixxin 10y ago
I don't think this adequately covers why Facebook is no friend of the open web. What the company tried to do in India with FreeBasics (and I'm a co-founder of the campaign that fought them off), was carve out a part of the open web for themselves. Factor this: 1. Websites had to apply to be available to FreeBasics users, else not. 2. They had to conform to Facebook's technical requirements (which could have arbitrarily been changed by Facebook), and more importantly, comply with Facebook's own terms and conditions. 3. The data-cost differential between the open web and FreeBasics meant that users would have gotten some information, but would think twice before accessing the open web because it would cost them to do so. 4. This is from sources, but the figure that Facebook mentions for people accessing the open web after "trying" free basics is merely the number of people who have clicked on a link, not those who have bought data connections. So it's hardly an on-ramp. 5. In India, we have the only data ever released about FreeBasics, in terms of users: only 20% of users who used FreeBasics till May 2015 had never used the Internet before. 6. There's a better way of increasing Internet access than this. Facebook has ignored other models for providing Free Internet access: the equal rating models from Mozilla, for example. 7. Countries in the EU where Zero Rating has been implemented showed that ISPs had a lower tendency to drop data rates for regular usage. One journalist in Gujarat (an Indian state) told me how retailers stopped pitching FreeBasics to customers because the service was being marketed as "FreeNet: Free Internet service", and customers found that they were being billed for using sites other than FreeBasics sites. We run the risk of Facebook becoming the primary and perhaps only site accessed, as has been indicated by surveys done in Indonesia (by LirneAsia) and Nigeria (I think; by Quartz). The bigger risk is the notion that because the platform is entirely controlled by them, they define the norms, they get to control creation of content and services. The Internet, when access is neutral, is a place where all users are equal, and all users are both consumers and creators. A better product or a smarter strategy, or fund-raising capability has the ability to challenge giants: Facebook beat myspace. Non-neutral Internet access creates separates consumers from creators, and reduces the freedom that creators have to innovate. Facebook is doing what is best for its business, not for the open web. Look at what has happened in case of Instant Articles, and the reach of fan pages: Facebook is prioritizing publishing on its own platform and giving that content greater reach with users. It has also deprecated reach for fan pages. Of course, it's not that changes in google search and youtube's algorithm don't hurt creators, but with Facebook, what is clear is that the intent isn't increasing relevance: it is exercising control to improve monetization. Publishers who are going with Instant Articles are missing the long game: the bait-and-switch. So yes, Facebook celebrating the open web looks hypocritical.

165 points by kurren 10y ago

I don't get why the issue of Peter Thiel and Gawker was grafted onto this article. Even if you do think something of value was lost when Gawker was shut down (and I don't), I can't see how it's relevant to the issue of the walled garden Facebook is trying to create. They don't even mention Free Basics or internet.org. Rather than elevating an issue of real concern, it makes the whole piece come off as "kids these days are ruining my internet".

