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We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon

• Veratyr 9y ago
  I totally agree that Google, Facebook and Amazon have too much power and too little accountability. However they're all global companies and as bad as they are, I trust all of them more than I trust the US government (I am not American). Can you even imagine how their business would work when these are state entities? You're no longer buying ad placements from a marketing company, you're buying them from the US government. You're no longer selling product through a third-party storefront, you're selling through the US government. Google and Facebook, two of the most important information gateways, are now controlled by the US Congress and Senate. All that information on people all over the world is now in the hands of the US government. The very thought of this terrifies me.
  • piaste 9y ago
    I'm not sure it would be such a huge difference from now, when the US government can go through the NSA to acquire data from internet companies. Surely if you had a document the contents of which you wouldn't want the US government to know, you already wouldn't put it on Google Drive? But you raise another important point. What happens to all the infrastructure and personnel that Google or Amazon have outside the US? Ireland and the Netherlands probably don't feel the same way about hosting a branch of the US Government as they do about a global corporation, and vice versa the US government wouldn't want the same level of scrutiny from foreign governments that Google does. Would European countries attempt to nationalize their local Facebook datacenters? Would it effectively break those colossi apart along national borders?
    • hueving 9y ago
      It's more than who has access to the data, it's also who sets the policies for acceptable content and the direction of the products.
    • naibafo 9y ago
      I would say there is a difference. Right now my assumption would be that American Law Enforcement could target someone to have access to everything. And they might be able to surveil unencrypted traffic. But I do not think that they are always reading anybodies WhatsApp messages. Nationalized that assumption couldn't be made anymore.
  • yahna 9y ago
    They are american companies first and you should trust them even less because they are open to corruption by the US government.
  • mmmnt 9y ago
    I guess the idea is that each country or region has its own Google, Facebook or Amazon - Not that it all belongs to the US government. I would also argue that they are US companies first and global companies second. Their main focus is always USA and their spirit is also very American for the good and the bad. Strategy for the rest of the world is made in the USA. All important decision are made in the USA. Most investments are made in the USA and also the profits go to the USA. This is nor good or bad but the point is that those are not global companies.
    • naibafo 9y ago
      According to [1] 75% of Facebook Users are located outside the US. And According to [2] India has more Facebook Users than the US. The statistics differ somehow, though they both should be current, but the point remains: Facebook is very much a global company. I am sure that you can find similar statistics for Google or Amazon. [1] https://brandongaille.com/facebook-user-statistics-by-country-and-age/ https://brandongaille.com/facebook-user-statistics-by-countr... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-based-on-number-of-facebook-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-...
      • mmmnt 9y ago
        I didn't say that their audience is not outside of the USA. Feel free to re-read what I wrote. Think about it like that. BMW sells most of their cars outside of Germany but still is a German company that operates world wide. And this is very true for most big companies today.
  • visarga 9y ago
    Maybe nationalization is a bad way to go about it, but these companies are too large, they have too much power over society and society needs to exert power back onto them. So there should be some kind of external oversight when decisions that affect millions of people are being made. I think governments are inefficient and corrupt, but companies are absolutely free to do as they please when deciding how to change products that affect society. Also, there is much more spying freedom in the private sector. This is why there should be a mechanism to oversee what happens with our data.
    • simonh 9y ago
      You mean like a set of regulations these companies had to comply with? Maybe with panels of ordinary citizens to adjudicate their application, overseen by a professional expert. Maybe we could call these regulations 'laws'.
    • igravious 9y ago
      Largest companies by annual revenue[0]: WalMart Stores (US) - $485.8bn State Grid (China) - $315.1bn Sinopec (China) - $267.5bn China Natural Petroleum (China) - $262.6bn Toyota Motor (Japan) - $254.7bn Volkswagen (Germany) - $240.2bn Royal Dutch Shell (Netherlands) - $240bn Berkshire Hathaway (US) - $223.6bn Apple (US) - $215.6bn Exxon Mobil (US) - $205bn None are the big three. Should we nationalize Toyota and Volkswagen also? [0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/07/20/revealed-worlds-10-largest-companies-revenue/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/07/20/revealed-worl...
      • TrickyRick 9y ago
        Are you more or less forced to buy a Toyota simply because all your friends drive a Toyota? Is the majority of roads exclusive to Toyotas? If you question a business decision of Toyota, or a design of their car, can you then sell said car and purchase one from another brand with minimal impact on your daily life (Other than the fact that you have to sell and buy a car)? Clearly it's not just about revenue numbers here.
      • kiliantics 9y ago
  • panic 9y ago
    If Google and Facebook were nationalized, why would they need to sell ads?
    • poooogles 9y ago
      Same reason that BBC Worldwide does.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    • dragonwriter 9y ago
      The same reason the postal service does. They still have to pay the bills.
      • majewsky 9y ago
        I could see Facebook and Google move to a subscription-style model. People would easily pay, say, 3$ per month for Facebook and 5$ per month for Google if it was the only option. (Prices should be lower in less developed regions, of course.) Once freed from the prime directive of collecting increasing amounts of data to improve ad tracking, operating and development costs should be much lower than they are now, too.
        • zild3d 9y ago
          > People would easily pay, say, 3$ per month for Facebook and 5$ per month for Google if it was the only option If people had to pay a monthly fee for search or social media, it would very quickly not be the only option anymore
    • simonh 9y ago
      Where would you prefer the funding to come from?
  • papey 9y ago
    The current situation is close to what you describe (PRISM, etc...)
