With Google’s recent monopoly status being a topic a discussion recently. This article from 2017 argues that we should nationalize these platforms in the age of platform capitalism. Ahead of its time, in fact the author predicted the downfall of Ello.
Ahem, No. We need something better. And nations should respect their citizens’ privacy and digital security. Not exploit it. 99% of any of those companies is about harvesting people’s personal data and show them ads. We need the other 1%: offer some useful services. Nationalize Free and Open Source Software, Proton, Nextcloud and healthy social media platforms. Not Facebook and Google!
I think since we’re living in capitalism, what we should do is force some competition. Make them interconnect and open up so the people can choose which company to use. Like with E-Mail or federated services. That should apply to instant messengers and social media.
Best would be if they nationalized these systems and then migrated them to their FOSS alternatives over time.
I’d say that’s overly expensive and complex. Since almost everything with these companies is about the ad selling, harvesting and using the data and tieing the users attention. The state would adopt something that is mostly concerned with that. And they’d struggle with their role influencing political views with the algorithms that now belog to them. And it’d be pretty much an Orwellian dystopia once the state starts getting into the advertisement business. What we consider a “product”, the social media platform or mail service is just a means to have users. It’s a tiny fraction of what these companies do. And it’s an expense to them, not what they make money with.
I think it’s far easier and quicker to start fresh. Have something that has good features baked in from the start. And not adapt a business, settle >90% of what it’s about and change the product 180 degrees so it’s about something entirely different. I mean everything Google programms is with the idea in mind to sell ads. They’d need to change pretty much everything about that program code. And we already have some good alternatives to some things. And the EU for example already funds some Free Software. I think if we were to educate people, regulate online services in a good way and offer proper alternatives, the rest follows automatically. IMO nationalising an ad selling business comes with severe issues, as I lined out earlier. And if we did it over, we could also learn from the past and address issues like filter bubbles, unhealthy behaviour, being overly addictive and whatever is baked in to the current generation of social media and almost impossible to get rid of.
They wouldn’t need to run the ad business. Downsize and replace it with taxpayer dollars.
The reason to nationalize something existing in these spheres rather than build something new is because the network effects of these platforms make it near impossible for something competing to get a foothold. And if anyone could fail to compete against big tech, no one could fail better than the government.
I’m still unsure. That’s certainly a possibility and something that happens in the actual world… Buy a company just for the userbase and throw out everything it consists of. Except for a really tiny portion of the software assets and a few hundred employees. And the database with the user accounts. It’d be super hard to keep the users, though. As they’re then on a platform that’s not anymore what they originally signed up for. If it doesn’t go smoothly, they’ll go someplace else and everything was in vain. Maybe prohibit other private companies from offering competing online services. Or it has to be perfect and stay like that indefinitely.
And I mean the network effect is there. But it can be overcome. Or we’d still use MySpace, ICQ, Facebook, Friendster… I’ve changed instant messenger services like 4 times in my life. Similar for social media platforms and pretty much everything. Just my email is still with the same company.
I’m not entirely sure if that still holds true because companies like Meta and Google are so big these days. But as one example I’d like to mention TikTok which was able to attract like all the young people and get them away from Google and Meta’s grip. And they were able to do that by competing and offering a better(?) service. And it’s pretty much ran by a government. So I’d say it can be done that way. You just need a good product and a lot of money.
But eventually, yeah we should all end up on FOSS services that aren’t paid for in private data.
We need to split them, kill them, do whatever it takes to scatter the power they’ve accumulated.
They , as in people holding that power, want to nationalize them, because it simplifies the system they have already built for themselves.
Both Harris’ program and such articles are all in the same direction. “Corps are fine, they just should be state-controlled and their services affordable”.
No. People who want this are power-hungry fools, and despite their feeling of victory factually achieved and only waiting to be formalized, they will get fucked and this will fail.
Yup. It’s time for some trust-busting. Amazon’s logistics is great (though there is need for unionization of the employees) but their shopping site sucks. Kill the vertical integration so there can be different websites that use their logistics to deliver stuff. Many shopping portals competing with each other to allow people to quickly find products that don’t suck and have those products be delivered within days.
