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I'm tired of the big tech alarmism. Nobody needs to break up any of these companies. Having power does not make a company evil. You can ask legitimate question

I'm tired of the big tech alarmism. Nobody needs to break up any of these companies. Having power does not make a company evil. You can ask legitimate questions about Amazon's treatment of employees. Boycott them if you're so inclined. Are they being paid fairly? Are they being exploited and over-worked? I think it's a conversation worth having. At least be sensible and call for regulations that address this in particular, not trying to break up Amazon entirely. Google is guilty of what, exactly? Do you dislike how they treat you, the user, as the product? Change your Google privacy settings or better yet switch to Google alternatives (Protonmail, DuckDuckGo, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, the like, YouTube is too useful to abandon). All I see is a big push to vilify tech companies so politicians can look like they're for the little guy. Take the recent Google internal vulnerability case. All of the sudden politicians come out of the woodwork, when public disclosure of this sort of thing was never an issue before. In reality, people doesn't seem to understand that enforced disclosure of internally discovered vulnerabilities will make more proactive actors look less secure than companies which aren't as rigorous (and have less to disclose). If you very understandably don't trust Facebook with your data, simply get off it. Use Signal, SMS, email, Discord, Slack, anything else you want to talk to your friends and family. I suppose telling people not to use Facebook, Instagram, or Google services doesn't have the same ring to it as tearing companies down though. Edit: Changed nonsensical sentence about Google's vulnerability disclosure. Clarified. Edit: Reclarified still nonsensical Google vulnerability disclosure paragraph. Edit: Changed "more" to "less" in the disclosure paragraph. Third time's the charm.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago
Corporate power is very different from personal power. The layers of management and decision making in a corporation don't often admit to any moral dimension - just success/fail measurements and next quarter profits. So yes, a corporation may not be evil, but it is almost by construction, amoral. Which may be worse in a sense.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  Construction of success/fail measures has a moral dimension. If a corporation only had profits as a deciding goal, that isn't something that comes from outer space independent of morality, it's a consequence of moral value judgments, particularly of it's stockholders (but board members and executives have a role, too.)
  - Retric 8y ago
    If you swap "black and white" morality for "blue and green" morality then some things people will find abhorrent are considered ok.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
munk-a 8y ago
With regards to Facebook in particular, you can always leave... but it's more difficult to keep in touch with those who stay and good luck convincing your grand parents to send you a zip file of pictures from their recent trip to Italy instead of just "throwing them up on the facebooks". I've abandoned Facebook myself as very little of that interests me, but my wife enjoys those social contacts and is stuck in a position where she's researched and knows better alternatives but can't exactly drag her family with her. It would never happen because this would destroy their business, but if Facebook offered RSS feeds (or similar) for profile activity I'm pretty sure most of their users would abandon using their site/app directly.
TAForObvReasons 8y ago
The real problem is a failure of our political system to create appropriate regulations and incentives. At the end of the day, the corporation behaves within the system. What the "big tech" CEOs figured out is that there's a gray area between "what is acceptable" and "what is legal", and while people before have felt constrained by "doing the right thing" the new CEOs have not even been constrained by "behaving in accordance with the letter of the law". See Uber as a great example of moving fast and breaking the law until the law was changed in their favor. "Big Tech" encompasses a wide spectrum of issues, from garden-variety law-breaking up to "too-big-to-fail". Microsoft was slammed with anti-trust once. Given the prevalence of tech in our society, some laws and regulations are appropriate, the question is really how far they should extend.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> If you very understandably don't trust Facebook with your data, simply get off it Facebook compiles shadow profiles of people who have gotten off Facebook [1]. Their lack of platform security affects users and non-users alike, particularly when those actions spread violence and political misinformation. Facebook bought WhatsApp and promptly broke its promises to WhatsApp's founders and the EU. Facebook bought Instagram and used its heft to copy Snapchat's product. Using incumbency-resulting scale to copy and destroy competitors is inefficient. It's a market failure. It's why we have antitrust law. When people say "break up Facebook," we mean "update antitrust law to see user data as capital." [1] https://www.cnet.com/news/shadow-profiles-facebook-has-information-you-didnt-hand-over/ https://www.cnet.com/news/shadow-profiles-facebook-has-infor...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
criddell 8y ago
> If you very understandably don't trust Facebook with your data, simply get off it. That might work for Europeans protected by GDPR, but in the US I don't think you can get Facebook to stop building a profile of you.
will_brown 8y ago