  • mikojan 9y ago
    This is such a widespread idea I wonder where it comes from. At least your government (hopefully) is a somewhat democratic institution and is to that extend accountable and is providing standard procedures to make it more accountable if you believe it ought to be. There's no such thing in Facebook or Google. Managers dictate policy and if you don't like it you can leave/stop using their service.
    • Veratyr 9y ago
      My government is far more democratic than the US but I still wouldn't trust it with that kind of power. Democracy is nice and all but the representative democracy most of the world is ruled by puts people who are good at getting elected in power rather than people who are good at running a country. Google/Facebook don't have that problem, their leaders are there on merit rather than their charisma, popularity or the lies they told. Also, Google/Facebook are very much regulated by data protection authorities in the countries they operate in.
  • pdkl95 9y ago
    > I trust all of them more than I trust the US government Governments don't deserve your trust. The same goes for business. Trusting either is is a terrible idea, because power corrupts wherever it accumulates. While public and private use power in different ways, they are both a serious threat when they are allowed to act without regular check on their power. The solution isn't to pick sides. Power needs to be diluted regularly, and that happens when government and business work as checks on each other. It is the conflict itself that keeps power from accumulating. > Can you even imagine how their business would work when these are state entities? They already are, in all but name. Remember Prism? > All that information on people all over the world is now in the hands of the US government. That ship already sailed, unfortunately. I agree that this is a terrifying problem, but I'm not sure how to fix it. However, consider this: right now there are effectively no restraints on that power. Nationalizing/utilifying Google et al at least introduces the opportunity to add regulation by bringing the problem into public scrutiny.
    • dsfyu404ed 9y ago
      >Trusting either is is a terrible idea, because power corrupts wherever it accumulates. Concentrated power is also concentrated responsibility. It's the lack of individual power for any one member that makes groups (governments, companies, political organizations, etc) untrustworthy. When nobody feels like they have enough individual power to do what they consider right they also do not feel responsible for doing wrong. They're just doing their jobs.
  • 659087 9y ago
    > All that information on people all over the world is now in the hands of the US government. The very thought of this terrifies me. I hate to tell you this, but that barn door was already left open a long time ago.
• polotics 9y ago
  Wow this guy does not mention taxation and the huge advantage governments bestow upon large companies by making it possible to engineer taxes away, an opportunity much less open to small companies. Instead he wants a merger with the biggest responsibility-shirking enterprise of all: the state!
• ucaetano 9y ago
  The author spends a long time talking about how companies are planning to make money (shocking news!) on AI, and then concludes with "What’s the answer? Nationalization!" But he forgot to ask the question he's trying to answer. This article doesn't even make sense.
• an_account 9y ago
  Governments have broken up large companies in the past, and that works out pretty well. Why suggest nationalization over that? The article only mentions “huge economies of scale”, but doesn’t do a good job convincing me that there isn’t room for broken up Amazons, Google’s, etc. On the other hand, nationalization is a terrible idea for so many reason. It also goes against the fabric of the American economonic system. I know it’s opinion, but hard to believe that the guardian published this with how poorly written it is.
  • linkregister 9y ago
    Considering their irresponsible painting of Whatsapp's end-to-end encryption re-key scheme as a "backdoor", I no longer can be surprised by The Guardian's lack of editorial quality.
• featherverse 9y ago
  That's the _worst_ idea I've heard this week. First of all, "Nationalizing" corporations is not something that free societies do. Second, the effect of this would be to further stifle competition from smaller businesses. Which is also not something that free societies do. I question the motives of the author.
  • kagamine 9y ago
    You keep saying "not something that free societies do" as though that phrase in itself has meaning, but fail to explain why. From a socialist's pov putting a profitable industry in the domain of _everyone_ and sharing the profits is freeing capital from the few and providing an (more)equal share to all. It's not capitalism but that does not mean it isn't "freedom". What is "freedom"? Market competition The way Amazon, Uber etc have been set up, using hundreds of millions in investment, able to operate against smaller competitors for literally years without breaking even until the opposition is crushed and consumers are herded into being customers... is that freedom? Maybe for the already established wealthy. For everyone else it's an unfair advantage. There is no freedom for the average Joe to start a publishing an distribution powerhouse I agree it's a terrible idea to nationalize these companies, but citing 'freedom' as the reason why is not why it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea because it would lead to excessive bureaucracy, higher prices and is unlikely to benefit the competition much. It might help governments get those companies to pay some tax though.
    • CryptoPunk 9y ago
      >From a socialist's pov putting a profitable industry in the domain of _everyone_ and sharing the profits is freeing capital from the few and providing an (more)equal share to all. It's not capitalism but that does not mean it isn't "freedom". I don't believe all ideologies and their definitions need to be given equal respect. Socialists shouldn't get to just redefine "freedom" to mean a government monopoly running major industries, by outlawing private citizens from owning productive enterprises in those industries, and have everyone else accept their definitions as equally valid as a classical liberal's. Think about it practically for a moment: what is the government going to do when private citizens in another country fire up thousands of servers and begin providing web services to the people within the government's jurisdiction? Put up a firewall? Start raiding anyone running a relay node that bypasses the firewall? How is that congruent with any reasonable definition of freedom? We can pretend that we're frameless and judging all perspectives as equally valid, but in actuality that will never happen, as it would make any sort of meaningful communication impossible. Someone could argue war is peace, slavery is freedom, etc, and there would be no way to reject their statements as unequivocally wrong. We would be uttering words to each other that mean completely different things to different people, because we would no longer follow the basic convention of language, which is that the widely observed and long established definition trumps the unorthodox one.
