8 ms·

Tech giants are hijacking the internet

212 points by jruohonen 3y ago

acheron 3y ago
Breaking news from 2008?
- jruohonen 3y ago
  Oh, didn't notice that. It was on the DW's frontpage today.
  - czechdeveloper 3y ago
    It's not that article is old, but that this has been happening for a very long time.
  - quaintdev 3y ago
    OP is being sarcastic. The article is very recent.
    - nottheengineer 3y ago
      But unfortunately it says nothing that couldn't have been said 10 years ago.
      - pjerem 3y ago
        Oh, 2008 is nearly 16 years ago. Don’t thank me :D
      - HenryBemis 3y ago
        In my current job I was discussing with a C-person and they were expressing their worries about "Microsoft Cloud" taking cover of everything, and how 'we' could reverse that without crippling the business.. to which I answered that we are past the point of no return, and this is a dialogue that we should have had 3-4 years ago. But when this was discussed everybody was 'thrilled' to have a solution up and running in Y time at Z cost instead of alternatives with 3xY time and 3xZ cost. That hindsight is always 2020 (semi-related - https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/875:_2009_Called https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/875:_2009_Called)
charcircuit 3y ago
Big tech is big because they built sustainable products that appeal to billions of people. There was no hijacking. Anyone can still make their own site and become popular. TikTok was able to become the number one site despite not being from big tech.
- arlattimore 3y ago
  I'd agree that big tech are big because they built a (good) product that appeals to the masses. Make no mistake though, they've also used their power to abuse the system and cement themselves as monopolies which is modus operandi for a monopoly. As for the comment that TikTok got big, sure they've managed to amass a fairly large user base but they pail in comparison against the likes of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc on any metric that matters. TikTok are also the new hotness and could just as easily go as much as they came. The big tech companies have survived massive market shifts, economic catastrophes, dodged/maneuvered their way through government regulatory apparatus around the world measured in decade time scales.
- renegat0x0 3y ago
  Railroad tycoons have also built a good sustainable product that appealed to billions, yet they leveraged their position of power, monopoly. https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/rise-of-the-robber-barons/ https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/rise-of-the-ro... Just because someone creates a good product does not allow them to be free from scrutiny. Certainly if whole traffic goes from the Internet to Facebook, Amazon, and other you may say that the traffic has been hijacked.
- rambambram 3y ago
  Exactly, it's just a scare tactic to make us and 'the enemies' believe that there's no way out and we already lost. The solution is in front of us, all that time. I follow a lot of blogs I scrambled together over the years from this place called HN, I do that with RSS. It's enough for me to get a good and healthy information diet (all your blogposts together are way more interesting than any social media platform can offer me). The only thing I miss are feeds with images, to have an image pop-up in my RSS-based timeline is always nice. And some kind of replacement for Youtube would also be nice to have.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Thought experiment: Online advertising is regulated. How do so-called "tech" companies respond. Do they have a plan. Even if they continued to sell surveillance and data services, they would shrink in size. There are various ways ads could be regulated and historical precedents. Regardless of whether this ever happens, currently, online advertising is highly centralised and under increasing scrutiny. This centralisation is not the result of innovation by a select few companies but plain old M&A by the so-called "tech" giants, while the the government was apparently sleeping. If more competition were to take place in online ad services, this could potentially have a serious effect on the lifeblood of so-called "tech" giants. Time will tell.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  There's a solution that's far less invasive. The article offered it, and I've also repeatedly espoused it: "Enforcing open standards to enable users to share videos, images and texts across platforms is paramount." The reason there are tech monopolies is because of the network effect. It's not practical to expect healthy competition in domains where your product's quality is primarily driven by the number of users you have, and they start with billions, and you start with zero. Enforce open standards, prevent companies from coercing users to sign away their rights to content they generate, and you will have rich competition because you effectively eliminate the network effect.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - wayfinder 3y ago
