4 ms·

Maybe this should be reconsidered when a "private company" controls a large majority of humanity's social fabric and/or popular culture?

klyrs 3y ago
No, antitrust laws should break them up.
nova22033 3y ago
The way to reconsider this is to amend the constitution.
miohtama 3y ago
This is why developer and hacker community should strive to build open networks, and then have them adopted. This was what early internet was like: Usenet, IRC, etc.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  Usenet was a set of fiefdoms mostly administered by academics in CompSci departments, and proved utterly unequal to its first real crisis*. Distributed systems work great as long as they're new and everyone is participating in good faith most of the time. In adversarial situations, they're rarely able to adapt flexibly enough, partly because the networked structure imposes a severe decision-time penalty on consensus formation. A negligent or malicious attacker just has to overwhelm nodes with high betweenness centrality and the whole network fails. Immediately following crises everyone talks about making the network more resilient and so on, but it never fully recovers because everyone intuitively knows that establishing consus is slow and bumpy, and that major restructuring/retooling efforts are way easier to accomplish unilaterally. So people start drifting away because unless there's a quick technical fix that can be deployed within a month or two, It's Over. Distributed systems always lose against coherent attackers with more than a threshold level of resources because the latter has a much tighter OODA loop. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel#Green_card_spam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
- tored 3y ago
  Yes, but I would also add that it is important that the rest of the world should stop using services from American companies.
- corinroyal 3y ago
  Exactly, and look what happened to Usenet. People abused the commons and we lost it to spam. Unmoderated networks always fall to bad actors. I'm building a p2p social network and struggling hard with how to balance company needs, community needs, and individual freedom. A free-for-all leads to a tyranny of structurelessness in which the loudest and pushiest form a defacto leadership that doesn't represent the will of the majority. On the flip side, overly restrictive rules stifle expression and cause resentment. These are hard questions and there is no one answer, except that unmoderated networks always suck eventually, so the question is one of line drawing and compromise.
JohnMakin 3y ago
How do you propose this actually work out? Every time youtube, twitter, facebook, etc wants to ban someone they have to submit a request to the government or be subject to its oversight? That's far more dystopian.
- plagiarist 3y ago
  Aren't they still publishing his content, just not running ads and paying? The US government will do fuckall about that, even if platforms are forced to be quasi-national entities subject to the First Amendment.
- kypro 3y ago
  Or alternatively companies have to provide clear and explicit rules about what is permissible on their platform and if you feel you're wrongly censored or removed from the platform you should be able to take legal action. I'm fine with YouTube not wanting to provide a platform for people who they feel are harmful, but they need to define that in an explicit way so that these decisions are not made arbitrarily. I believe primary Brand's job for the last few years has been as a content creator. Given this I think it's reasonable to expect he should have some legal rights. Personally I don't see a huge amount of difference between an Uber gig worker and a YouTube content creator. Both should have some basic rights regardless of whether they're technically classed as "employees".
  - jayrot 3y ago
    They do have rules on what is permissible on their platform. They call it the Creator Responsibility Policy. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7650329?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7650329?hl=en
    - kypro 3y ago
      If by "rules" you mean vague references to "harm" then sure. My use of the word "explicit" here was intentional. As it stands the "rules" may as well just read "if we don't like what you're doing on or off our platform we reserve the right fire you as a content creator". And again I'll note, if you're fired as a content creator for some arbitrary reason you have no way to challenge the decision. I don't think this is acceptable. I think Google should ultimately be able to run their platform however they like, but they have a responsibility to make those rules clear when people are dependant on them for their income.
plagiarist 3y ago
You are reconsidering the wrong part. Let's have smaller companies that aren't able to control that much of society.

klyrs 3y ago

No, antitrust laws should break them up.

nova22033 3y ago

The way to reconsider this is to amend the constitution.

miohtama 3y ago

This is why developer and hacker community should strive to build open networks, and then have them adopted. This was what early internet was like: Usenet, IRC, etc.

anigbrowl 3y ago
Usenet was a set of fiefdoms mostly administered by academics in CompSci departments, and proved utterly unequal to its first real crisis*. Distributed systems work great as long as they're new and everyone is participating in good faith most of the time. In adversarial situations, they're rarely able to adapt flexibly enough, partly because the networked structure imposes a severe decision-time penalty on consensus formation. A negligent or malicious attacker just has to overwhelm nodes with high betweenness centrality and the whole network fails. Immediately following crises everyone talks about making the network more resilient and so on, but it never fully recovers because everyone intuitively knows that establishing consus is slow and bumpy, and that major restructuring/retooling efforts are way easier to accomplish unilaterally. So people start drifting away because unless there's a quick technical fix that can be deployed within a month or two, It's Over. Distributed systems always lose against coherent attackers with more than a threshold level of resources because the latter has a much tighter OODA loop. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel#Green_card_spam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
tored 3y ago
Yes, but I would also add that it is important that the rest of the world should stop using services from American companies.
corinroyal 3y ago
Exactly, and look what happened to Usenet. People abused the commons and we lost it to spam. Unmoderated networks always fall to bad actors. I'm building a p2p social network and struggling hard with how to balance company needs, community needs, and individual freedom. A free-for-all leads to a tyranny of structurelessness in which the loudest and pushiest form a defacto leadership that doesn't represent the will of the majority. On the flip side, overly restrictive rules stifle expression and cause resentment. These are hard questions and there is no one answer, except that unmoderated networks always suck eventually, so the question is one of line drawing and compromise.

JohnMakin 3y ago

How do you propose this actually work out? Every time youtube, twitter, facebook, etc wants to ban someone they have to submit a request to the government or be subject to its oversight? That's far more dystopian.

plagiarist 3y ago
Aren't they still publishing his content, just not running ads and paying? The US government will do fuckall about that, even if platforms are forced to be quasi-national entities subject to the First Amendment.
kypro 3y ago
Or alternatively companies have to provide clear and explicit rules about what is permissible on their platform and if you feel you're wrongly censored or removed from the platform you should be able to take legal action. I'm fine with YouTube not wanting to provide a platform for people who they feel are harmful, but they need to define that in an explicit way so that these decisions are not made arbitrarily. I believe primary Brand's job for the last few years has been as a content creator. Given this I think it's reasonable to expect he should have some legal rights. Personally I don't see a huge amount of difference between an Uber gig worker and a YouTube content creator. Both should have some basic rights regardless of whether they're technically classed as "employees".
- jayrot 3y ago
  They do have rules on what is permissible on their platform. They call it the Creator Responsibility Policy. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7650329?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7650329?hl=en
  - kypro 3y ago
    If by "rules" you mean vague references to "harm" then sure. My use of the word "explicit" here was intentional. As it stands the "rules" may as well just read "if we don't like what you're doing on or off our platform we reserve the right fire you as a content creator". And again I'll note, if you're fired as a content creator for some arbitrary reason you have no way to challenge the decision. I don't think this is acceptable. I think Google should ultimately be able to run their platform however they like, but they have a responsibility to make those rules clear when people are dependant on them for their income.

plagiarist 3y ago

You are reconsidering the wrong part. Let's have smaller companies that aren't able to control that much of society.