helloworld 10y ago
Thiel’s strategy [to shut down Gawker through litigation] demonstrates how tech money...can now also suppress freedom of expression.... I think the writer is pointing out the irony that an investor who has benefited enormously from an open web has now effectively made it less open, because of the potentially stifling effect of lawsuits like his.
- 2opdude 10y ago
  The argument was not compelling nor well reasoned.
  - Melk 10y ago
    I disagree. >As that uber-blogger Dave Winer observed: “Gawker is gone because Peter Thiel financed its murder-by-lawyer. It’s legal to do this in the US, but until now as far as I know, no one has crossed this line. Now that the line has been crossed, it’s fair to assume it will become standard practice for billionaires like Thiel to finance lawsuits until the publication loses and has to sell itself to pay the judgment.” >I wasn’t ever a great admirer of Gawker, but Dave Winer is right: Thiel’s strategy demonstrates how tech money not only talks, but can now also suppress freedom of expression, even in the land of the first amendment.
    - kirrent 10y ago
      He financed their murder by lawyer but it's a vulnerability that only affects the weak and diseased. Expecting not to be punished for egregious illegal actions simply because your victims don't have enough money to make use of the court system is even more cynical and worrying than the alternative. As someone in a country without a first amendment equivalent, I think it's great. It's fabulous. It also doesn't give you free reign to say whatever you want to about anyone in public and that's entirely reasonable. As for a party with more money tying up someone else in multiple expensive lawsuits. It's certainly not a practice limited to tech billionaires alone.
      - vonklaus 10y ago
        > expecting not to be punished. I suspect Denton expected to have negative ramifications. I do not believe he expected to be held personally liable for the actions of a corporation he was part of and that both the personal and corporate liabilities would have unprecedented magnitude. Further, the article says that benefactor style lawsuits are fairly novel and thus it is unreasonable to expect someone with a vendetta for publishing a true statement about them would relentlessly pursue and finance litigation until the company was destroyed. > it only effects[sic] the weak and diseased I would hope, but would not expect that to be the case. The government and large scale corporations can certainly make headway sueing companies like wikileaks for publishing damaging media they do not control. This is quite a dangerous precedent and how bad things can potentially get is up to the creativity of very powerful companies & lawyers.
        Chris2048 10y ago
        > someone with a vendetta for publishing a true statement about them So if I publish all your personal details online: address, contacts, workplace, political leanings etc, it'd ok? The only problem here is that non-billionaires aren't able to easily do this. > This is quite a dangerous precedent So is the behavior of Gawker going unchecked.
      - sangnoir 10y ago
        > He financed their murder by lawyer but it's a vulnerability that only affects the weak and diseased This is in no way true! Everyone is vulnerable because win or lose, a lawsuit costs both sides money. Repeated enough times, the side with more money wins. If I had the motivation and the resources, do you think I would fail to fund a suit by someone who has a valid grievance against you for something you did in the past 5 years? Are you certain you are not "weak and diseased"?
- S_Daedalus 10y ago
  It would be a powerful argument, except that Thiel's money wasn't as instrumental in killing Gawker as Gawker's own behavior. The same attacks levied against, say, the NYT wouldn't have accomplished anything except losing Thiel money.
  - shard972 10y ago
    I feel like we are getting to a scary place in society when you can spin funding a successful lawsuit into suppressing free speech. I mean if Tiel was pouring millions after millions into failing lawsuits that just aim to drain whatever money he can sure but a single successful lawsuit?
    - sangnoir 10y ago
      > I feel like we are getting to a scary place in society when you can spin funding a successful lawsuit into suppressing free speech. It's not spin if it is true: a suit does not need to be successful to ruin the targeted victim - simply defending yourself from a lawsuit costs a lot of money, good luck defending yourself from a well-resourced nemesis. Without commenting on Gawker's culpability, I will draw parallels to Mother Jones, which was also sued by a billionaire[1] (Vandersloot), but they managed to beat the suit. Incensed, VanderSloot set up a million dollar fund available to pay the legal expenses of people wanting to sue Mother Jones or other members of the "liberal press."[1] MoJo even weighed in on Thiel v Gawker, stating For the likes of VanderSloot, Adelson, Thiel, and Trump, the courts have become an avenue not so much for vindication, but for exacting a price[2]. They've been in the trenches, I'll take their word over people who assume only the guilty get punished by the justice system. 1. http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/10/mother-jones-vandersloot-melaleuca-lawsuit http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/10/mother-jones-vander... 2.http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/thiel-trump-vandersloot-lawsuit http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/thiel-trump-vand...
      - Chris2048 10y ago
        > likes of VanderSloot, Adelson, Thiel, and Trump > They've been in the trenches Thiel isn't like the others in that list. And was Thiel and the others not "in the tranches" too?
unfunco 10y ago
The article links to a story about Free Basics, specifically the sentence: And the whole thrust of his company’s strategy is to persuade billions of future users that Facebook is the only bit of the internet they really need. I think mentioning Thiel is valid, I outright disagree with what Gawker did, but Thiel then hid behind a different and unrelated lawsuit to enact his revenge, both Zuckerberg and Thiel have the money to oppress those that can't match the size of their wallets and they're doing so, the comparison is fair.
- labster 10y ago
  One sentence with a tangential reference. Whoop-dee-doo. This is not good for an article about how Facebook is closing the web. The print edition won't even include a link due to technical reasons. The comparison to Thiel may be fair if a comparison was made in the article. Instead we get this: Interestingly, Thiel is also a member of Facebook’s board of directors. Super-convincing. Actually, parent post is far more convincing than the article, which seems to think that illegal speech somehow deserves first amendment protection.
  - Melk 10y ago
    Scroll down. There is an entire paragraph about Thiel.
orionblastar 10y ago
Gawker was basically a Supermarket News Rag Tabloid on the Internet and sort of like TMZ trying to dig dirt on celebrities. Hulk Hogan got hit really bad when they found he was using racist words in the video, and they tried to blackmail Hulk Hogan and threaten to release the sex tape if he didn't pay it. Hogan didn't pay, the sex tape was released and he lost his job at WWE and they erased him from most of their history. HHH and the McMahons want a PG rated show, and won't allow R-Rated stuff on their show as they try to appeal to children now with the action figures and other toys.
bambax 10y ago
Because Thiel is a board member of FB. If Zuckerberg is committed to openness and "freedom" he should distance himself from Thiel; that he doesn't highlights his hypocrisy.
throwanem 10y ago
Your use of the present imperfect strikes me as unduly optimistic. Facebook's user base is roughly a quarter of the species. It mediates the social interactions of a sizable subset thereof. Network effect implicitly penalizes those who don't behave so as to generate value. To do so requires that you participate. It is trivial to enter, and as difficult as can be made practicable to exit. Those within often enough distrust those without, simply because the distinction exists. What is this if not a walled garden? What is a walled garden if not this?