Pull out the Cloud services from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Probably should have some standard APIs for cloud services so to make it easier to switch between them which means they will have to compete instead of just locking people in to their particular service.
Social media just needs to be regulated like the phone companies are. Required to interoperate. Don’t like what Elon Musk has done with Twitter? Move to Mastodon, Threads, or whatever and still be able to communicate with your friends that are still on Twitter. Create a common social media API standard that the biggies are required to implement so they can’t use the network effect as a barrier to entry. Moving to a different social media platforms should be like changing to a different phone company. You don’t have to be on the same phone company that your friends use, so why should you have to be on the same social media platform that your friends use?
Maybe update the CDA so that if their algorithm recommends something, they face the same liability as traditional media does when they publish something. Sure they shouldn’t be liable whenever a random user posts something, but if their algorithm is recommending that post to millions of people, it doesn’t seem any different from a newspaper printing an article saying some bullshit.
Scattering it just creates an opening for the next monopoly to come and fill the gap. Nationalizing ensures everyone gets fair and equal access and prevents a capitalist monopoly.
It’s so easy to just say “they” and sound scary it’s harder to actually figure out why some solutions are good and others bad without resorting to a mysterious malevolent entity.
Nationalizing ensures everyone gets fair and equal access and prevents a capitalist monopoly.
Some people live with a regulated market and think that it won’t lead to monopoly no matter what.
Some people live without seeing what nationalization does and think that it will be something fair and equal.
Let’s generally avoid being so certain about things we haven’t seen.
It’s so easy to just say “they” and sound scary it’s harder to actually figure out why some solutions are good and others bad without resorting to a mysterious malevolent entity.
There’s nothing mysterious in this.
If hard narcotics are highly illegal, but also still generally available in your country for those who seek, then somebody does that work with protection from sufficiently powerful people.
If prostitution is illegal in your country, then the same.
And so on and so forth.
Now we are talking about the government control over a large chunk of your communications. There’s no need to sound scary, this is bullshit and you are either a shill or very inexperienced.
Some people live with a regulated market and think that it won’t lead to monopoly no matter what.
It pretty much by definition has to be a monopoly. The point is that profit isn’t the goal anymore. Serving the people is.
There’s nothing mysterious in this.
If hard narcotics are highly illegal, but also still generally available in your country for those who seek, then somebody does that work with protection from sufficiently powerful people.
What? That’s totally an unrelated topic.
Now we are talking about the government control over a large chunk of your communications. There’s no need to sound scary, this is bullshit and you are either a shill or very inexperienced.
They already partially are in most places. Building infrastructure requires government consent or it’d be chaos. Having an option of a search engine being national does not put them in charge of all options though. It just creates a base version that people always have access to.
It pretty much by definition has to be a monopoly. The point is that profit isn’t the goal anymore. Serving the people is.
You can’t possibly have any instrument to set that goal to people with more power than you or “the people”. And idiots thinking they can have centralized power with “a different goal” somehow set are the ones who’ve lead us to the current state of things.
What? That’s totally an unrelated topic.
It’s not. That’s the kind of system you are suggesting to nationalize something under.
They already partially are in most places. Building infrastructure requires government consent or it’d be chaos. Having an option of a search engine being national does not put them in charge of all options though. It just creates a base version that people always have access to.
Having an option of Meta or Google doesn’t put them in charge of all social networks too. But in practice it’s different.
The genuises on PCM supported this and would try to push it occasionally because it would make YouTube be universally covered by the 1st Amendment so they could spread Nazi propaganda to children even more easily.
Alternative Title: Here’s why we need to give the government more reach into people’s daily lives (and how it will make you wealthier because fuck logic)
First I’d propose a nationalization of internet services.
Without that is partly like being without electricity.
Yes, you’d survive but it’s damn inconvenient in the modern way of life.Using anti trust laws to ensure a free marketGiving ownership of the monopolies to the government… whose leaders are funded by said monopolies…
This is a dumb idea even for politicians.