    No, the problem is no one is willing to pay for any of these services. How many people are paying for their news? For something like YouTube? That stuff costs mega $$$ Back in the day, you were forced to pay for things. You wanted news? You had to put in some coins for a newspaper. Now you sign on and you get news and YouTube seemingly for free… open standards or not, someone has to pay for it one way or another.
    - 3y ago
mediumsmart 3y ago
These tech giants are the sum of their users and nobody else is using the internet they are “hijacking”. Enjoy
- bt4u 3y ago
  [dead]
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  Do Facebook users want to exclude me (no FB account) from their pages? I think that's what Facebook wants.
bullen 3y ago
These are the symptoms. The diseases are centrally controlled IP, DNS and root certificates. The removal attempt of HTTP/1.1 is the biggest censorship in history. The only way to fight back is to self host DNS, HTTP and SMTP at home.
- squarefoot 3y ago
  > The only way to fight back is to self host DNS, HTTP and SMTP at home. Agreed, but DNS at least needs to be shared via encrypted p2p, to avoid congesting someones broadband with million requests and prevent the inevitable hijacking by malicious actors.
  - sprash 3y ago
    > needs to be shared via encrypted p2p You mean blockchain? DNS has been solved with namecoin more than a decade ago. One of the few blockchain applications that actually make sense.
- diarrhea 3y ago
  > The removal attempt of HTTP/1.1 is the biggest censorship in history. I’d love some more context on this.
  - bullen 3y ago
    All browsers now default to blocking HTTP URLs. Anti-virus software blocks native applications that use HTTP.
    - computerfriend 3y ago
      HTTP/1.1 on TLS works perfectly fine.
      - doublerabbit 3y ago
        Your missing the point. In that browsers insist that you now -must- have HTTPS. And that if you wish to serve an static HTTP website over HTTP you can not without a glaring "This site is unsafe" thrown in your face.
notaigenerated 3y ago
Banks did that to our money and everyone's fine with that. Although banks are slow and stupid af, unlike big tech who offer high quality services.
- planb 3y ago
  Banks had hundrets of years to become "slow and stupid af". Seems like big tech needs less then a decade for that.
EGreg 3y ago
You could rely on government to try to rein them in — good luck. Didn’t work with Ma Bell, the pieces still charged $3 a minute. Or you could contribute to open protocols, and do to the tech giants what: The Web did to AOL, MSN, etc. VoIP did to AT&T, Sprint, etc. Wikipedia did to Britannica OpenStreetMap will do to Google Maps etc. Open, permissionless networks beat closed, proprietary ones once they are good enough. I spent 10 years and over $1 million from my company’s revenues to build an open source social operating system to power pretty much all the applications you’d want: https://qbix.com https://qbix.com Hope it helps! About to release v2.0 on GitHub https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform (And 5 years ago spun off https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications — we are still in the development stage on that one).
- Pako 3y ago
  It took me a while to even begin to understand what Qbix is trying to sell people on. In my humble opinion the website is a disaster, especially on mobile. After a few minutes all I could gather was that it claims itself to be a "social operating system" (nice buzzword). After exploring the GitHub readme it got a bit clearer but it kinda "just" seems like WordPress but for websites seeking out more user interaction? I have not looked into it too deeply, but I also have not seen any mention of any sort of open standards that would lift Qbix from being another vendor to be locked into. No OID/OID Connect, ActivityPub, etc. Instead it mentions integration with Facebook of all things. Where is the openness?
- opportune 3y ago
  I went to your website, selected “I’m a software developer”, tried to select “what it’s all about” and nothing happened. Doesn’t really give me confidence in the technology or make me inclined to spend time watching the videos on the same page I’m using Firefox Focus on an iPhone 14, iOS 16.6.1
- Shish2k 3y ago
  > Open, permissionless networks beat closed, proprietary ones once they are good enough. Generally yes, but not necessarily - look at what happened when we (the nerds who write free software) collectively decided that IRC was “good enough” :(
nologic01 3y ago