• dasil003 9y ago
  > For the briefest moment in March 2014, Facebook’s dominance looked under threat. Ello, amid much hype, presented itself as the non-corporate alternative to Facebook. Okay, this is a terrible opener. Ello never appeared to have any greater traction than as a hipster fad, much less posing a material threat to Facebook. Also, you can not nationalise any of the companies listed, because they are not British nor of Commonwealth country origin. Perhaps we could nationalize, but that's not really Trump's style.
  • corobo 9y ago
    Yeah I think I registered on Ello just to get my preferred username if it did become popular (after missing out on early Twitter) and haven't really thought about it until just now
  • aestetix 9y ago
    When Ello first arrived, I saw it as a very welcome competitor to Twitter/Facebook, and was using it. The questions of "how will Ello make enough money to survive?" came up. I was one of the vocal supporters of a paid account, as I would gladly pay them $5 a month just to help them continue to exist. In the end they took money from VCs, at which point I promptly stopped using them. I can't speak for anyone else, but their move to take VC money instead of my money is largely what killed their traction for me.
  • smarinov 9y ago
    Yeah, I agree. Most of us haven't even heard of it until now…
• okket 9y ago
  Imagine there would only be only one car company where you could by good, affordable cars for some reason. Now image this car company would not be an American one. I'd say there were national regulations, taxations and tariffs in about zero seconds.
  • icebraining 9y ago
    There are already national regulations and taxes that apply to Google, Facebook and Amazon. Hell, there's a story on the front page right now about that.
    • honestoHeminway 9y ago
      The big three have reached escape velocity when it comes to laws there.
• euyyn 9y ago
  By "we" does he mean the UK? How do you nationalise a multinational?
  • Scarblac 9y ago
    This is the secret reason why the Netherlands is giving all these multinationals a tax deal if they register their companies there.
  • semperdark 9y ago
    I thought that was funny as well. If anyone's going to be nationalizing them, it'd be the US, and I'd wager that non-US residents would like that even less.
• nl 9y ago
  The politics of this discussion is really interesting. I think this might be the only substantial policy topic where The (progressive leaning) Guardian and (fairly right-wing) Breitbart[1] both push roughly the same approach. The thing both have in common is that they are media destinations, and are deadly afraid of the the power Google and Facebook have to direct traffic. Not sure why Amazon is included in this though.. [1] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/07/28/report-steve-bannon-wants-google-facebook-to-be-regulated-like-utilities/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/07/28/report-steve-bannon...
• olau 9y ago
  Actually, I think behind the nationalisation idea, which doesn't seem workable given the circumstances, there's an interesting thought: these companies are sitting on basic infrastructure so instead of treating them like other companies, perhaps we should treat them like utilities. Note that this piece appears in The Guardian. I don't know how it works in the US, but I'm of the impression that in many European countries, basic infrastructure like energy or transportation or communication links is either very tightly regulated or owned by a non-profit organisation that in turn is owned by either the local consumers, the local authorities, or by the state. DNS operates in this way, as far as I'm aware. Can we move in this direction with things like search (Google) and personal publishing (Facebook)? Perhaps if the tech community delivers the software, and the societies themselves start a serious discussion about it and delivered the users?
  • lucb1e 9y ago
    This would also make me a lot happier about sharing info with said companies. Right now I avoid their products (the non-open source ones) because they just have too much market share and power, but if a site like Facebook turned non-profit I'd be much happier to use it. It just sounds like a great idea all around.
    • 2bitencryption 9y ago
      Facebook goes "non-profit" -> becomes regulated in terms of privacy/earnings -> competing social network springs up -> is able to advertise and boast features that the "non-profit public" Facebook cannot have due to cost or regulations -> new social network is now the de-facto Facebook, and you're right where you started. and this is assuming that the whole "lets beg Mr. Zuck to pretty pretty please stop doing that whole business thing and start serving us for free, we'd appreciate it" thing works out.
      • int_19h 9y ago
        I'm not at all convinced that there are any substantial new features that would overcome the inertia of lock-in (via one's existing connections). I mean, G+ couldn't do it, and Google tried damn hard. If they can't do it at their scale, who can?
• bem94 9y ago
  I think a lot of the "oh my gosh nationalisation is such an awful idea" / "not in my free society" comments are missing the point. I too believe nationalisation is a bad idea in this case, but given the enormous reaction it would bring, can you imagine how awful the situation appears to be from the authors (any many other non-tech-bubble) peoples perspective to even contemplate such a thing? Let alone write an opinion piece in a national news paper. You can argue it is a bad idea all you like, but ultimately, Facebook Google and Amazon are building something that scares people. Scared people do stupid things. If the tech bubble does not look at articles like this as symptoms of a growing scepticism, or a check on the implicit (and often abused) trust of their users, then the backlash is only going to grow. The tech bubble inhabitants will have only themselves to blame. You can argue all you like about whether people are logically correct to fear the big three. What matters is that they are fearful, and how the bubble reacts to that.
  • jpttsn 9y ago
    Are you sure the authors are writing this story out of a genuine heartfelt fear? Do you think the editor who published them shares this genuine fear?
    • gaius 9y ago
      The Graun is ideologically committed to nationalising all the things. It would be noteworthy if they ever called for anything to remain private, let alone be privatised. Having said that there's a decent case for Google being broken up.
      • smcl 9y ago
        That just isn't true at all
        • gaius 9y ago
          I guess you have some links to pro-privatisation articles in the Graun then?
