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We need to nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon. Here’s why (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I'd say computers with internet have done to regulations of mass media the same thing that early computers have done to encryption.

They allow platforms\businesses\whoever to make systems of enormous complexity, easily incompatible and with intentional gray zones for laws here and there, and to do that fast and in enormous quantities.

For example, with algorithmic recommendations and who's responsible.

What in the world before the Internet would be generally contained to real physical objects and procedures hard to change that fast, after it became wholly models defined by computer programs. When Facebook reads your messages, they don't open any physical envelope and they don't even do something at a telephone station.

There's an explosion of facts legal systems have not been designed to deal with. As we've all seen with the way they react to it.