Well DW could do something about it by at least adding the fediverse on their abominable "follow us on X, Y, Z". DW does not even have an RSS feed for chris sake. The press is complicit in the hijacking of the internet. They made a Faustian pact. Now they are crying foul.
- marban 3y ago
  They have plenty of feeds.
  - nologic01 3y ago
    Where exactly? Visible through your rose tinted glasses? There is no visual hint on the page (RSS has a well established logo) and my rss reader does not autodiscover it from the main page.
    - kervantas 3y ago
      Inoreader or Feedly list plenty of RSS links for DW
    - jug 3y ago
      Give me a break. You literally just type dw.com/rss. Logotypes or not this is pretty much a default address for RSS discovery.
      - shortrounddev2 3y ago
        Having to type the URL manually is very poor discoverability. Most people don't use the internet this way
- binchol 3y ago
  Why would they bother adding the fediverse, it's mostly useless, would provide no benefit to them, and they'd probably get defederated eventually for publishing something someone doesn't like.
doggerel 3y ago
Slow news day at DW.com.
- j16sdiz 3y ago
  It's not. They are just shaping the narrative for Google antitrust case. Check the number of article on Google's case. "Something" is happening just today.
ellis0n 3y ago
How could it be otherwise in a world where every startup dreams of selling to a large corporation? You won't get 60 million dollars or a billion dollars faster and only large corporations have that kind of money, it's math time = money. Justice was possible before 2000. In my practice, I have been developing an alternative platform, OS and browser for 11 years and I realized that without major players your donation will be 0 for freedom, since you again need money and time to find relevant users. If interesting, here is the link to the platform demo video: https://vimeo.com/animationcpu https://vimeo.com/animationcpu
Probiotic6081 3y ago
Martin Andree is a schmuck but he's right here.
crvdgc 3y ago
> Also, it must be ensured that user data is accessible to all competitors. This doesn't sound like a good idea. The collection of user data and the underlying advertising business model is a problem to be removed, not a playing field for more competition and "improvement".
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  I assumed the idea was that if you open it up to everyone it becomes less valuable to the tech giants.
- CalRobert 3y ago
  The only way to make it inaccessible to competitors is to make it impractical to access for the user themselves. GDPR demands this portability and in theory, it's awesome. Though I haven't seen a lot of examples yet it should make it easy to do things like port your favourites and listening history from spotify to another platform. It's your data, after all.
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
Not entirely different from the industrial giants that control other industries. Our lives are largely controlled by them but we don't really see it
- bell-cot 3y ago
  True - but there are far fewer techno-utopians hanging around the shipbuilding industry, or soft drink industry, or roofing shingle industry, or ...
pluc 3y ago
They're hijacking your internet. I'm not on social media and let me tell you the rest of the web still exists. Its pace is much slower, but it's there.
- Borg3 3y ago
  Yeah. Same here, mostly self-hosted. Running VPNs everywhere. Internet is still good transport layer. Old web I care is still there too, but I mirror everything I feel I will need in the future. Just in case.
- CalRobert 3y ago
  For now - but with changes like WEI (attestation) you may find that you have little choice to be part of "the rest of the web" unless you use an Approved Browser to do only Approved Things.
- TrackerFF 3y ago
  Imagine a couple of years from now, you're working on some stuff for a client. Client sends you a link, but you can't open the link with your non-chromium browser of choice - it's been built on tech provided by google, and google says: You can only use chrome to view this site. You try to download chrome, but since you once used some ad-block plugin, you've been banned from using all alphabet products. Google has also decided that in order to use chrome, you need to have a valid user account to login with. Clients says screw this, I'm gonna find someone else. (switch out client with friends, family, or whatever - one web for you, one web for the rest).
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    I think we can all think of potential futures. I don't see why this one is particularly likely. Google has open sourced the guts of its browser so others can make non-Google controlled browsers, and they fund one of the two only real competitors to their browser.
    - josephcsible 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