49531 10y ago

There are a lot of other organizations and corporations I would say are doing more to kill the internet than Facebook. I don't think everyone who builds something on the web should be compelled to be open. Who cares that Facebook is a walled garden? I'd say their investments is open source tools has outweighed the fact that my grandma spends her browsing time in a silo.

Aqueous 10y ago

I think that in spite of Facebook and other 'walled gardens' or 'silos,' the web is more open now than it's ever been, even if it's tempting to argue otherwise. Everything you need to build a web application like Facebook is free to try and use, up to a certain amount of traffic at least. AWS, Heroku, and other platforms make it possible to develop and host a complete web application for free and to make it publicly available on the Internet for anyone to use for free. Most of the technologies that underlie Facebook are freely available as open source. There are billions of freely available tutorials and communities built around programmers helping each other for free (some of whom, I'm sure, work for Facebook). So I don't buy the notion that FB has 'pulled up the ladder behind them' so to speak, as the article insists it has. Nor do I believe that it has the power right now to do so. The only thing Facebook has done that the author seems to object to is to be extraordinarily, unprecedentedly successful. There are a lot of things I find toxic about Facebook, but I don't begrudge it its success.

Melk 10y ago
>The only thing Facebook has done that the author seems to object to is to be extraordinarily, unprecedentedly successful. Where does he say that? You just described an open web and then somehow attributed all of that to Facebook. If Facebook were to replace the Internet like Zuckerberg would love to do then none of the things you described would still be possible. >There are a lot of things I find toxic about Facebook Sir Tim and I agree with you on that.
S_Daedalus 10y ago
Less like a silo, and more of flytrap for the unwary and unprepared.
destructionator 10y ago
> AWS, Heroku, and other platforms make it possible to develop and host a complete web application for free and to make it publicly available on the Internet for anyone to use for free. I have been running complete web applications from home for free for anyone to use for a long time. That is what the web is about - you don't need a dedicated, centralized host. Anyone can connect to it and anyone can run servers on it. It isn't terribly difficult to do, nor costly, I do it on a budget residential broadband connection. Granted, it might not scale to millions of users, but neither will heroku's or AWS's free/low-cost tiers either.

bluejekyll 10y ago

This is a challenging debate. What does it mean to be open vs. closed. And what would a service like Facebook look like if it was "open"? > the Facebook founder has no intention of allowing anyone to build anything on his platform that does not have his express approval. I assume this is based on the fact that you can not directly use facebooks APIs, and can not utilize Facebook itself. Facebook does allow for people to link out to other sites content, so in that way there is no barrier to seeing external sources in Facebook. An external site can't extend the experience of Facebook though, but I don't know of any successful web business that does allow this. I'm curious of examples that actually meet the definition of open which he's using. Almost all sites require a form of login, many news sites are putting up paywalls, and there have always been private services requiring login to get at secure data. So, the openness that I think people want, is access to the Facebook user base, but I would argue that everyone already has that, in is the rest of the web. The difference is Facebook is not going to give that to any other companies, because that user base is their revenue stream. To me this isn't a problem until people are incapable of accessing anything other than Facebook. This would be like the AOL of 1992, before most AOL users realized there was more to the Internet than what AOL gave them. I don't think people will want to go back to that. But competition will constintently pull on this. Email is not dead, Messenger is not the only messenging platform. Btw, I find myself barely ever using Facebook these days. And a question, what sites operate in the way this article wants? There were no examples. Reddit?

