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I think if there ever was an indicator that some function should be owned by the public, it’s when the public has come to expect it exists for free, when the so

by dcow 1y ago

I think if there ever was an indicator that some function should be owned by the public, it’s when the public has come to expect it exists for free, when the social expectation is this thing is so fundamental and necessary that paying for it is absurd and creates equity of access problems.

strogonoff 1y ago
An issue with regulation of something as public good is stagnation. When companies can make money and compete for serving the customer best, this drives innovation. I used to think that a good alternative could be making it mandatory to provide feature-complete API for interoperation. Third-party cross-platform clients would remove lock-in and make ads unprofitable, demoting Big Social from platforms to pipes, like mobile providers, and force them to charge for service. It would no longer be in their interest to serve aggravating content to keep us glued to screens if we can just switch to a more mental health friendly competitor, and besides it would lower their server load. However, I am not sure anymore whether it would do much to other shady practices like all sorts of data mining and sale, including the new practice of using private data for training commercial ML models.