212 points by jruohonen 3y ago

acheron 3y ago

Breaking news from 2008?

jruohonen 3y ago
Oh, didn't notice that. It was on the DW's frontpage today.
- czechdeveloper 3y ago
  It's not that article is old, but that this has been happening for a very long time.
- quaintdev 3y ago
  OP is being sarcastic. The article is very recent.
  - nottheengineer 3y ago
    But unfortunately it says nothing that couldn't have been said 10 years ago.
    - pjerem 3y ago
      Oh, 2008 is nearly 16 years ago. Don’t thank me :D
    - HenryBemis 3y ago
      In my current job I was discussing with a C-person and they were expressing their worries about "Microsoft Cloud" taking cover of everything, and how 'we' could reverse that without crippling the business.. to which I answered that we are past the point of no return, and this is a dialogue that we should have had 3-4 years ago. But when this was discussed everybody was 'thrilled' to have a solution up and running in Y time at Z cost instead of alternatives with 3xY time and 3xZ cost. That hindsight is always 2020 (semi-related - https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/875:_2009_Called https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/875:_2009_Called)

charcircuit 3y ago

Big tech is big because they built sustainable products that appeal to billions of people. There was no hijacking. Anyone can still make their own site and become popular. TikTok was able to become the number one site despite not being from big tech.

arlattimore 3y ago
I'd agree that big tech are big because they built a (good) product that appeals to the masses. Make no mistake though, they've also used their power to abuse the system and cement themselves as monopolies which is modus operandi for a monopoly. As for the comment that TikTok got big, sure they've managed to amass a fairly large user base but they pail in comparison against the likes of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc on any metric that matters. TikTok are also the new hotness and could just as easily go as much as they came. The big tech companies have survived massive market shifts, economic catastrophes, dodged/maneuvered their way through government regulatory apparatus around the world measured in decade time scales.
renegat0x0 3y ago
Railroad tycoons have also built a good sustainable product that appealed to billions, yet they leveraged their position of power, monopoly. https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/rise-of-the-robber-barons/ https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/rise-of-the-ro... Just because someone creates a good product does not allow them to be free from scrutiny. Certainly if whole traffic goes from the Internet to Facebook, Amazon, and other you may say that the traffic has been hijacked.
rambambram 3y ago
Exactly, it's just a scare tactic to make us and 'the enemies' believe that there's no way out and we already lost. The solution is in front of us, all that time. I follow a lot of blogs I scrambled together over the years from this place called HN, I do that with RSS. It's enough for me to get a good and healthy information diet (all your blogposts together are way more interesting than any social media platform can offer me). The only thing I miss are feeds with images, to have an image pop-up in my RSS-based timeline is always nice. And some kind of replacement for Youtube would also be nice to have.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Thought experiment: Online advertising is regulated. How do so-called "tech" companies respond. Do they have a plan. Even if they continued to sell surveillance and data services, they would shrink in size. There are various ways ads could be regulated and historical precedents. Regardless of whether this ever happens, currently, online advertising is highly centralised and under increasing scrutiny. This centralisation is not the result of innovation by a select few companies but plain old M&A by the so-called "tech" giants, while the the government was apparently sleeping. If more competition were to take place in online ad services, this could potentially have a serious effect on the lifeblood of so-called "tech" giants. Time will tell.

