6 ms·

Working in tech (not companies listed), I get somewhat irked at the recent barrage of "regulate/break them up" articles I keep seeing about tech companies. Not

by wpasc 9y ago

Working in tech (not companies listed), I get somewhat irked at the recent barrage of "regulate/break them up" articles I keep seeing about tech companies. Not being a big fan of regulation in general, but if you're going to regulate, should these companies be at the top of your list? There are plenty of wrongs being committed by a variety of companies and industries right now. Not saying these companies are as holier than thou than they preach to be, but they are all innovative and good companies. While they have practices that merit examination, so do many other companies that have histories of being far less transparent and far less proactive about change. I don't mean to say the world of tech doesn't need a fair amount of reflection and self reflection, but this recent bandwagoning of "regulate tech!" seems reactionary and hype driven as opposed to more well intentioned. This guy was even mentioning his book... The media has covered tech in the last year in a "if it bleeds it leads" capacity that I think undercuts many of the valid points being raised. Idk, I could be wrong, but that's my two cents

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
r00fus 9y ago
Exactly. Wouldn't say, Monsanto or BP be considered far more evil and manipulative? What about those opioids pharmas that have literally destroyed small-town America through outright fraud/malfeasance? Yeah, tech companies aint goody two-shoes, but there are bigger fish that need frying.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  And if you want tech, particularly in America there are ISPs and telcos in dire need of being broken up.
  - EADGBE 9y ago
    Yeah. I used to think the same thing. Maybe I will again, but here's what changed my specific situation: I once had Time Warner. It was OK, I didn't need to deal with Customer Service and my cable never went out. No real issues other than a bill I thought was too high at times. Then Google Fiber came here. Literally across the street. I couldn't taste that sweet, sweet gigabit even if I wanted to. Time Warner, sitting on it's laurels didn't care. I was their only choice if I wanted something faster than 15Mb/s. Cue the Time Warner/Spectrum/Charter (Honestly, I don't know what order that was, but the billing took care of it) buyouts. Oh no! Things are going to be terrible. Except your old login still works with Spectrum/Charter. The QoS wasn't affected at all by the switching. Oh, and since Charter came out I get a free doubling of internet speed, because Google Fiber. Now I'm using Spectrum (I think). All of a sudden, the option for 940Mb/s is available for me. That's close enough for wireless devices to call it "gigabit" to me. Even though companies changed hands 2 or 3 times, I still have the same options (but better!) that I had before. It's easy for me to get behind the hatred that monopolies have for communications in theory, but when they literally make the transition seamless, still provide all the same options as before, and allow me to get a taste of that sweet sweet gigabit; I just don't care anymore. Especially when they maintain competitive pricing.
Slansitartop 9y ago
> if you're going to regulate, should these companies be at the top of your list Yes. Two of them (Google and Facebook) basically control a huge fraction of the information people are exposed to on a daily basis, either directly on indirectly. They're so dominant and aloof, that they can make or break businesses without even realizing it or caring. Their control over information flow also has important civil society implications. Amazon could conceivably control most American retail activity in the future, though it has a few retail titans that could conceivably stand up to it if they get their acts together [1]. At best, we seem to be headed towards a retail oligopoly. Personally, I'm much less worried about Apple, its control is much less pervasive. Though I wish there were more alternatives to it other than Android. [1] https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/01/01/amazon-is-dominating-the-entire-retail-industry.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/01/01/amazon-is-...
- buchanaf 9y ago
  Could you elaborate on their aloofness? What exactly do you hope to achieve by regulating them? They seem to take the privacy of their users far more seriously than other competitors as well as the government (US - net neutrality).
  - mulmen 9y ago
    What does net neutrality have to do with privacy?
    - buchanaf 9y ago
      https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/11/15258230/net-neutrality-privacy-ajit-pai-fcc https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/11/15258230/net-neutrality-p...
  - Slansitartop 9y ago
    > Could you elaborate on their aloofness? For Google: If your site gets incorrectly fucked over by one of Google's ranking algorithm changes, try to find someone to talk to who cares enough to try to fix the issue. Ditto if your Gmail account gets wrongly flagged and closed for some reason. There's no one for you to call and you're fucked, unless you happen know someone inside Google. Neither of these have happened to me personally, but I've followed cases of each pretty closely. For Facebook: It's recent newsfeed changes have had a huge detrimental impact on legitimate news organizations, even more in some foreign markets than int the US. See how much Facebook cares. > What exactly do you hope to achieve by regulating them? The standard stuff, like elimination of unfair competition (e.g. Google using Search to push its other stuff). I'd also like to see some breakups/forced divestitures to increase overall competition. In Facebook's case, specifically: I'd like to see Instagram and Whatsapp spun off; and the core Facebook social network decentralized into several independent instances, with mandates to conform to open interoperability standards. Those standards should include a mandatory privacy permissioning system, to control how personal data is used across instance boundaries.
librexpr 9y ago
On my part, I dislike the argument "there are people doing worse things than me, so don't try to stop me doing bad things!". It's not one or the other.
aje403 9y ago
No. No. No other company on the planet knows where billions of people exactly are and what they're doing at a given point or can predict their behavior. Not Coca Cola or Monsanto or any of them. There are very, very specific reason why people on HN are complaining about big tech now. We're mainly well-educated and have read a lot of sci-fi written by well-educated people.
- redial 9y ago
  And yet, they benefit the most from lobying, taxes and profits, and dictate and have dictated the market for decades. They drain entire countries, they extract all their resources, most of their water, they pollute and are responsible for the extinction of entire ecosystems and quite a few human deaths. Imagine, they've done all of that without knowing exactly where you are and what you are doing right now. What has Facebook done? Copied all of Snapchat and displayed some russian ads.
  - arstin 9y ago
    Well for one, Facebook, through crass negligence and a failure to own up to the duties that go along with their position in regulating the flow of information between people, played a key role in the election of an administration which supports the draining of countries, the extraction of resources, and the extinction of ecosystems...and if the recent stories about a lifetime cap on medicaid benefits are true, quite a few human deaths! (Obviously Facebook isn't solely or even mostly responsible, Monsanto is worse, yadda yadda yadda)
