The solution really is a revitalization of antitrust policy. The reason markets work is because participants in them are bound to a 'race to the bottom' with many other participants doing the same thing. When companies aren't forced to race to the bottom against each other, the conditions of authoritarianism rise. Authoritarian structures don't have to necessarily come from government - monopolies, oligopolies and implicit cartels are some of the authoritarians of today. The question is have we reached a point where technology and globalization provide such enormous returns to the economies of scale that we can't go back or is all this corporate concentration just due to a lack of government enforcement?
> The question is have we reached a point where technology and globalization provide such enormous returns to the economies of scale that we can't go back or is all this corporate concentration just due to a lack of government enforcement?
At some point, America decided that only horizontal monopolies counted, not vertical ones.
Many of our concerns about antitrust would be assuaged if regulators started keeping separate markets separate. Like banning content distributors from buying content creators. Or requiring platforms to provide third-party-friendly APIs. Microsoft got in trouble for trying to vertically integrate its browser into its operating system. But Facebook isn't likewise called to task for treating Facebook live streams differently than others.
RE: Antitrust - on the right track. Consumer's can't solve this from the ground up. What's needed is to prevent certain kinds of key acquisitions. The law around acquisitions is too permissive in an age of network effects; acquisition laws were fine pre-internet but don't solve their intended purpose anymore. Normally, the market corrects against the biggest players because the biggest players are slow to change culture and their business. But, acquisitions are the mechanism by which the big players are preventing themselves from being disrupted by smaller, more nimble players. If the big players can simply buy up any new comers (who will want a deserved pay-out for their efforts) on the scene, they maintain complete control regardless of what consumers want. Otherwise, any "alternative practices" you try to foster will simply be crushed, if they ever become a large enough threat.
Facebook acquiring Instagram is a perfect example.
As a very free market libertarian, I actually agree with this completely. Facebook buying Insta was a very anti-competitive situation. It wasn’t a purchase for a particular tech — it was a purchase specifically to capture a competitor. Grabbing WhatsApp is an even more severe example — it effectively gave Facebook ownership of a vast percentage of messaging networks — both their own and WhatsApp.
Google is a harder one though because Google doesn’t rely upon network effects to the same extreme FB does — meaning, my dad’s search engine choice has no impact on me — but my dad’s messaging client absolutely does.
It’s relatively easy to start a new search engine — it’s close to impossible to start a new general purpose messaging system or social network — at least not one that survives.
Consumers already can do that — they can refuse to use FB products — but they don’t. So a consumer group is pretty useless without enough consumers to actually exert their power.
This is exactly right. Consumers could organize a week without Facebook event, including deleting the app from their devices. If a significant number of people participated, FB would get the message.
Microsoft got in trouble for a good deal of illegal things they did to protect the Windows monopoly from Java :) Integrating IE into the OS was fine in itself, but part of the bigger strategy for which they were sentenced.
Microsoft biggest crime was they didn’t spend any money lobbying. Apple doing the same thing Microsoft did and worst, you cannot even change the default, yet no anti-trust on Apple. Different is Apple one of the biggest spender on lobbying.
False. The law actually changed because judges noticed that the law as it was in the books was pretty nonsensical and totally arbitrary.
It was mostly created, pushed and used by a group of progressive to go after their political opponents. Its well documented (even if people choice not to remember this part) that this was very much PR and protectionism of businesses that were afraid to be driven of the market by the larger more efficient companies. The first anti-trust law in US history for example was quite explicitly passed to restrict the centralised slaughter house industry from driving all the local butchers out of businesses)
The new interpretation that has been adopted requires that you can show consumer harm. I actually have credible evidence that people are getting overpriced.
> Many of our concerns about antitrust would be assuaged if regulators started keeping separate markets separate.
That is very easily said but practically impossible. And even if it is possible, it would be massively harmful because some of the largest changes in the history happened because or were at least massively supported by companies bridging, merging, combining, integrating different markets.
In fact what you describe is pretty much called 'Indian Socialism' a form of 'Socialism' that was very in vogue with British elites after WW2 and India served as a nice place to test this since many of the Indian leaders had an English education and agreed with it. They had a sort of 5 year plan that attempted to plan how many companies could be in what market requiring licences to go into or out of different markets.
Those licences were of course a perfect tool for the state bureaucracy to get bribes from all business people.
> Or requiring platforms to provide third-party-friendly APIs.