somenameforme 3y ago
There's a solution that's far less invasive. The article offered it, and I've also repeatedly espoused it: "Enforcing open standards to enable users to share videos, images and texts across platforms is paramount." The reason there are tech monopolies is because of the network effect. It's not practical to expect healthy competition in domains where your product's quality is primarily driven by the number of users you have, and they start with billions, and you start with zero. Enforce open standards, prevent companies from coercing users to sign away their rights to content they generate, and you will have rich competition because you effectively eliminate the network effect.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- wayfinder 3y ago
  No, the problem is no one is willing to pay for any of these services. How many people are paying for their news? For something like YouTube? That stuff costs mega $$$ Back in the day, you were forced to pay for things. You wanted news? You had to put in some coins for a newspaper. Now you sign on and you get news and YouTube seemingly for free… open standards or not, someone has to pay for it one way or another.
  - 3y ago

mediumsmart 3y ago

These tech giants are the sum of their users and nobody else is using the internet they are “hijacking”. Enjoy

bt4u 3y ago
[dead]
JKCalhoun 3y ago
Do Facebook users want to exclude me (no FB account) from their pages? I think that's what Facebook wants.

bullen 3y ago

These are the symptoms. The diseases are centrally controlled IP, DNS and root certificates. The removal attempt of HTTP/1.1 is the biggest censorship in history. The only way to fight back is to self host DNS, HTTP and SMTP at home.

squarefoot 3y ago
> The only way to fight back is to self host DNS, HTTP and SMTP at home. Agreed, but DNS at least needs to be shared via encrypted p2p, to avoid congesting someones broadband with million requests and prevent the inevitable hijacking by malicious actors.
- sprash 3y ago
  > needs to be shared via encrypted p2p You mean blockchain? DNS has been solved with namecoin more than a decade ago. One of the few blockchain applications that actually make sense.
diarrhea 3y ago
> The removal attempt of HTTP/1.1 is the biggest censorship in history. I’d love some more context on this.
- bullen 3y ago
  All browsers now default to blocking HTTP URLs. Anti-virus software blocks native applications that use HTTP.
  - computerfriend 3y ago
    HTTP/1.1 on TLS works perfectly fine.
    - doublerabbit 3y ago
      Your missing the point. In that browsers insist that you now -must- have HTTPS. And that if you wish to serve an static HTTP website over HTTP you can not without a glaring "This site is unsafe" thrown in your face.

notaigenerated 3y ago

Banks did that to our money and everyone's fine with that. Although banks are slow and stupid af, unlike big tech who offer high quality services.

planb 3y ago
Banks had hundrets of years to become "slow and stupid af". Seems like big tech needs less then a decade for that.

EGreg 3y ago

You could rely on government to try to rein them in — good luck. Didn’t work with Ma Bell, the pieces still charged $3 a minute. Or you could contribute to open protocols, and do to the tech giants what: The Web did to AOL, MSN, etc. VoIP did to AT&T, Sprint, etc. Wikipedia did to Britannica OpenStreetMap will do to Google Maps etc. Open, permissionless networks beat closed, proprietary ones once they are good enough. I spent 10 years and over $1 million from my company’s revenues to build an open source social operating system to power pretty much all the applications you’d want: https://qbix.com https://qbix.com Hope it helps! About to release v2.0 on GitHub https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform (And 5 years ago spun off https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications — we are still in the development stage on that one).

Pako 3y ago
It took me a while to even begin to understand what Qbix is trying to sell people on. In my humble opinion the website is a disaster, especially on mobile. After a few minutes all I could gather was that it claims itself to be a "social operating system" (nice buzzword). After exploring the GitHub readme it got a bit clearer but it kinda "just" seems like WordPress but for websites seeking out more user interaction? I have not looked into it too deeply, but I also have not seen any mention of any sort of open standards that would lift Qbix from being another vendor to be locked into. No OID/OID Connect, ActivityPub, etc. Instead it mentions integration with Facebook of all things. Where is the openness?
opportune 3y ago
I went to your website, selected “I’m a software developer”, tried to select “what it’s all about” and nothing happened. Doesn’t really give me confidence in the technology or make me inclined to spend time watching the videos on the same page I’m using Firefox Focus on an iPhone 14, iOS 16.6.1
Shish2k 3y ago
> Open, permissionless networks beat closed, proprietary ones once they are good enough. Generally yes, but not necessarily - look at what happened when we (the nerds who write free software) collectively decided that IRC was “good enough” :(

nologic01 3y ago

Well DW could do something about it by at least adding the fediverse on their abominable "follow us on X, Y, Z". DW does not even have an RSS feed for chris sake. The press is complicit in the hijacking of the internet. They made a Faustian pact. Now they are crying foul.