• ben_jones 9y ago
  Why don't we just nationalize the compute power? There is a billion dollar barrier to entry to offer services like Youtube for free. Nobody is going to do it because they don't have a giant Ad company to subsidize it.
  • flukus 9y ago
    Why nationalize what we can distribute? There is no reason a future youtube has to be centralized and many good reasons that it shouldn't be.
    • visarga 9y ago
      I am amazed that there is no open source, distributed search engine to rival Google. We let Google get too much data about us. Search engine research has advanced a lot, we can use that.
      • Mediterraneo10 9y ago
        "Search engine research has advanced a lot, we can use that." A strong part of Google's search engine results is leveraging the data it has from Google Maps (including the almost unique Google Street View), actions tracked through the user’s Google account, and proprietary image-recognition technologies. It’s hard for another party to compete with that; Google hasn't been a mere web crawler in a long, long time.
• yahna 9y ago
  Nah. Just rip them apart and start going after them for anti-trust reasons. Instead of going after Apple for harming consumers with their ebook BS (actually, in addition to) go after Amazons monopoly on the space.
• honestoHeminway 9y ago
  How about a monopoly tax for market dominating companys, whos money is rerouted into VC or Darpa projects?
• empath75 9y ago
  We'd do better by nationalizing Comcast and Verizon, tbh.
• ajdlinux 9y ago
  A further alternative - require that certain businesses that reach this level of monopolistic influence transition into some kind of Public Benefit Corporation. I don't quite know what this would look like, but I'm thinking of some kind of framework where we develop controls and accountability mechanisms on a company-by-company basis.
• tuxt 9y ago
  The answer is no.
• orblivion 9y ago
  The scary thing is that you'll find conservatives are going to come on board with this, if you pay attention to ruminations recently. They're very concerned about censorship. I am as well, but I'm too libertarian to want the government to be the solution.
• Animats 9y ago
  What if we had tax brackets for corporations, as we do for individuals? Tie them to market share? As market share goes up, so does the tax rate.
• panic 9y ago
  Facebook in particular should really be governed by its users, whether that's indirectly under the public ownership of a democratic state, or directly through some built-in form of democratic governance. Nobody should have so much power without some form of accountability.
  • jedmeyers 9y ago
    People had voted to give them this power, by signing up to use the services. They are free to leave any time.
• visarga 9y ago
  FB, Google, Amazon should be split on many levels. The companies, the datacenters, the data. Especially the user data. The new system should federated, like email and SMS, with account and user data portability. There should be public access to the unique datasets these companies collected from user interactions - all done in a privacy conscious way, for the betterment of sciences and society. We can't let this valuable, unique data (that only exists in the largest companies of their field) benefit only those companies. It's our data, ultimately.
• ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  Flashback time, anybody remember when AIG insured multiple claims on the same pieces of property which were overvalued and unable to be paid for by an individual plebe's income, and got Congress to use everyone else's money to pay for this business practice by having the Treasury/Fed buy shares of AIG? And then AIG used the surplus floated capital to give bonuses to the executives and traders, because that quarter happened to be awesome, numerically. And then AIG was part of a lawsuit that sued the Treasury/Fed under the expropriation clause of the 5th Amendment because the value of the shares was not deemed correct? Well. ultimately the Fed made like an 80 billion profit, 1/12th of what they make from annual tax collection, so if they keep that up maybe they won't even levy income taxes to fund the Federal Government's general operations anymore. With that logic, nationalize all the things because I can't stand paying for the general operation of this plunder. Partial sarcasm.
• org3432 9y ago
  Nationalizing doesn't mean the decisions won't be for the benefit of a single person, a single person can manipulate them regardless, and the people will support it.
• 0xbear 9y ago
  I think we should start small, from, say, nationalizing the authors' personal possessions and primary residence.
  • NoGravitas 9y ago
    We're coming for your toothbrush, 0xbear.
    • 0xbear 9y ago
      μολὼν λαβέ :-)
• adrianmonk 9y ago
  So the problem is that one big organization has all this data, and the solution is to put it all under the umbrella of a different organization? How does that help unless we assume that government can do less bad stuff with it than a private organization?
• gkya 9y ago
  As "googling" becomes the most common way most people obtain information, I believe we do need some means to provide for this need w/o private enterprise, and lots of new regulations to defend the users, e.g. in case of Facebook. Persons' private data has become an acceptable good traded silently behind the scenes. The industry needs to gain a means to maintain the quality of software, and basic software needs must be guaranteed by those who we appoint to furnish us roads, electricity and water. WRT nationalisation, well, nations are slowly becoming obsolete as globalisation progresses, and what is most apt instead is that we engineer a globally distributed system at least for search.
• marenkay 9y ago
  That misses an even more important point: At this point any kind of cloud environment should be considered public infrastructure. It is not so much about all these companies, it is more about being able to keep the things you bought after these services reach their inevitable deaths, as no company survives forever.
  • jedmeyers 9y ago
    > At this point any kind of cloud environment should be considered public infrastructure. Why? Public infrastructure like sewer, or roads, is tightly coupled with the fact that it's close to impossible to gain physical land/space to build a second one. AWS/Azure on the other hand neither blocking you from accessing the land nor implemented any regulatory capture to prohibit you from building your own version of cloud infrastructure.
• TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
  Not sure if that's the right path to take, but I definitely agree something need to be done to add further consumer protections. Many people have a large chunk of their lives tied up tightly into their ecosystems, with no simple way out. I've been reflecting on the impact of oauth / openid during the last few years. For some people, losing your Facebook or Google account could mean ending up locked out of dozens, if not hundreds, of services! Haven't checked Facebook's TOS, but Google's TOS says they can shut down your account at any time. Considering the size and reach of both, I think they should be required to at least provide a reasonable migration period before fully closing down an end-user's account.
  • simonh 9y ago
    At a minimum you should be able to export your data for some period after account suspension. At the moment are there any cases where they summarily delete everything? I've been thinking about automating a periodic export but not got round to it. I know they have APIs and services for this under the DLF project but I've not looked into it yet. Does anyone have experience with this?
• Steveorevo 9y ago
  https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org
  • pferde 9y ago
    Don't bother. It turned into yet another microblogging echo chamber with nothing but propaganda and RSS newsbot reposts.
• csdreamer7 9y ago
  Why doesn't the author mention Microsoft? Why hasn't anyone else mentioned Microsoft in the comments? Mobile might be what people use most of the time. But for productivity, specialty applications (X-Ray software, billing, medical applications, scientific, tool software, video editing, 3d rendering, ATMs, cash registers) Windows dominates. There is a huge body of software that can not be used on mobile. Bill Gates threatened to withdraw Windows from the market during the anti-trust trial. I assumed this would also include security patches and key registration. This would have threatened millions of businesses and government services. If you can have any argument against a tech company operating against the public interest you have to include Microsoft.
  • alpb 9y ago
    You should look at the Four Horsemen talk by Scott Galloway. Microsoft just doesn't possess the same power and market cap proportional to its age as these three companies. Note, Apple is also not mentioned.
• sidcool 9y ago
  In my opinion, apart from Medicare, Infrastructure, Law enforcement, Defence, Prison System and a few other should be nationalized, not Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft etc.
• bpodgursky 9y ago
  I don't know where they dredge up chimpanzees who can look at the glorious history of nationalization in Venezuela et all and say "yeah that really worked out well" It's pretty pathetic how the internet scum found a startup-oriented board and infested it with articles about nationalizing the tech startups the board was about founding. Congratulations, you found a thing someone else built and trashed it. Fittingly, now you're posting about using the long dick of the law to seize and destroy some more useful companies. At least we're globalized so they can leave you to live in the shithole you dig yourselves. Oh well. I was wasting time on HN anyway. At least it isn't fun to browse anymore, makes it easier to focus on building something a bunch of lowlifes can have wet dreams about stealing.
  • sctb 9y ago
    Maybe what's needed is just some cooling off, but it should be clear that you're not welcome to continue to violate the guidelines like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • bpodgursky 9y ago
      No, I just don't care anymore about my karma here. I was careful when the comments here were full of thoughtful people and interesting discussion, but I can't pretend to respect the current Zeitgeist. It's fine, I'm done here. Hopefully you can still get some kind of satisfaction here, but I'm going to look elsewhere.
• Quarrelsome 9y ago
  The sad thing is that I actually trust Google, Amazon and Facebook (maybe less the last two) more than I do the British government. Obviously that can change but at least these giants understand tech. Their response in the Snowdon leaks to being tapped was correct. The UK's response to any perceived threat is to question the validity of core technologies such as encryption. Nationalisation of the big tech services by government would just lead to pointless tail chasing as the they learn in the slowest possible way that the internet can route around the blockades they wish to implement. Giving the government something like Facebook is akin to giving the reins to some unchecked righteous teen who thinks they know how to make it all "better".
• jasiek 9y ago
  So currently, you have a choice not to use google/fb/amazon. If they were to be nationalized (a truly silly idea), you may lose that choice.
  • simonh 9y ago
    This might look like a silly comment, but it really isn't. Let's say FB was nationalised. So now if you want to contact your local government office you do so through Facebook. The library service is accessed through FB. Drivers Licenses and professional certifications are linked to your FB profile as are medical and criminal records. Government information and services would only be indexed in Google. Amazon would become a branch of the postal service and used to deliver passports and driving licenses. In practice you'd hardly be able to function without using them.
    • kbart 9y ago
      Don't know about other countries, but at least in Lithuania there are laws against such scenarios.
      • simonh 9y ago
        Sure, but in a scenario where the government was so interventionist and controlling that it nationalised a search engine, social engine and retailer how likely is it that such laws would stay on the books?
  • kbart 9y ago
    Nonsense. How can any democratic government force to use Google search, post pics in Facebook or buy from Amazon?
    • KGIII 9y ago
      By making the government services only accessible, discoverable, and provisioned by those companies, maybe?
• dcraw 9y ago
  Most people seem to be evaluating this question on an egalitarian premise: what's best for the greatest number of people? On that premise, taking money from very wealthy people and giving it to others will always seems appealing (even though it destroys wealth). But let's evaluate it from the premise of justice. By what principle can we remove control of these companies from those who created them? From those who have worked there and earned equity in them? From those who have invested in the public stock in order to fund growth and earn a return? By what principle can a government interfere with a private contract, one that has governed how a group of people work together for 15 or 20 years, and unilaterally break it? The argument is that the companies have too much power. But what kind of power? Can they take money out of your paycheck without your permission? Can they prevent you from erecting a building on your property without their approval? Can they imprison you for failing to appear at a hearing? There is a difference between government power and economic power. Government power is the power to compel, and it the source of the power is the army and the police, or, more bluntly, the gun. Economic power is the power to create. The source of economic power is the value that is offered. Sometimes a business offers something so valuable that people shape their lives around its presence and start to take it for granted. These are the businesses we punish most. Should we turn economic power into government power? The immediate implication is frightening. All three of these companies have well-staffed legal departments challenging the government's requests for private information about their users. Who will fight those requests when these companies are agencies of the executive office? The long term implications are devastating. Who will create the next Facebook, Google, or Amazon with the prospect of working 20 years and having it taken by force, as punishment for succeeding too much? And would a nationalized Google have created a self-driving car? Would a nationalized Amazon have invented AWS? Would a nationalized Facebook invest in high-speed internet for Africa? Nationalization destroys growth. Economic growth follows economic freedom. The world has experimented many times, and the theory and the experiments agree—Venezuela is only the most recent tragic example. At the root of any other argument is a desire to redistribute wealth.