How is democratizing dumb again?
Government bureaucracy. Social networks should be as close to direct representation of the people as we can get, like the fediverse.
This is a dumb idea even for politicians.
Politicians are usually smart, just parasitic and destructive.
Giving ownership of the monopolies to the government… whose leaders are funded by said monopolies…
So this idea gets promoted by people from that loop you are describing here. What’s dumb? It makes sense that they are doing this. It’s in their interest. They are stronger than you and are forcing you into that bent over position. It’ll only be dumb if you can prevent them from succeeding.
The only thing worse than a monopoly is a government owned monopoly
You prefer your monopolies to not be democratically accountable?
I prefer no monopolies, but if it’s something that is a natural monopoly, I certainly don’t want it by a for profit foreign company.
Maybe the answer is to split these guys up by country and each government decides what they do with their chunk. We’ll see which works best.
Independent not for profits, straight up nationalised, private still(baby Bell), publicly owned and privately run, etc etc.
Best case it’s gonna get bloated and beurocratic (any monopoly, but especially state run ones) and if it’s government owned they’ll use the power of the government to prevent competition (more than a private monopoly which will still try but won’t have as much power to do so).
Worst case it goes off the rails and the service is unavailable/unusable. If it’s anything important - say the Soviet’s food production - anybody who needs that service doesn’t get it.
There’s not really much difference. Either way it’s a legal entity defined by the state and run by the extremely privileged.
The government doesn’t need a warrant to browse data that it’s already in possession of. Food for thought.
Good thing they already possess it all via realtime backdoors into every major tech company. The only thing that would change, is the (im)plausible deniability.
I agree, though. We’re all in danger.
This
Exactly this
The government doesn’t need to know my search habits without a warrant
Sounds like it really shouldn’t have possession of that, although my sympathy is limited for fools who post their crimes on the Facebook
That’s not the kind of data they’re looking for, if you post it somewhere publicly available they already have that without a warrant or anything. The kind of data to be worried about is the kind that those companies collect about where you travel and when, and what kind of people you talk to through email or private messages. Even if you don’t think there’s anything incriminating in there, law enforcement loves to collect evidence that they think can be used to pin any crime on anybody, even if they don’t know what that crime is exactly.
Maybe not a warrant, and IANAL, but government agencies aren’t necessarily at liberty to share information amongst themselves. For instance, IRS needs a court order to share returns with law enforcement (IRC Section 6103(i)(1)).
But yeah…this seems like maybe not a super great solution…
They also don’t need a warrant to browse data that companies just give them freely. The government can often easily get your data without a warrant if it’s stored by a megacorporation.
Not Ello!
Jk, I was the only person I knew with an Ello account. I know more people on lemmy and mastodon and fediverse stuff than I did on Ello. It didn’t take much to predict it wouldn’t work out.
I, too, predicted the downfall of Ello, where’s my praise?
Note:
This article is more than 6 years old
Okay, which nation gets them?
Can we go with Egypt? I feel like they should get some more time in the history books.
Lol. What a ludicrous idea.
How high do you want your taxes to be, for a start?
How high do you want your taxes to be, for a start?
High enough to cover proper healthcare and education (including higher education) for everyone. Personal wealth should never be a factor when it comes to education and healthcare.
Right. But do you realise how high they would have to be to nationalise multiple trillion dollar companies?
Considering it wouldn’t need to run for-profit, it would cost much less than their market evaluation.
I’m not the guy suggesting nationalising SoMe, and I actually don’t think it’s a good thing to nationalise that particular function. But shutting down for-profit driven SoMe would probably be a good idea.
How about just making them actually pay an amount of taxes commensurate with the burdens they apply on society?
Nationalize Google search circa 2008 (or whenever it actually was good pre-SEO), kill off everything else.
Oooooorrr…Let’s just break them up like we should have done a long time ago.
Yeah I don’t want government or private monopolies. Competition in an open, well regulated market seems better.
Or both!edit: My enthusiasm was well meant but misplaced. On further consideration, I don’t want government to control social media.