Again, said very easily. Have you considered what that would mean? It would mean government regulator would have to go threw each layer of the software and each application and define adequate rules about what sharing would mean. This is a political insanity specially in a democracy.
Now you could argue, that it should all be made by some loosely controlled government bureaucracy like the Fed. An API tzar but how that would end is pretty easy to see.
I would agree that it would make sense for government to support and insensitive the adoption of open standard that were created and adopted by people and companies in the market voluntary.
If you want to use state power to force companies to support open standards it can not be on a ad-hook bases. You would need to think about a specific general law that could be applied to everybody and that does not involve concrete technologies or companies. That would be pretty hard because I think once such a thing is written most people (at least in here) would oppose it.
> That is very easily said but practically impossible.
It's very practical to say <content distributor> should not be able to buy <content creator>.
Likewise, it is practical to say <web site> cannot favor their product in feeds, search, app stores, etc. over competitors.
> Again, said very easily. Have you considered what that would mean?
Sure. To the extent that open standards support types of media, it's a solved problem. Displaying <img> tags has been a thing for decades, for instance. <video> tags are a thing now, as well. Facebook could be previewing external video the same way they preview their own. But their business model is to try to gain market share in the streaming video market, live and otherwise.
You are missing my point. You are assuming a perfect regulater in your imagination. However this is not how the real word works.
Do you remember all the democratic autrage about Net Neutrality. How everybody cried about how unfair it was.
Who are actually the exact people that get to make these choices. How do you enforce fair proceedings? How do you handle appeal? How do you do all this without making it fundamentally undemocratic?
Do you want a democratic vote to make these choices?
Do you want the Senate as a whole to vote on these issues?
How about a congressonal subcommity?
Do you want a largly unsuprivised undemocratic burocracy to just make these chocie by fiat?
The list of problems goes on. What is the legal bases for these effect and how do you punish people who don't follow the rules? How about the US not controlling the internet and if the US goes away from global standards it could massivly hurt the US as a industry standard.
These are real conceptual issues that have caused many issues in many of these ideas that people have where they assume that 'if only I could make these choice the way I want, it would be better for everybody'. However the outcome that you imagine is probebly not the outcome you are gone get, specially if you don't think about these issues.
Do you want a democratic vote to make these choices?
Do you want the Senate as a whole to vote on these issues?
How about a congressional subcommittee?
Do you want a largely unsupervised undemocratic bureaucracy to just make these choices by fiat?
Hmm, well to me it seems like the that last option is the worst of the bunch. And that's what we get when we don't regulate at all - unsupervised, undemocratic, corporate bureaucracies making decisions that critically affect our lives. I don't need a perfect regulator, I just need a regulator because even in your worst case scenario for a regulator you've only tied what I already live under. To your net neutrality argument, your argument is essentially that instead of having a regulatory body in charge of net neutrality who then rescinded it, we should never have had that government body at all - to me that's just unconvincing, at least I got some years of net neutrality this way, better than none at all.
The list of problems goes on. What is the legal bases for these effect and how do you punish people who don't follow the rules? How about the US not controlling the internet and if the US goes away from global standards it could massively hurt the US as a industry standard.
Why do you need every detail of a plan to see if something is good? You want us to quote from law journals for you? Why don't you just admit you don't like the idea - don't pretend that if only we could lay out a plan you'd be for it, your disagreement isn't in implementation it's in foundation.
> Hmm, well to me it seems like the that last option is the worst of the bunch. And that's what we get when we don't regulate at all - unsupervised, undemocratic, corporate bureaucracies making decisions that critically affect our lives.
Your implaying that state burocracy and markets produce the same outcome. That is 100% false, as both systems have totally different feedback mechanism. It is a totally different thing if you are a open soruce standards commity that has to actually attrackt people rather then a burocracy that has no insentive to attrackt people.
The market process is guided by the choices of all the players, and this is why even in a bad case the deversity will be higher then in any government run situation. Standards can be overcome, thrown away, upgraded depending on the chaning needs people.
We already have the largly unregulated market and in that market we have lots of standartisation both completly open and industry standards. Open Source software is winning in many places. New spaces are being opened up for standards, like RISC-V. Yes its not perfect, but you have to realize that you are risking everything we have by giving some government burocracy (and a US burocracy at that) the complete power over the internet.
There are good and well studied reason why this approche is better then the political processes I have mentioned.