AnthonyMouse 10y ago
> Almost all sites require a form of login Almost no sites require a form of login. You can login to most sites, but primarily so that you can keep a persistent pseudonym and set preferences. You can browse almost every site without logging in. There is nothing that stops you from e.g. linking to a YouTube video from your own site regardless of whether you have a YouTube account. For Facebook you need an account to even see the large majority of the content. > So, the openness that I think people want, is access to the Facebook user base, but I would argue that everyone already has that, in is the rest of the web. The difference is Facebook is not going to give that to any other companies, because that user base is their revenue stream. Which is why people dislike them. Who wants to be somebody else's "revenue stream"? Replacing Facebook with a decentralized social network that no single party controls would be better for everyone but Facebook.

20yrs_no_equity 10y ago

Violating someone's privacy by publishing them having sex is not protected by the first amendment. Maybe you think it should be. I personally think it is protected if the people being photographed consent to the publication, and a violation of privacy if they don't. (Privacy and free speech are both human rights, they don't conflict.) We can have that conversation, though, if you think that privacy isn't a human right. But the people who are upset about this don't seem to be talking about that. They don't talk in terms of human rights, they paint Theil as a bad guy and try to paint him as being opposed to freedom of speech. But can you cite a single quote from Theil that has him on the record as opposing freedom of speech? We should not accept this kind of smear as if it were legitimate argument. It doesn't appeal to reason or argument it is characterization. And it is eating all discourse. For every time I see an actual argument against a policy of Trumps (notice how they dragged him into it?) I see at least 150 claims that he is a racist. Not quoting him saying something racist, just a smear. And that ratio is probably higher, because to be honest I haven't seen any coverage of Trump in the last 6 months that makes a good reasoned argument against one of his positions. It's not like it's hard. Here's one of Trumps positions I disagree with: We should have open borders. Closed borders is really saying that a company can't hire who they want to hire- that you can't hire the best and the brightest in the world and bring them to america, one of the things that made america great in the past. We shouldn't nationalize talent we should have a free market in it and let anyone who has a job offer (at least, there are legitimate arguments for an even lower bar) come to the country. There. That's an actual argument against a Trump position. A similar argument could be made against Theil. They almost make one against Zuckerberg (but in the end they resort to characterization of Facebook as a "walled garden", which by that definition means The Guardian is a walled garden because the editors control what is published on their site.) Discourse is dying. Don't let it.

shitgoose 10y ago

this article reminds me of an old Soviet joke: an army psychologist shows soldier a brick and asks "what do you think about when you look at this?". Soldier answers "chicks!". Psychologist "chicks?? why?". Soldier "i always think about them". some bizarre chain of reasoning: Lee, Zuckerberg, Thiel... Trump???

intended 10y ago

Wow, the article is terrible and doesn't do anything to express the hypocricy of Facebook. Heres why Facebook and Zuckerberg are hypocritical - Freebasics and net neutrality. Freebasics is a closed system, with FB as the gatekeeper. In its previous iteration it was internet.org. Only the utter debacle (for FB) that was the Indian Netneutrality debate, caused FB to rebrand to the more accurate :freebasic. Before that they were happy to portray themselves as providers of the internet to the poor. When asked why they needed a model that created them as gatekeeper, instead of cheap/free/advertizer supported internet with actual openness, they tweaked their model but were tone deaf to the gatekeeper role. With NN, they support it in the states in order to combat telecoms. In India and in other places, they support telecoms and Anti NN positions to further their ability to be the only site users go to. Zuckerberg is old enough to know the difference between walled gardens and open internet, as are most of his engineers. Discussing hypocrisy would indicate some sort of moral center in the first place. Facebook is for itself, and is a creature for the perpetuation of its existence.