• nanch 9y ago
  We need [Trump]'s administration to run Google. We need [Trump]'s administration to run Facebook. We need [Trump]'s administration to run Amazon. In 4 years, substitute your own -- no thanks. No offense, Nick Srnicek, but please keep the authoritarianism on that side of the pond.
• ckastner 9y ago
  I believe that the fact that the article doesn't compare the solution of nationalization with the prevalent alternative of breaking-up says all you need to know about the quality of the article. Hell, it doesn't even mention the alternative, even though it's the prevalent one.
• lvoudour 9y ago
  >We’ve only begun to grasp the problem, but in the past, natural monopolies like utilities and railways that enjoy huge economies of scale and serve the common good have been prime candidates for public ownership. The solution to our newfangled monopoly problem lies in this sort of age-old fix, updated for our digital age. It would mean taking back control over the internet and our digital infrastructure, instead of allowing them to be run in the pursuit of profit and power. The article is a mishmash of sensationalism and trending buzzwords. OK let's accept the argument that said companies are "too big". Why nationalize them? To nationalize a company you first have to ask the question what are the consequences for the nation if company X increases prices/fails/stops offering services? If the answer is not dire, you don't touch them I'll buy that search is important, but what's the vital utility of google apart from that, e-mail and maps? Android? Facebook is a chat/opinion/vanity medium, are we really saying that losing facebook (or whatsapp or whatever) access is a national emergency? I can't buy the argument about "our data". Privacy is important and mishandling of personal data should be severely punished, but that's not an argument for letting the state operate those companies - that's an argument for better laws and enforcement. And how do you nationalize a globally accessed service with limited physical national presence anyway? This is getting more silly by the minute There are antitrust/competition laws in every capitalist country, if a company is too big just break it - it won't be the first time or the last. If you think a company mishandles or has privileged access to something it shouldn't (your citizen's data) just punish it and limit its access.
  • jerrre 9y ago
    >Facebook is a chat/opinion/vanity medium, are we really saying that losing facebook (or whatsapp or whatever) access is a national emergency? Not a direct answer, but this triggered me to wonder how many relations/connections would be lost because people have no other details of each other than what's on facebook.
    • lvoudour 9y ago
      Sadly that's true, but the blame for this single point of failure falls entirely on those people. In this day and age it's inexcusable not to have multiple ways to contact people you care about.
• krylon 9y ago
  I am not opposed to public ownership of these companies per se. Letting them just go on uncontrolled does pose dangers we are just beginning to understand. But given rhe massive surveillance and largely uncontrolled data hoarding our governments and their intelligence agencies have engaged in, I do not think handing control of Google, Facebook and so forth over to the (any) government is a good idea. In the long run, we need to do something, bur I think we need to come up with a better idea.
• nnq 9y ago
  As a non-american, I'd be 100x times more scared of these giants being owned by the US gov. Actually I'd completely stop using the services of the two of them that I still use. I'll take a nice faceless profit driven shady corporation any time over a foreign government. Heck, what freaks me out the most about Facebook is that they act very unlike any of the classical profit driven corporations... which may mean they have other more dubious interest than "just profit". Profit-drivenness is in a sense "pure" and "fair"... when something is state owned/controlled it becomes infused with ideologies and these are known to make people do way more stupid and cruel things that the thirst for more money (hint: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol-Pot and their followers where not profit-driven!)
• tzury 9y ago
  "We need" - Who are WE? As far as I know, Google and Facebook helped and helping people in places where almost everything is nationalized - by providing alternative to local gov-controlled media by making the information and data available to anyone with internet connection. As far as I know, users are sharing and storing their data and trusting those organizations, rather than their governments. The problem starts when governments try to enforce the providers to tap or provide records our of their data centers. The internet is good as is, and improved every day, and will continue improving. We need no nationalization over here. Not really, thanks, but no!
  • 659087 9y ago
    > The internet is good as is, and improved every day, and will continue improving You consider mass centralization and being almost exclusively under the control of a few massive companies an "improvement"?
    • tzury 9y ago
      This will evolve and changed over time I believe. But, we are certainly in a far better place than we were 2 decades ago regarding freedom of speech and information availability, aren't we?
• janlukacs 9y ago
  Never reading a Guardian story again, crypto-communists - no other word for them, pretty much every day some kind of idiotic leftist agenda is being pushed.
  • ionised 9y ago
    You think the Guardian is communist? Haha, it's a left-of centre paper. They are not even close to genuinely socialist publication like the The Socialist or the Morning Star, which if you read I imagine would give you a heart attack. Do you think the Daily Mail is a moderate publication? I find the ideas people have of left and right so pointless and hilarious. It's just childish sports team politics.