    - redial 9y ago
      So did Fox News.
      - rock_hard 9y ago
        Let’s break up Fox News, NYT and all the other outlets that enables Trump
  - 9y ago
pdeuchler 9y ago
Okay, so we should regulate all those other companies and industries too? Is that your point? Maybe that self-reflection should include why people are so eager to dump on tech companies? I've been saying this on HN and other mediums for a while, but the backlash against silicon valley has just begun and will continue to grow. People are starting to discover just how many facets of their lives are controlled by opaque black boxes owned by large tech companies and any time something goes wrong (fake news, twitter bots, crypto scams, data breaches) they will lash out at whatever is most visible precisely because they are being kept in the dark about what's going on behind the scenes. A corollary of this is if companies continue to claim that they have revolutionary AI that can rival human intuition when they're really just doing fancy linear regression behind the scenes (insert whatever outlandish tech marketing claim that usually just means simple database read/writes here) they will be targeted if that linear regression results in predictable downsides since the people have been sold a bill of goods that implies more control than what is really possible. But even besides the public perception problem, there's the issue of the inherent winner-take-all business models rampant within tech and SV. The publishing/VC model inherently promotes monopolies and anti-competitive behavior, and the natural network effects in many technologies only exacerbate this. Ignoring this just because other companies do bad stuff and tech gets a bad rap isn't going to change the fact that many tech companies have scary control over not only entire industries but also entire segments of the world's population. Since we both work in tech we can be honest here, the end goal of almost any tech company is the collection and protection of user data. Whether the data is your product itself or if the data allows you to create a product doesn't matter, this hoarding and collection of user data will inevitably come under scrutiny. At this point you have to ask yourself if people will look favorably on this. Are we doing our best as an industry to stay above reproach? Are we doing our best as engineers to use this data without hint of ethical quandaries? I can assure you if we don't ask these questions ourselves now people with less knowledge and less context will ask them later, and eventually people who are just as clueless as the general public, but with more power will ask them. And this doesn't just apply to user data, it applies to many other facets of the industry as well. Are we really comfortable with a single entity that's legally controlled by a single person hosting so much of the "distributed" internet (Amazon, Bezos, AWS)? Are we really comfortable with a single company legally controlled by a single person controlling the communication platforms of such a large percentage of the global population (Facebook, Zuckerberg, Whatsapp/Instagram/FbMessenger)? The refusal to see any kind of downside to those questions is itself intertwined with the poor public perception, and we would do well to begin to answer those questions ourselves, even if they have hard answers, then let others answer them for us. In the end you can complain about a bandwagon campaign all you want, and you can be right about it until the cows come home, but it won't make any difference if we can't convince the general public. And to do that I think we need to deeply re-examine some long held beliefs and givens that almost all of us hold, and we need to dramatically improve how we communicate and interact with those who rely on our work to go about their day to day lives.
c256 9y ago
The argument for breaking up these companies is not based on punishing them for wrongs. Instead, it’s based on the idea that they have so much manifest power that their natural order of business inherently has the effect of “abuse of monopoly (monopsony) power”, regardless of any ‘unfair intent’. Take Google as an example: they provide a large number of incredibly valuable services to the public (in my opinion). The cost for those services is a vast centralized surveillance system that cannot be reasonably avoided by basically anyone taking part in the first world economy. If Google we’re less hegemonic, then there would be at least a chance for alternatives that don’t either knock you out of contemporary society or simply change the nameplate on the panopticon to exist. An exception that proves the rule here is DuckDuckGo: it’s a scrappy, functional search engine that lets people opt out of part of Google’s oversight —- except that it doesn’t; the remainder of Google is still in so many aspects that it can effectively bypass the loss of personal data that goes to search. If YouTube, Gmail, and AdSense were also separate blocks, though...
- amelius 9y ago
  Fortunately, there is one thing on the horizon that can stop all of this, which is to have AI that can recognize and remove ads: that would destroy all incentives for these companies to track us.
  - jacksmith21006 9y ago
    Like it or not ads are necessary. So if there is AI that removes ads then there will not be content to consume.
- nerfhammer 9y ago
  You seem to be talking about credit agencies though. It's orders of magnitude easier to browse the internet in incognito mode than it is to live without a credit card or to not have a credit report. There's only two credit card networks and three credit reporting agencies. Google and Facebook don't know exactly where you live but credit agencies do, and they also know your bank accounts, social security number, etc. Credit agencies openly sell their data, but Google and Facebook don't and never have. Google and Facebook don't actually have vast logs of everything you've ever done, they trash old logs after some period of time, and frankly most of is not useful to bother to do anything with to try to join it in the first place. But your credit card data and credit history lasts your whole life. We could put some regulations on personally identifiable information... except actually that exists already, and the credit agencies have been the ones that have been hopelessly reckless with that and somehow always get away with it.
amelius 9y ago
> if you're going to regulate, should these companies be at the top of your list Yes. Ironically, these companies are doing the regulation now. And they control an increasing share of the real economy.
pythonaut_16 9y ago
It comes off as insincere to me. The rapid rise in anti-tech sentiments really seems like someone with an agenda is targeting tech companies, rather than a genuine response to perceived wrongs. It seems that entrenched media companies and other businesses that are most threatened by Facebook, Google, and Amazon are the ones who are the quickest to jump on the bandwagon and publish anything they can against big tech. I think there are valid concerns to be had about big tech companies and the data and influence they have, but a genuine response is to consider the best way to deal with those concerns. Aggressively pushing for the breakup or destruction of their business is an indicator of other motives.