> Why do you need every detail of a plan to see if something is good? You want us to quote from law journals for you? Why don't you just admit you don't like the idea - don't pretend that if only we could lay out a plan you'd be for it, your disagreement isn't in implementation it's in foundation.
If you don't have even a basic idea what the scope and power of your policy is, how are you gone compare it to anything else? I am a consequentialist, if you can make a reasonable argument that your burocarcy can significantly improve on the current 'anarchy' approch then I'm happy to listen to your argument.
We actually do already have lots of government promoted standards, and if they are any indication then
I would be running into a different direction as fast as I can.
To the extent that open standards support multimedia, you're absolutely right that Facebook could preview any video from any place on the internet. There might be some potential for minor security concerns around loading and serving big blobs of external data, but those are controllable.
What might be of larger concern is the IP licensing aspect. Users uploading video and indemnifying Facebook against their dubious claims of ownership is questionable. It's possible that what you suggest might run afoul of copyright concerns, as well as the business model reasons you so correctly point to.
You are, obviously and of course, correct that Facebook stands to benefit from lock-in.
Perhaps I fail to understand the IP issues correctly. Users uploading wedding photos to Facebook that they claim they have the rights to is in the same category, legally, as the videos that users claim they own the rights to. Both get the same (lack of) concern.
That's my understanding, at least. Does your differ?
On a legal level, you are correct. On a practical level, people are able to share text and image files without consequences while companies like facebook and google provide tools to detect and proactively police copyright infringement in audio and video files.
Well so, thats because the concept of a vertical "monopoly" makes no sense.
A monopoly means that you are the one major player in a certain market. It is in the word.
It is definitely possible that a company could have excess market power in a certain SEGMENT of their vertically integrated market, but that is still a horizontal monopoly.
Vertical integration isn't a threat to anybody as long as every segment of the market has competitors.
For example, maybe facebook has a monopoly on the social network part of their product. And maybe they shouldn't be allowed to use that excess market power for bad purposes.
It's even worse than a monopoly, it's the elimination of a market. When you perform a vertical merger you no longer have to negotiate with people at that level of the market. The acquired business now only has to respond to the demands of the parent company and it is only through those demands that market forces act on the child business.
Furthermore, since the parent company has removed its demand from the market, there is less money moving around. The less competitive businesses who contributed to the market forces keeping prices low end up folding or being vertically integrated into competitors. The market dies and the oligarchy strengthens immensely. Especially so because now startup competitors must have all segments of the market in order to compete.
I mean, your argument is effectively that vertically integrated companies are so efficient, and lower costs so much, that they force competitors out of business.
If I was a lawyer, fighting FOR the company, I would literally use your exact same argument as for why vertical integration is a good thing.
Reducing costs, and making the market more efficient is a good thing, not a bad thing. Reducing prices is good, not bad.
There's another explanation, that they have the capacity to drive price of entry up. That they have enough money saved that they can undercut their competitors and snuff them out before they can gain any market share. So this is true whether they are efficient or not.
However I'd argue the damning blow is that centralization makes efficient but fragile structures. Its why everyone hates a monolithic codebase.
> vertically integrated companies are so efficient, and lower costs so much, that they force competitors out of business.
I don't think you would want to argue that driving competitors out of business since antitrust legislation is partly designed to prevent that.
My understanding is that using the lowering of costs as an argument works when the government is concerned with consumers but not when it is concerned with competition. I think the US is the former while the EU is the latter?
The revitalization is happening as we speak. Normally Big Tech would have been able to rely on establishment Democrats and Republicans to avoid antitrust scrutiny. But Democrats are on board with the progressive wing now [1], mainly as a result of seeing the fallout of Google/Facebook/Twitter's role in enabling Russian influence operations in the US (and Europe), but also because newspapers and rivals of Google have been campaigning for it for years (Foundem in the UK and Yelp in the US have been massive thorns in Google's side, as well as the entire FairSearch group). They were successful in the EU (the shopping and Android cases are slam dunks in my opinion) but were stymied in the US under the Obama administration (despite FTC staff recommending a case be made) [2].
The exciting, and refreshing, thing about the revitalization is that's its bipartisan in nature. The Bannon wing of the Republican party are targeting Google/Facebook for the perceived threat to conservative speech and likely because the companies are too liberal, the Warren wing of the Democrats are concerned with concentration in markets. The mainstream of the parties are more open to these arguments than ever before. A Republican attorney general opened an antitrust investigation against Google [3]. That's dangerous water to be in if you're Google or Facebook.
