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Interesting how power is being consolidated all the time, creating stronger monopolies: Facebook taking control over publishers by integrating their content. No

Interesting how power is being consolidated all the time, creating stronger monopolies: Facebook taking control over publishers by integrating their content. Now Google taking control over suppliers by creating the sales lead/conversion. Power consolidation just like what happened with the banks. The end result means less competition, higher prices, less democracy, more mass surveillance and population control/manipulation. The Internet is becoming the opposite from what it was in its early days.

treelovinhippie 11y ago
The solution is (or something like) https://ethereum.org https://ethereum.org
- nota_bene 11y ago
  The giants currently have all the control because they own the contact to the consumer. What would be the mechanism that motivates the lazy consumer to switch away from what he knows and loves?
  - treelovinhippie 11y ago
    Yeah true. Though one way it could play out is that the existing behemoths transition from a centralized company structure to a decentralized algorithmic structure to save costs. If the "boring" functions of big tech companies can be automated, at some point it makes sense to just spin that out into a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) aka smart contract/s on a platform like Ethereum. The company still receives the tiny transaction fee from that running contract, but they don't need any employees/infrastructure/costs so overall revenue wouldn't be affected from the change. Consumer-facing nothing will have changed. Same apps, same beautiful interfaces. But 99% of the backend business operations will be performed by distributed, decentralized algorithms running on a blockchain. Particularly as the sharing economy unicorns scale (Uber, Airbnb etc) they are essentially becoming the single interface and algorithm to entire industries. Uber will become the single monopolized UI to the entirety of all transport (people/food/parcels) with some other minor competitors. But Uber can very easily be decentralized. And actually the bigger they get, the easier it will be to decentralize them as a third party (because the trained workforce and behaviour is established, and will gravitate on economics... lower prices, higher wages). And so hopefully the costs, competition, monopoly legal issues and scaling pressures (at 1B+ users) will encourage Uber itself to decentralize and run their entire operations transparently on a blockchain. Maybe in some other capacity Google/Facebook/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon will follow suit. Though personally I'm looking forward to a world where sharing 24/7 video and audio feeds to the cloud for processing is seen as normal. Collecting all human input/output data is the first step in my opinion toward building a super AI around humanity. Google and Facebook's centralized nature is capturing the most data at the moment, so they're best positioned. /2c
    - eropple 11y ago
      This is wishcasting coupled with curious but fact-free supposition. Maybe a better question is: why would people rationally do anything you want?
ashishk 11y ago
If the internet is becoming democratic, what explains the increasing number of new, massive and independent internet businesses?
- s3r3nity 11y ago
  VC's funding $$ hoping that they will be bought by said monopolies in < 5 years?
robotresearcher 11y ago
> The Internet is becoming the opposite from what it was in its early days. The Internet is unchanged. You don't have to use any of these private services that run on top of it. You can still run your own, and you can still reach any IP on the 'net. Now faster than you used to. What's to complain about?

treelovinhippie 11y ago

The solution is (or something like) https://ethereum.org https://ethereum.org

nota_bene 11y ago
The giants currently have all the control because they own the contact to the consumer. What would be the mechanism that motivates the lazy consumer to switch away from what he knows and loves?
- treelovinhippie 11y ago
  Yeah true. Though one way it could play out is that the existing behemoths transition from a centralized company structure to a decentralized algorithmic structure to save costs. If the "boring" functions of big tech companies can be automated, at some point it makes sense to just spin that out into a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) aka smart contract/s on a platform like Ethereum. The company still receives the tiny transaction fee from that running contract, but they don't need any employees/infrastructure/costs so overall revenue wouldn't be affected from the change. Consumer-facing nothing will have changed. Same apps, same beautiful interfaces. But 99% of the backend business operations will be performed by distributed, decentralized algorithms running on a blockchain. Particularly as the sharing economy unicorns scale (Uber, Airbnb etc) they are essentially becoming the single interface and algorithm to entire industries. Uber will become the single monopolized UI to the entirety of all transport (people/food/parcels) with some other minor competitors. But Uber can very easily be decentralized. And actually the bigger they get, the easier it will be to decentralize them as a third party (because the trained workforce and behaviour is established, and will gravitate on economics... lower prices, higher wages). And so hopefully the costs, competition, monopoly legal issues and scaling pressures (at 1B+ users) will encourage Uber itself to decentralize and run their entire operations transparently on a blockchain. Maybe in some other capacity Google/Facebook/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon will follow suit. Though personally I'm looking forward to a world where sharing 24/7 video and audio feeds to the cloud for processing is seen as normal. Collecting all human input/output data is the first step in my opinion toward building a super AI around humanity. Google and Facebook's centralized nature is capturing the most data at the moment, so they're best positioned. /2c
  - eropple 11y ago
    This is wishcasting coupled with curious but fact-free supposition. Maybe a better question is: why would people rationally do anything you want?

ashishk 11y ago

If the internet is becoming democratic, what explains the increasing number of new, massive and independent internet businesses?

s3r3nity 11y ago
VC's funding $$ hoping that they will be bought by said monopolies in < 5 years?

robotresearcher 11y ago

> The Internet is becoming the opposite from what it was in its early days. The Internet is unchanged. You don't have to use any of these private services that run on top of it. You can still run your own, and you can still reach any IP on the 'net. Now faster than you used to. What's to complain about?