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.
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.
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.
Governments are bad; I get it.
But is it tiring to constantly mistrust the people we’ve put in charge of our shared resources or is it resignation to keep choosing the same people each time instead of the ones you CAN trust?
I didn’t put anybody in charge. I could theoretically employ them. They are employees.
When someone wants trust, they are the last person to be trusted.
I obviously don’t choose much.
First, because an anonymous vote where you can vote only for one candidate, not even against. Something similar to likes\dislikes would make more sense, but with each voter getting, say, the amount of likes equal to floor of 1/3 choices in the ballot, and the same amount of dislikes.
Second, because I live in Russia.
- Google: plenty of other search engines exist right now, if this argument had been about gmail or Android, I could have understood it better
- Facebook: yeah we can tell this was written before the rise of the fediverse because the solution there is completely obvious to anyone reading this…
- Amazon: maybe because of its cloud services? In terms of e-commerce Amazon is literally just one online shop out of many, I at least do not buy from Amazon especially more often than other online shops.
Someone needs to learn world history before making proposals like this.
Someone should say what they’re referring to before hitting enter and be done with their cryptic comment
Okay, which nation gets them?
Seems like it would be better to have government buy-in to federated platforms. There are some governments that have moved their official announcements to Mastodon, which is a good start.
What the Fediverse really needs to ensure longevity is government and journalist support.
Note:
This article is more than 6 years old
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.
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
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.
Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon? If somebody posted that on Google, Facebook and Amazon, I’d say, “well, they seem to not know better”. But posting that in the noncommercial Fediverse? Why?
I found the idea interesting, just something to think about as these platforms continue to develop.
This is actually an interesting proposal. In fact, many utilities went the way of nationalization like water and electricity. Searching the internet, socializing and ensuring a fair market are all also things which could in theory be nationalized given they fulfill a basic need.
Of course, as they are, they would grant whichever government they were given untold power over the entire internet and our lives. Which seems rather… unbalanced. Moreover, no government should retain that right given the internet transcends borders. No one owns all of it.
Letting the free market run its course with no breaks clearly didn’t work particularly well either.
Perhaps a third option? Instead of one government ruling all of it. Perhaps they were to be owned by a supranational body where several governments can propose and discuss changes/regulation and keep balances on each other? UN style? Worthy of discussion.
If anyone has other ideas I’d love to hear them.
PS: (Also, when one suggests nationalizations such as this, one does not intend for a nationalized framework to be the ONLY one. Alternatives brought upon by the free market would still certainly compete with any such services.)
The only thing worse than a monopoly is a government owned monopoly
There’s not really much difference. Either way it’s a legal entity defined by the state and run by the extremely privileged.
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.
Oooooorrr…Let’s just break them up like we should have done a long time ago.
Or both!edit: My enthusiasm was well meant but misplaced. On further consideration, I don’t want government to control social media.
Yeah I don’t want government or private monopolies. Competition in an open, well regulated market seems better.
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?
Nationalizing Facebook is a terrible idea. 1a would turn it into an almost unmoderatable hellhole Twitter would pale in comparison to.
Ever seen the discussion on a government Facebook page where they’re not legally allowed to block trolls?
Ever seen the discussion on a government Facebook page where they’re not legally allowed to block trolls?
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.