> They were successful in the EU (the shopping and Android cases are slam dunks in my opinion) but were stymied in the US under the Obama administration (despite FTC staff recommending a case be made) [2].
Problem is that too many people are getting most of their information from a single shared source (or small set of shared sources) which is controlled by relatively small set of individuals. This leads to small amount of people controlling the news feed for the majority, which is kind of an issue in democracy.
For this particular case we have in hand antitrust policies and forcefully breaking Google and Facebook might be the solution. Same kind of issue however could rise even if there was no money or corporations involved at all. Think for example somebody suddenly purchasing Facebook, removing all ads and just running it as free social media site. The users would be still there and owner of the site controlling what they see.
To tackle the problem we should get more creative. One thing that comes to mind is progressive tax on user base (or based on number of people you reach). Making in financially unfeasible to create a platform that covers too large part of the population. I'll skip thinking about the practical problems in implementing this.
Ideal decentralized Internet solves this problem as we tear down the walled gardens. But what if people are too happy with the walled gardens. What if we just end up with another information monopoly - this time running in the decentralized network and outside the intervening hands of any government.
Network effects can occur in federated networks as long as different platforms cooperate and communicate.
Currently, the Fediverse[1] exists through multiple free software platforms and online communities. (Like Mastodon[2])
This can and should expand to include Twitter/FB/others but that would go against their mantra of owning the platform to ensure maximum profits/rent-seeking and power over information. (Platform Capitalism[3])
We make natural monopolies into public institutions. Roads, sidewalks, parks, copyright registrars, postal services, land surveyors, courts, law enforcement, etc, etc.
And then we take an active role in their management.
Notice the difference between the physical activity of helping to maintain these institutions and the physical activity of sitting at your keyboard and typing into an HTML form and hitting the submit button.
Look at what is actually occurring and not just at what is described in what you are reading.
Those tradeoffs are as chilling as a nationalized postal service.
The "chilling consequences" that you are imagining are as speculative as any other work of science-fiction that you've read online.
Ask yourself: where did you get the idea that creating new public institutions would have "chilling consequences"? Did you personally experience this in reality or did you read about it somewhere?
What are the chilling experiences that you've had with public roads, the postal service, or the hall of records that holds the deed to the private property you live on? Do these negative experiences align with the "chilling consequences" that you imagine with a public social media?
I think reading that sentence is enough to be bone-chillingly horrified, and nationalizing the necessary data is the first step towards making it inevitable
Becomes? Many modern states were designed to be that way from the start. The Constitutions are their core operating-systems, running on a substrate of human decision-making.
i see your point that this is all hypothetical stuff from intellectual books.
BUT, the people in power get to decide the course of the earth. It's humans all the way up. The hypothetical becomes real over time and when it gets here, it is too late to plan.
It might be that nationalising the protocols is enough.
A similar situation arises with the public railways in many countries. Most railways are actually private — the big ones in Japan, the German railway, the various Italian railways. In Italy, multiple companies run trains on the same tracks with competing offerings.
Most of the major European “national” railways can run their trains on each other’s tracks. TGV can go directly to Milan in Italy, and makes multi-stop trips in Switzerland (Basel and then Zurich after crossing the border).
There is a defacto “European railway” that is centrally coordinated but not centrally owned.
I suppose I see consolidation which is a function of the mechanics of the market as a good reason for nationalization and consolidation which isn't as a good reason for antitrust. So maybe Facebook/Google should be nationalized? I think the real test of that though is to break them up and see whether consolidation reoccurs. I'd love to have lots of competing Googles and I prefer that world to the one with a nationalized Google but I prefer either of those scenarios to having just one private and unaccountable Google.
maybe! i don't see how it's possible to have two competing world wide webs, or two competing facebooks. The fact that there's only one of them is why they are valuable.
It's interesting that facebook wants to be the world wide web, and if they pull that off, they'll have just eaten the one network and merged it into theirs.
Its as if the only way to compete with a network is to swallow it up by a bigger, more powerful network. Iterate that over 20 or 50 years. We're in trouble :(
The difference between Facebook and the web is that Facebook is a monolithic service run by one company and the web is a set of open protocols that can be implemented by anyone who cares to do so.
It's easy to imagine a world where social media worked the way email already does: you'd pick your own provider, and they would interoperate with other providers through standardized protocols.
You can have one network that isn't run by one entity.