  • nl 9y ago
    Steve Bannon proposed a fairly similar idea: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/07/28/report-steve-bannon-wants-google-facebook-to-be-regulated-like-utilities/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/07/28/report-steve-bannon...
• smegel 9y ago
  We need to stop posting links to the Guardian.
• radisb 9y ago
  If one considers the big three to have become a problem then there is a simple solution. One should just stop using them. Why bring politics into it? The users made them what they are, the users can undo it.
• norswap 9y ago
  You know who I trust less than Google, Facebook and Amazon? The U.S. government. Also "nationalize". The author seems blissfully unaware of the existence of other countries where said services operator (about 200 of them!).
• jondubois 9y ago
  I agree that advertising should be nationalised and Facebook is a particularly good target. Advertising makes capitalism more centralized; whoever has the biggest budget gets all the customers. Having worked for both big corporations and small companies in the tech industry, I'm certain that big corporations are less efficient overall; I think that they are successful in spite of their innefficiencies because of their advertising power. Centralization reduces the number of people who have wealth (increases inequality); there are so few of these people and their money is in such high demand (and they have so much of it) that they are effectively incapable of investing it efficiently - Their investing bandwidth is all used up (they are spammed-out with investment opportunities). If wealth was more spread out, more people could be investors and they would have more time to really think through and consider opportunities and because they would have less money on an individual basis, they would be much more careful about their investment decisions.
• golergka 9y ago
  You know, there's this simplistic view about the left - that it's only interested in taking things that other people have created, forcibly, and redistributing them. I wonder, where that simplistic view comes from.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• Grue3 9y ago
  Guardian just went full communist. Never go full communist.
• jmull 9y ago
  What a terrible idea. It's also a terrible article, since the conclusion isn't supported by the rest of the article. It gets in to some things about these new large companies that have problematical aspects but just grazes by on what those problems are. I guess the evil can just be assumed? Since the main problems haven't been clarified there's no way to argue about if or how nationalizing would help solve them. Meanwhile nationalizing has some huge issues of its own which aren't even hinted at here... (1) do we want the government controlling the platforms for our scocial interactions, purchases, and information retrieval? (2) these are global companies so you'd have to break both the company and the platforms they run by political boundary. How is that not nonsensical? There are other issues, but I'll leave it at two fatal flaws for now. As an alternative, why not regulate the problematical aspects of these companies? Let's figure out each one and determine a regulatory framework that lets us get to the root of the problem without stifling, and develop the regulations to drive it.
• Klockan 9y ago
  No, I don't want the people who are responsible for all of my data to also have the authority to put me in jail.
• Klockan 9y ago
  I doubt that it is possible to nationalize Facebook since it means that you no longer have a global user-base and creating inter-op between such complex systems is all but impossible especially when we have hundreds of countries. This means that any free actor with one system for the entire world will always provide a better experience, so as soon as you nationalize a service most users will migrate away from it making the whole thing moot.
• fetbaffe 9y ago
  Lets assume it would be possible to nationalize Google, Facebook and Amazon. But by whom? US government? So a nation should run a global company in everyone's interest? Everyone as in the entire population of the world? Why would I as a non-US-person use a US government system? Should I then as a non-US-person have a say in how the US run these companies? This does not make sense. I guess next article from Guardian will be like 'We Need to build a global government'.
• throw2016 9y ago
  Is this really leftism or a provocation? Either way it backfires by playing right into the simplistic right narrative of theft and jealousy and makes the left look like clueless out of touch jokers with no solutions for innovation and a weakness for ill thought sledge hammer constraints. It's a disgrace. The bigger problem is significant gains in western democracy and liberalism are being watered down with serious issues around regulatory capture, surveillance and accountability growing. Or current systems, laws and legislation would have been dealing with some of the privacy and market problems caused by Google, Facebook and Amazon. The EU is trying but it's not in the US interest to interfere with the growth of these companies for many reasons from surveillance to market domination so they will not meet legislation here.
• maus42 9y ago
  One fascinating question is which country should be responsible for nationalizing them. According to the Snowden leaks, the US government is already more than happy to cooperate with FB and Google and alike to spy on non-US citizens; handing the private data to the US government bureaucracy appears to be not much of an improvement from a point of view of an EU citizen Maybe these megaliths should be split according to the national boundaries, not unlike how the AT&T / Bell System was structured as a combination regional telephone companies.
• throw83123123 9y ago
  Nationalizing said companies might sound like a good idea at first but one must wonder if this is indeed for the better. In theory, we own the Govt. in a democracy but it's often realized that in practice, it is owned by whosoever can afford to lobby ignorant politicians, who often care neither for the profit of public industries, nor for their constituency composed of generic ignoramuses. This seems reminiscent of how 'communism' came to indicate a crony-capitalistic system with a single worst crony possible - the state itself. I for one don't believe public ownership is the same as being owned by a state agency.
• wslh 9y ago
  I share the sentiment that we are dealing with a new kind of companies that don't fit into our "capitalism 2.0" thinking but I wonder: where are those crazy and capable people trying to compete with them in a realistic way? Probably optimizing ads and investment models. Please don't mention blockchains as a solution to this problem. I have some very raw ideas about this. For example, I really think that Google search engine is unique and its complexity almost almost irreproducible but back in 2013 I wrote[1] a small piece thinking about layered search engines where web sites, specially the top ranked ones, improve their local search, and subsequent layers improve the global searches. Local searches within a specific site are usually awful. I am thinking of these web sites sharing the search "parameters" so we can integrate these information along the different layers. I find many flaws in this thinking but it is good to start discussing different ideas. [1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bKpAf08NQa7ChQnGQh--YwdPa6o_Uah3JIKsf8SHqsY/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bKpAf08NQa7ChQnGQh--YwdP...