jondubois 10y ago

The ending of this article reminded me of Peter Thiel's article "Competition is for Losers" http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536 http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-l... Peter Thiel's article is really well researched but his conclusions about monopolies are wrong and dangerous. Monopolies are terrible for society - Monopolies allow companies to enforce arbitrary rules which everyone must follow with no means of escape (it's essentially a total dictatorship). If you got fired from such a company, where else would you work? The CEO could literally just rape anyone they wanted and no one would be able to speak up. Worse than that; the media will probably tell you that it's actually an honour and you should be thankful! What sort of world is that? Then he uses past history - The fact that monopolistic companies like Google tend to encourage and reward innovation as an example of why monopolies are good but he completely omits the fact that Sergey and Larry were raised in a highly competitive environment (and that's why Google is like this). Wait a few generations and you're going to see the elite 'inheriting' class develop into a generation of spoiled entitled brats who have no interest for innovation because they're too busy having fun. It sounds like Peter Thiel wants to turn Facebook into a mega-corporation to take over the world. He has a very black-and-white view of the world which I find really dangerous. He thinks that there is one correct way to do things and that this way is always correct. The biggest problem is that as soon as you allow a corporation to get a world-dominating monopoly, there will be NO WAY OUT - That corporation will always have the power to manipulate the media and keep everyone locked in their places - There will be NO GOING BACK. Peter Thiel severely underestimates human greed and ego (both of which he has plenty of). His monopoly idea is only good for people like him - The fact that he thinks it's good for EVERYONE just shows how out of touch he and his friends are.

throwanem 10y ago

This could have been a great article, but its author mistook a strong position for a weak one and dragged in Thiel, Gawker, and Trump. This foolish attempt to bolster something that didn't require it has totally confused the issue, to the point where everyone here is arguing over matters that have no significance to the question ostensibly at hand. It's a real shame. There's a conversation around Facebook that needs very badly to happen. A better article than this one could have done much to advance it. But the structural flaws evident here render the work useless, or worse than that.

atnixxin 10y ago

I don't think this adequately covers why Facebook is no friend of the open web. What the company tried to do in India with FreeBasics (and I'm a co-founder of the campaign that fought them off), was carve out a part of the open web for themselves. Factor this: 1. Websites had to apply to be available to FreeBasics users, else not. 2. They had to conform to Facebook's technical requirements (which could have arbitrarily been changed by Facebook), and more importantly, comply with Facebook's own terms and conditions. 3. The data-cost differential between the open web and FreeBasics meant that users would have gotten some information, but would think twice before accessing the open web because it would cost them to do so. 4. This is from sources, but the figure that Facebook mentions for people accessing the open web after "trying" free basics is merely the number of people who have clicked on a link, not those who have bought data connections. So it's hardly an on-ramp. 5. In India, we have the only data ever released about FreeBasics, in terms of users: only 20% of users who used FreeBasics till May 2015 had never used the Internet before. 6. There's a better way of increasing Internet access than this. Facebook has ignored other models for providing Free Internet access: the equal rating models from Mozilla, for example. 7. Countries in the EU where Zero Rating has been implemented showed that ISPs had a lower tendency to drop data rates for regular usage. One journalist in Gujarat (an Indian state) told me how retailers stopped pitching FreeBasics to customers because the service was being marketed as "FreeNet: Free Internet service", and customers found that they were being billed for using sites other than FreeBasics sites. We run the risk of Facebook becoming the primary and perhaps only site accessed, as has been indicated by surveys done in Indonesia (by LirneAsia) and Nigeria (I think; by Quartz). The bigger risk is the notion that because the platform is entirely controlled by them, they define the norms, they get to control creation of content and services. The Internet, when access is neutral, is a place where all users are equal, and all users are both consumers and creators. A better product or a smarter strategy, or fund-raising capability has the ability to challenge giants: Facebook beat myspace. Non-neutral Internet access creates separates consumers from creators, and reduces the freedom that creators have to innovate. Facebook is doing what is best for its business, not for the open web. Look at what has happened in case of Instant Articles, and the reach of fan pages: Facebook is prioritizing publishing on its own platform and giving that content greater reach with users. It has also deprecated reach for fan pages. Of course, it's not that changes in google search and youtube's algorithm don't hurt creators, but with Facebook, what is clear is that the intent isn't increasing relevance: it is exercising control to improve monetization. Publishers who are going with Instant Articles are missing the long game: the bait-and-switch. So yes, Facebook celebrating the open web looks hypocritical.