The problem in a very real sense is Google is using its market dominance to enter other markets and unfairly compete/stifle competition. Whether I/you/we use google or not, we are all losing out. How does it happen? Google search is >90% of all internet searches. Is that a monopoly by itself? No, but they use the dominate market position to determine where they will expand. Example, flights/hotels Google knows everything about the economics of that industry from their market position. Then Google expands into flights/hotels. Google flights is now automatically at the top of every organic search to the detriment of competition and market incumbents. Google will also now bid up ads for these terms simultaneously putting themselves at the top of ads, lining their own pockets, and driving up the cost of Google’s own ad customers who were paying $1 yesterday to Google and now paying $10 Google to compete with Google. As a result many competitors across these industries go out of business and leave consumers with only Google.
supercanuck 8y ago
A hearing is not a trial. Why don't we elect representatives who can ask the hard questions for us and compel the tech companies to provide us the information necessary to make informed decisions on whether we should be concerned or if we do have reason to be concerned. Maybe we could even compel Facebook to answer our question with the threat of jail if they lie. What is wrong with this idea? Seems like a very democratic and completely appropriate thing to do in a representative democracy. I am starting to get the sense that a lot of technologists skipped the section on civics, didn't learn about it or simply don't care how it works.
ABCLAW 8y ago
If I do something bad, like collude to depress the wages of my workers, the existence of alternatives to the service I provide are not exculpatory. Legally, if those bad things are anti-competitive in nature, one of the potential remedies is the forced breakup of the company. If you don't think these companies are doing anything bad, that's one thing, and the existence of competitors is certainly one piece of evidence towards that conclusion. But it isn't determinative. You can engage in many anti-competitive strategies that don't preclude 100% market share.
syn0byte 8y ago
>Having power does not make a company evil. Sure it does. It's predicted by games theory, preached as gospel by capitalist economics, and proved by history. We even have an axiom for it: Power Corrupts.
mancerayder 8y ago
Google is guilty of what, exactly? Do you dislike how they treat you, the user, as the product? Change your Google privacy settings or better yet switch to Google alternatives (Protonmail, DuckDuckGo, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, the like, YouTube is too useful to abandon). All I see is a big push to vilify tech companies so politicians can look like they're for the little guy. Well, your rant sounds emotive, but part of the question is a legal (and to some extent ethical) one. It's been considered, after the experience of the late 1800s and early 20th century, that monopolies (or cartels in old parlance) cause wide enough damage to trade (i.e. free market capitalism) that they should be regulated by government. Classical free market economists warned of monopolies. Modern free market philosophers like Milton Friedman argued stopping them was one of the (limited) critical functions of government. The U.S. Federal Government has the ability to regulate them for the benefit of all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law Serious question, here. When I read comments like these on HN, I have to ask: do people learn philosophy and economics in typical computer science programs?
blihp 8y ago
Google has been accused of, and increasingly being found guilty of, a great many things: run-ins with the FTC (the Canadian pharmacy settlement comes to mind), to the DOJ (consent decree... companies rarely agree to these unless there's some there there), to artists being forced to list their catalogs with Google in order to have them automatically scan/take down copyright violations on YouTube (a form of tying IMO), to scraping web sites for the purposes of competing with them (Yelp etc.), to contractually eliminating any real competition re: Android (this was a story on HN in the last couple days re: finally something being done about it in the EU at least), to 'no-poach' agreements with other companies for employees and on and on. None of this is unique to Google or even the tech industry: when a company gets an advantage, they tend to press it. When pressing it works, they press a bit more. They will continue to ratchet up what they are doing until they meet significant market resistance or are otherwise stopped. When you are able to use your market position/power to eliminate the competition and/or abuse your customers, the tendency is to do so when it helps the bottom line. Rarely is there an edict from the top that says 'go forth and do great evil', it's usually more a bunch of people in the organization being told from above 'hit your numbers', 'close the sale', 'get it done' (sometimes with an implicit or even explicit 'or else') and self-interest takes care of the rest. When you get the right mix of market power and greed, about the only entity that can deal with it is the government as market forces are no longer functioning.
mcrad 8y ago
> All I see is a big push to vilify tech companies so politicians can look like they're for the little guy. The more popular opinion is that we need improved checks and balances in a major sector of the economy in order to keep it stable. A growing concentration of power and wealth is typically not seen as a good thing. An updated legal framework which attempts to optimize competitive/market forces is what is needed here. It's not simply about "tear them down because they screwed with my data" as you imagined.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago

Corporate power is very different from personal power. The layers of management and decision making in a corporation don't often admit to any moral dimension - just success/fail measurements and next quarter profits. So yes, a corporation may not be evil, but it is almost by construction, amoral. Which may be worse in a sense.

dragonwriter 8y ago
Construction of success/fail measures has a moral dimension. If a corporation only had profits as a deciding goal, that isn't something that comes from outer space independent of morality, it's a consequence of moral value judgments, particularly of it's stockholders (but board members and executives have a role, too.)
- Retric 8y ago
  If you swap "black and white" morality for "blue and green" morality then some things people will find abhorrent are considered ok.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

munk-a 8y ago

With regards to Facebook in particular, you can always leave... but it's more difficult to keep in touch with those who stay and good luck convincing your grand parents to send you a zip file of pictures from their recent trip to Italy instead of just "throwing them up on the facebooks". I've abandoned Facebook myself as very little of that interests me, but my wife enjoys those social contacts and is stuck in a position where she's researched and knows better alternatives but can't exactly drag her family with her. It would never happen because this would destroy their business, but if Facebook offered RSS feeds (or similar) for profile activity I'm pretty sure most of their users would abandon using their site/app directly.

TAForObvReasons 8y ago

The real problem is a failure of our political system to create appropriate regulations and incentives. At the end of the day, the corporation behaves within the system. What the "big tech" CEOs figured out is that there's a gray area between "what is acceptable" and "what is legal", and while people before have felt constrained by "doing the right thing" the new CEOs have not even been constrained by "behaving in accordance with the letter of the law". See Uber as a great example of moving fast and breaking the law until the law was changed in their favor. "Big Tech" encompasses a wide spectrum of issues, from garden-variety law-breaking up to "too-big-to-fail". Microsoft was slammed with anti-trust once. Given the prevalence of tech in our society, some laws and regulations are appropriate, the question is really how far they should extend.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago

> If you very understandably don't trust Facebook with your data, simply get off it Facebook compiles shadow profiles of people who have gotten off Facebook [1]. Their lack of platform security affects users and non-users alike, particularly when those actions spread violence and political misinformation. Facebook bought WhatsApp and promptly broke its promises to WhatsApp's founders and the EU. Facebook bought Instagram and used its heft to copy Snapchat's product. Using incumbency-resulting scale to copy and destroy competitors is inefficient. It's a market failure. It's why we have antitrust law. When people say "break up Facebook," we mean "update antitrust law to see user data as capital." [1] https://www.cnet.com/news/shadow-profiles-facebook-has-information-you-didnt-hand-over/ https://www.cnet.com/news/shadow-profiles-facebook-has-infor...

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

criddell 8y ago

> If you very understandably don't trust Facebook with your data, simply get off it. That might work for Europeans protected by GDPR, but in the US I don't think you can get Facebook to stop building a profile of you.

will_brown 8y ago

The problem in a very real sense is Google is using its market dominance to enter other markets and unfairly compete/stifle competition. Whether I/you/we use google or not, we are all losing out. How does it happen? Google search is >90% of all internet searches. Is that a monopoly by itself? No, but they use the dominate market position to determine where they will expand. Example, flights/hotels Google knows everything about the economics of that industry from their market position. Then Google expands into flights/hotels. Google flights is now automatically at the top of every organic search to the detriment of competition and market incumbents. Google will also now bid up ads for these terms simultaneously putting themselves at the top of ads, lining their own pockets, and driving up the cost of Google’s own ad customers who were paying $1 yesterday to Google and now paying $10 Google to compete with Google. As a result many competitors across these industries go out of business and leave consumers with only Google.