by wpasc 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

r00fus 9y ago

Exactly. Wouldn't say, Monsanto or BP be considered far more evil and manipulative? What about those opioids pharmas that have literally destroyed small-town America through outright fraud/malfeasance? Yeah, tech companies aint goody two-shoes, but there are bigger fish that need frying.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
And if you want tech, particularly in America there are ISPs and telcos in dire need of being broken up.
- EADGBE 9y ago
  Yeah. I used to think the same thing. Maybe I will again, but here's what changed my specific situation: I once had Time Warner. It was OK, I didn't need to deal with Customer Service and my cable never went out. No real issues other than a bill I thought was too high at times. Then Google Fiber came here. Literally across the street. I couldn't taste that sweet, sweet gigabit even if I wanted to. Time Warner, sitting on it's laurels didn't care. I was their only choice if I wanted something faster than 15Mb/s. Cue the Time Warner/Spectrum/Charter (Honestly, I don't know what order that was, but the billing took care of it) buyouts. Oh no! Things are going to be terrible. Except your old login still works with Spectrum/Charter. The QoS wasn't affected at all by the switching. Oh, and since Charter came out I get a free doubling of internet speed, because Google Fiber. Now I'm using Spectrum (I think). All of a sudden, the option for 940Mb/s is available for me. That's close enough for wireless devices to call it "gigabit" to me. Even though companies changed hands 2 or 3 times, I still have the same options (but better!) that I had before. It's easy for me to get behind the hatred that monopolies have for communications in theory, but when they literally make the transition seamless, still provide all the same options as before, and allow me to get a taste of that sweet sweet gigabit; I just don't care anymore. Especially when they maintain competitive pricing.