• exit 9y ago
  which nation? perhaps, instead, we need to tokenize them: https://blog.bigchaindb.com/tokenize-the-enterprise-23d51bafb536 https://blog.bigchaindb.com/tokenize-the-enterprise-23d51baf...
• hzhou321 9y ago
  Or, I think the other way is more sensible or probably already in motion -- we need let Google, Facebook and Amazon govern.
• swalsh 9y ago
  If the current state is 0, nationalization is 10. Maybe we should look for 5. Something like a law that requires customer generated content to be accessible via API, and allows customers to PERMANENTLY delete data they've generated, the code, and data can be subject to random audits. Companies will only be subject to the rules if their customer numbers are > x. Or something similar to that.
• bachaco 9y ago
  If you nationalise Google and Amazon, say good bye to innovation.
• Kluny 9y ago
  Did he bother thinking about what Google, Facebook and Amazon thought of the idea? Google is the worldwide leader in search because they have an army of the world's brightest engineers working 24/7 on improving their algorithms... Why would those people continue working if you seize their company and tell them they're now public employees? If they wanted to be public employees, don't you think they'd be doing that already? We are, after all, talking about people who have their pick of pretty much any job they want. Google isn't a product that you can bottle up or store in a warehouse. It's made of people. People who might have other opinions.
• grondilu 9y ago
  As someone who owns stocks of Google and Amazon, I'd like to compare the effect the title of this article had on me, to what a woman would feel if she stumbled upon an article titled "We need to legalize rape : here is why." I'm all for free speech, but this guy is dancing on a thin line.
  • NoGravitas 9y ago
    That's a really terrible comparison, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
• mikehain 9y ago
  Relevant is this quote from another link recently posted here on HN: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/08/when-it-comes-to-internet-privacy-be-very-afraid-analyst-suggests/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/08/when-it-comes... "Europe has more stringent privacy regulations than the United States. In general, Americans tend to mistrust government and trust corporations. Europeans tend to trust government and mistrust corporations. The result is that there are more controls over government surveillance in the U.S. than in Europe. On the other hand, Europe constrains its corporations to a much greater degree than the U.S. does. U.S. law has a hands-off way of treating internet companies. Computerized systems, for example, are exempt from many normal product-liability laws. This was originally done out of the fear of stifling innovation."
• oh_sigh 9y ago
  What would happen to those companies if nationalized? I'm pretty sure most googlers et Al don't want to be government employees and would quit immediately.
• calebm 9y ago
  Who is John Galt? (I'm not a huge fan of the book, but it's so fitting here.)
• unityByFreedom 9y ago
  How can someone make this argument without considering broadband monopolies? Don't these limit our ability to even access content from the likes of Google, Facebook, or Amazon? Why should "platform" monopolies be regarded as more important than ISP monopolies? I'm not trying to say that there aren't platform monopolies. I just don't see the point in making them a higher focus when our ability to even access these platforms is under threat by the current FCC.
• RestlessMind 9y ago
  I never imagined I would support this position, but after seeing CloudFare CEO disabling a website just because he woke up in a bad mood, I fully support that any corporation should - either be not allowed to amass quasi-monopolistic power - or if they want/have to, they should be heavily regulated (eg. utilities) and not allowed to discriminate based on their "values"
• ucaetano 9y ago
  Let's do a mental exercise: the US government decides to nationalize those 3 companies. 1) Buying them would require at least 30% over their market caps, so let's say $1.3T for Google, and $1.3T for Amazon and FB combined, which is about 2/3 of the entire US Gov budget, so there's no way the government is paying fair market price for this 2) Since the government isn't paying fair market price, it essentially needs to seize the shares by force and then go through the courts for years to fight it off. Millions loose hundreds of billions of dollars in their ETFs, and their retirement savings take a massive hit 3) Even if the government seizes the shares by force, there are very few actual assets owned by those 3 companies, most of the value is in data, systems, growth expectations, employees, etc. 4) With the government forcibly taking control of those companies, countries around the world would take action and either take control of the local subsidiaries or just detach them from the US company, everything starts breaking down 5) Employees quit em masse, there's nobody able to run the systems, the government either has to arrest employees and force them to work, or simply let all the systems go down one by one. Hiring new people won't make a difference, as the learning curve is massive, and you wouldn't even have access to the systems 6) The products offered by those companies quickly fail, and the former employees open new companies that offer similar products, the government wiped out trillions of dollars from the global economy, a massive economic colapse ensues 7) As the global economy crumbles, the author blames the companies and the employees for not being willing to work for a shitty government job in a gulag with no opportunity for innovation, and refuses to take responsability for his/her stupid idea. It doesn't take a lot to understand how stupid this idea is. I usually don't like to call things stupid, but whoever came up with this idea put so little critical thinking behind it, that it isn't just bad, it's stupid.
• anonu 9y ago
  I guess Netflix didn't make the cut - even though its the N in "FANG"... Maybe the hype around Netflix is overblown. After all, Google has Youtube and Amazon has Prime Video which probably give Netflix a run for its money.
• dgudkov 9y ago
  Nationalization is probably too much, but indeed, these mega corporations lack accountability. Maybe we need a new kind of corporation, where users are voting stakeholders. It seems to me we, as users, gave up our personal information for too cheap. We underestimated (and still are underestimating) how much control over our lives we've given up in exchange for "free" services.