supercanuck 8y ago

A hearing is not a trial. Why don't we elect representatives who can ask the hard questions for us and compel the tech companies to provide us the information necessary to make informed decisions on whether we should be concerned or if we do have reason to be concerned. Maybe we could even compel Facebook to answer our question with the threat of jail if they lie. What is wrong with this idea? Seems like a very democratic and completely appropriate thing to do in a representative democracy. I am starting to get the sense that a lot of technologists skipped the section on civics, didn't learn about it or simply don't care how it works.

ABCLAW 8y ago

If I do something bad, like collude to depress the wages of my workers, the existence of alternatives to the service I provide are not exculpatory. Legally, if those bad things are anti-competitive in nature, one of the potential remedies is the forced breakup of the company. If you don't think these companies are doing anything bad, that's one thing, and the existence of competitors is certainly one piece of evidence towards that conclusion. But it isn't determinative. You can engage in many anti-competitive strategies that don't preclude 100% market share.

syn0byte 8y ago

>Having power does not make a company evil. Sure it does. It's predicted by games theory, preached as gospel by capitalist economics, and proved by history. We even have an axiom for it: Power Corrupts.

mancerayder 8y ago

Google is guilty of what, exactly? Do you dislike how they treat you, the user, as the product? Change your Google privacy settings or better yet switch to Google alternatives (Protonmail, DuckDuckGo, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, the like, YouTube is too useful to abandon). All I see is a big push to vilify tech companies so politicians can look like they're for the little guy. Well, your rant sounds emotive, but part of the question is a legal (and to some extent ethical) one. It's been considered, after the experience of the late 1800s and early 20th century, that monopolies (or cartels in old parlance) cause wide enough damage to trade (i.e. free market capitalism) that they should be regulated by government. Classical free market economists warned of monopolies. Modern free market philosophers like Milton Friedman argued stopping them was one of the (limited) critical functions of government. The U.S. Federal Government has the ability to regulate them for the benefit of all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law Serious question, here. When I read comments like these on HN, I have to ask: do people learn philosophy and economics in typical computer science programs?

blihp 8y ago

Google has been accused of, and increasingly being found guilty of, a great many things: run-ins with the FTC (the Canadian pharmacy settlement comes to mind), to the DOJ (consent decree... companies rarely agree to these unless there's some there there), to artists being forced to list their catalogs with Google in order to have them automatically scan/take down copyright violations on YouTube (a form of tying IMO), to scraping web sites for the purposes of competing with them (Yelp etc.), to contractually eliminating any real competition re: Android (this was a story on HN in the last couple days re: finally something being done about it in the EU at least), to 'no-poach' agreements with other companies for employees and on and on. None of this is unique to Google or even the tech industry: when a company gets an advantage, they tend to press it. When pressing it works, they press a bit more. They will continue to ratchet up what they are doing until they meet significant market resistance or are otherwise stopped. When you are able to use your market position/power to eliminate the competition and/or abuse your customers, the tendency is to do so when it helps the bottom line. Rarely is there an edict from the top that says 'go forth and do great evil', it's usually more a bunch of people in the organization being told from above 'hit your numbers', 'close the sale', 'get it done' (sometimes with an implicit or even explicit 'or else') and self-interest takes care of the rest. When you get the right mix of market power and greed, about the only entity that can deal with it is the government as market forces are no longer functioning.

mcrad 8y ago

> All I see is a big push to vilify tech companies so politicians can look like they're for the little guy. The more popular opinion is that we need improved checks and balances in a major sector of the economy in order to keep it stable. A growing concentration of power and wealth is typically not seen as a good thing. An updated legal framework which attempts to optimize competitive/market forces is what is needed here. It's not simply about "tear them down because they screwed with my data" as you imagined.