Slansitartop 9y ago

> if you're going to regulate, should these companies be at the top of your list Yes. Two of them (Google and Facebook) basically control a huge fraction of the information people are exposed to on a daily basis, either directly on indirectly. They're so dominant and aloof, that they can make or break businesses without even realizing it or caring. Their control over information flow also has important civil society implications. Amazon could conceivably control most American retail activity in the future, though it has a few retail titans that could conceivably stand up to it if they get their acts together [1]. At best, we seem to be headed towards a retail oligopoly. Personally, I'm much less worried about Apple, its control is much less pervasive. Though I wish there were more alternatives to it other than Android. [1] https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/01/01/amazon-is-dominating-the-entire-retail-industry.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/01/01/amazon-is-...

buchanaf 9y ago
Could you elaborate on their aloofness? What exactly do you hope to achieve by regulating them? They seem to take the privacy of their users far more seriously than other competitors as well as the government (US - net neutrality).
- mulmen 9y ago
  What does net neutrality have to do with privacy?
  - buchanaf 9y ago
    https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/11/15258230/net-neutrality-privacy-ajit-pai-fcc https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/11/15258230/net-neutrality-p...
- Slansitartop 9y ago
  > Could you elaborate on their aloofness? For Google: If your site gets incorrectly fucked over by one of Google's ranking algorithm changes, try to find someone to talk to who cares enough to try to fix the issue. Ditto if your Gmail account gets wrongly flagged and closed for some reason. There's no one for you to call and you're fucked, unless you happen know someone inside Google. Neither of these have happened to me personally, but I've followed cases of each pretty closely. For Facebook: It's recent newsfeed changes have had a huge detrimental impact on legitimate news organizations, even more in some foreign markets than int the US. See how much Facebook cares. > What exactly do you hope to achieve by regulating them? The standard stuff, like elimination of unfair competition (e.g. Google using Search to push its other stuff). I'd also like to see some breakups/forced divestitures to increase overall competition. In Facebook's case, specifically: I'd like to see Instagram and Whatsapp spun off; and the core Facebook social network decentralized into several independent instances, with mandates to conform to open interoperability standards. Those standards should include a mandatory privacy permissioning system, to control how personal data is used across instance boundaries.

librexpr 9y ago

On my part, I dislike the argument "there are people doing worse things than me, so don't try to stop me doing bad things!". It's not one or the other.

aje403 9y ago

No. No. No other company on the planet knows where billions of people exactly are and what they're doing at a given point or can predict their behavior. Not Coca Cola or Monsanto or any of them. There are very, very specific reason why people on HN are complaining about big tech now. We're mainly well-educated and have read a lot of sci-fi written by well-educated people.

redial 9y ago
And yet, they benefit the most from lobying, taxes and profits, and dictate and have dictated the market for decades. They drain entire countries, they extract all their resources, most of their water, they pollute and are responsible for the extinction of entire ecosystems and quite a few human deaths. Imagine, they've done all of that without knowing exactly where you are and what you are doing right now. What has Facebook done? Copied all of Snapchat and displayed some russian ads.
- arstin 9y ago
  Well for one, Facebook, through crass negligence and a failure to own up to the duties that go along with their position in regulating the flow of information between people, played a key role in the election of an administration which supports the draining of countries, the extraction of resources, and the extinction of ecosystems...and if the recent stories about a lifetime cap on medicaid benefits are true, quite a few human deaths! (Obviously Facebook isn't solely or even mostly responsible, Monsanto is worse, yadda yadda yadda)
  - redial 9y ago
    So did Fox News.
    - rock_hard 9y ago
      Let’s break up Fox News, NYT and all the other outlets that enables Trump
- 9y ago