marban 3y ago
They have plenty of feeds.
- nologic01 3y ago
  Where exactly? Visible through your rose tinted glasses? There is no visual hint on the page (RSS has a well established logo) and my rss reader does not autodiscover it from the main page.
  - kervantas 3y ago
    Inoreader or Feedly list plenty of RSS links for DW
  - jug 3y ago
    Give me a break. You literally just type dw.com/rss. Logotypes or not this is pretty much a default address for RSS discovery.
    - shortrounddev2 3y ago
      Having to type the URL manually is very poor discoverability. Most people don't use the internet this way
binchol 3y ago
Why would they bother adding the fediverse, it's mostly useless, would provide no benefit to them, and they'd probably get defederated eventually for publishing something someone doesn't like.

doggerel 3y ago

Slow news day at DW.com.

j16sdiz 3y ago
It's not. They are just shaping the narrative for Google antitrust case. Check the number of article on Google's case. "Something" is happening just today.

ellis0n 3y ago

How could it be otherwise in a world where every startup dreams of selling to a large corporation? You won't get 60 million dollars or a billion dollars faster and only large corporations have that kind of money, it's math time = money. Justice was possible before 2000. In my practice, I have been developing an alternative platform, OS and browser for 11 years and I realized that without major players your donation will be 0 for freedom, since you again need money and time to find relevant users. If interesting, here is the link to the platform demo video: https://vimeo.com/animationcpu https://vimeo.com/animationcpu

Probiotic6081 3y ago

Martin Andree is a schmuck but he's right here.

crvdgc 3y ago

> Also, it must be ensured that user data is accessible to all competitors. This doesn't sound like a good idea. The collection of user data and the underlying advertising business model is a problem to be removed, not a playing field for more competition and "improvement".

JKCalhoun 3y ago
I assumed the idea was that if you open it up to everyone it becomes less valuable to the tech giants.
CalRobert 3y ago
The only way to make it inaccessible to competitors is to make it impractical to access for the user themselves. GDPR demands this portability and in theory, it's awesome. Though I haven't seen a lot of examples yet it should make it easy to do things like port your favourites and listening history from spotify to another platform. It's your data, after all.

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

Not entirely different from the industrial giants that control other industries. Our lives are largely controlled by them but we don't really see it

bell-cot 3y ago
True - but there are far fewer techno-utopians hanging around the shipbuilding industry, or soft drink industry, or roofing shingle industry, or ...

pluc 3y ago

They're hijacking your internet. I'm not on social media and let me tell you the rest of the web still exists. Its pace is much slower, but it's there.

Borg3 3y ago
Yeah. Same here, mostly self-hosted. Running VPNs everywhere. Internet is still good transport layer. Old web I care is still there too, but I mirror everything I feel I will need in the future. Just in case.
CalRobert 3y ago
For now - but with changes like WEI (attestation) you may find that you have little choice to be part of "the rest of the web" unless you use an Approved Browser to do only Approved Things.
TrackerFF 3y ago
Imagine a couple of years from now, you're working on some stuff for a client. Client sends you a link, but you can't open the link with your non-chromium browser of choice - it's been built on tech provided by google, and google says: You can only use chrome to view this site. You try to download chrome, but since you once used some ad-block plugin, you've been banned from using all alphabet products. Google has also decided that in order to use chrome, you need to have a valid user account to login with. Clients says screw this, I'm gonna find someone else. (switch out client with friends, family, or whatever - one web for you, one web for the rest).
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  I think we can all think of potential futures. I don't see why this one is particularly likely. Google has open sourced the guts of its browser so others can make non-Google controlled browsers, and they fund one of the two only real competitors to their browser.
  - josephcsible 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]