pdeuchler 9y ago

Okay, so we should regulate all those other companies and industries too? Is that your point? Maybe that self-reflection should include why people are so eager to dump on tech companies? I've been saying this on HN and other mediums for a while, but the backlash against silicon valley has just begun and will continue to grow. People are starting to discover just how many facets of their lives are controlled by opaque black boxes owned by large tech companies and any time something goes wrong (fake news, twitter bots, crypto scams, data breaches) they will lash out at whatever is most visible precisely because they are being kept in the dark about what's going on behind the scenes. A corollary of this is if companies continue to claim that they have revolutionary AI that can rival human intuition when they're really just doing fancy linear regression behind the scenes (insert whatever outlandish tech marketing claim that usually just means simple database read/writes here) they will be targeted if that linear regression results in predictable downsides since the people have been sold a bill of goods that implies more control than what is really possible. But even besides the public perception problem, there's the issue of the inherent winner-take-all business models rampant within tech and SV. The publishing/VC model inherently promotes monopolies and anti-competitive behavior, and the natural network effects in many technologies only exacerbate this. Ignoring this just because other companies do bad stuff and tech gets a bad rap isn't going to change the fact that many tech companies have scary control over not only entire industries but also entire segments of the world's population. Since we both work in tech we can be honest here, the end goal of almost any tech company is the collection and protection of user data. Whether the data is your product itself or if the data allows you to create a product doesn't matter, this hoarding and collection of user data will inevitably come under scrutiny. At this point you have to ask yourself if people will look favorably on this. Are we doing our best as an industry to stay above reproach? Are we doing our best as engineers to use this data without hint of ethical quandaries? I can assure you if we don't ask these questions ourselves now people with less knowledge and less context will ask them later, and eventually people who are just as clueless as the general public, but with more power will ask them. And this doesn't just apply to user data, it applies to many other facets of the industry as well. Are we really comfortable with a single entity that's legally controlled by a single person hosting so much of the "distributed" internet (Amazon, Bezos, AWS)? Are we really comfortable with a single company legally controlled by a single person controlling the communication platforms of such a large percentage of the global population (Facebook, Zuckerberg, Whatsapp/Instagram/FbMessenger)? The refusal to see any kind of downside to those questions is itself intertwined with the poor public perception, and we would do well to begin to answer those questions ourselves, even if they have hard answers, then let others answer them for us. In the end you can complain about a bandwagon campaign all you want, and you can be right about it until the cows come home, but it won't make any difference if we can't convince the general public. And to do that I think we need to deeply re-examine some long held beliefs and givens that almost all of us hold, and we need to dramatically improve how we communicate and interact with those who rely on our work to go about their day to day lives.

c256 9y ago

The argument for breaking up these companies is not based on punishing them for wrongs. Instead, it’s based on the idea that they have so much manifest power that their natural order of business inherently has the effect of “abuse of monopoly (monopsony) power”, regardless of any ‘unfair intent’. Take Google as an example: they provide a large number of incredibly valuable services to the public (in my opinion). The cost for those services is a vast centralized surveillance system that cannot be reasonably avoided by basically anyone taking part in the first world economy. If Google we’re less hegemonic, then there would be at least a chance for alternatives that don’t either knock you out of contemporary society or simply change the nameplate on the panopticon to exist. An exception that proves the rule here is DuckDuckGo: it’s a scrappy, functional search engine that lets people opt out of part of Google’s oversight —- except that it doesn’t; the remainder of Google is still in so many aspects that it can effectively bypass the loss of personal data that goes to search. If YouTube, Gmail, and AdSense were also separate blocks, though...

amelius 9y ago
Fortunately, there is one thing on the horizon that can stop all of this, which is to have AI that can recognize and remove ads: that would destroy all incentives for these companies to track us.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  Like it or not ads are necessary. So if there is AI that removes ads then there will not be content to consume.
nerfhammer 9y ago
You seem to be talking about credit agencies though. It's orders of magnitude easier to browse the internet in incognito mode than it is to live without a credit card or to not have a credit report. There's only two credit card networks and three credit reporting agencies. Google and Facebook don't know exactly where you live but credit agencies do, and they also know your bank accounts, social security number, etc. Credit agencies openly sell their data, but Google and Facebook don't and never have. Google and Facebook don't actually have vast logs of everything you've ever done, they trash old logs after some period of time, and frankly most of is not useful to bother to do anything with to try to join it in the first place. But your credit card data and credit history lasts your whole life. We could put some regulations on personally identifiable information... except actually that exists already, and the credit agencies have been the ones that have been hopelessly reckless with that and somehow always get away with it.

amelius 9y ago

> if you're going to regulate, should these companies be at the top of your list Yes. Ironically, these companies are doing the regulation now. And they control an increasing share of the real economy.

pythonaut_16 9y ago

It comes off as insincere to me. The rapid rise in anti-tech sentiments really seems like someone with an agenda is targeting tech companies, rather than a genuine response to perceived wrongs. It seems that entrenched media companies and other businesses that are most threatened by Facebook, Google, and Amazon are the ones who are the quickest to jump on the bandwagon and publish anything they can against big tech. I think there are valid concerns to be had about big tech companies and the data and influence they have, but a genuine response is to consider the best way to deal with those concerns. Aggressively pushing for the breakup or destruction of their business is an indicator of other motives.