>The solution really is a revitalization of antitrust policy.
It really isn't because the free market ideology never grasped the full complexity of how our world actually works. It's a false ideology that rulers preach to the masses, see here for a talk on "the free market".
Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.
I'll give you an example of what happed to PC videogames. Over the last 20 years corporations have taken full control over PC videogame software by a campaign of propaganada and selling games where they fraudulently take advantage of the publics ignorance and irrationality to steal game software by rebranding this software mmo/online. It's a way to cheat the population of owning their own software.
Games like Overwatch and world of warcraft and diablo 3 all normalized basically taking freedom away from customers. Markets can't work in a post technological society because corporations have all the power in the relationship to force policies. The human brain never evolved to live in a high tech capitalist society which is why we now have videogame dystopia out in PC game land.
In the 90's we had full blown level editors and server executables, post mass high speed internet. Game companies can simply take the software hostage and chain it to a backend server committing fraud on a mass scale. No law or anti trust can prevent this shit since most people are too technology illiterate to comprehend how they are being defrauded.
Which makes me ask the question: do you, gentle Hacker News reader, really want diversity of opinion and why? Do you have unpopular opinions and if so, would you get fired or ostracized for sharing them? Are you practicing crimethink?
After all, the only people actually working on alternatives to Google and Facebook are the alt-right who have been de-platformed. Gab.ai is so de-platformed that google doesn't even let them put their app in the play store! Unlike the Pirate Bay and scihub, gab.ai is actually not violating the law. You aren't one of those filthy alt-righters who voted for Trump are you? Are you a person who raises uncomfortable questions that cause mental pain by triggering or creating cognitive dissonance in ideologically defenseless individuals you wish to torture with your arguments?
Anyway.... I don't think most of you want the Internet Facebook and Google insulate you all from. Why the heck are you complaining?
-A few hundred years ago, being an atheist was "crimethink", as was religious tolerance towards Jews, Muslims, and so forth.
-A few hundred years ago, questioning the divine right of kings to rule was "crimethink".
-In the early 1600s, Galileo stood trial and was condemned for the "crimethink" of saying the Earth moved around the Sun, in contradiction to the teachings of the Church.
-As little as 200 years ago, advocating racial equality was "crimethink", as was equal rights for women.
-As little as 60 years ago, in the McCarthy era, being a leftist or socialist was "crimethink" and people lost their jobs and/or were jailed because of it.
I do want diversity of opinion because I believe in the values of the Enlightenment, which include the ability to openly voice dissent without fear of reprisal and I have the strength of character to listen to the beliefs of others without feeling threatened; in short, I want diversity of opinion because I am a liberal.
You say you want diversity of opinion because you are a "liberal" but mainstream liberalism has next to nothing to do with classical liberalism. Your average urban, coastal "liberal" adheres to their orthodoxies with about the level openness to other opinions as a stereotypical religious zealot.
Without context what you are saying is meaningless. Sure, "liberals" seem closed minded in not accepting racism, bigotry or hate speech but in accepting people for who they are, it's hard to say their opinions are stereotypical at all... I mean the democrats/liberals/progressives agree to disagree more often than not.
> The problem is that these words have become nearly meaningless from vast overuse
i do think it's sometimes thrown around unfairly.
however, from the other direction the criteria for such is nearly impossible. for some, racism 'doesn't exist anymore' and short of explicitly saying 'i am a legit racist for realz' everything can be explained away. be it 'race realism', stat framing or a variety of other things.
part of this is the issue of what it means 'to be a racist'. some people would (for example) happily endorse laws that would disproportionately burden hispanic americans and harass hispanics of any sort, but claim they're 'not racist' because they 'don't care about color'.
basically this dialectic allows real world racist activity through deferring the assessment of racism to a fundamentally unknowable and unprovable internal state.
A perfect example would be the immigration debate. I believe if you are in this country ilegally you should be deported. Apparantly, according to many many liberals, that makes me a "racist."
Of course race has nothing to do with it, I couldn't care less what color you are , if you're here illegally you need to be deported. And it's not just me, but I constantly see others who have the same beliefs getting accused of being racist.
And that's just one example. I've seen people be accused of being sexist just because they didn't like Hilary Clinton. It was actually really common for liberals to accuse opponents of Clinton of being sexist regardless of the total absence of any evidence of actual sexism.
> I believe if you are in this country ilegally you should be deported. Apparantly, according to many many liberals, that makes me a "racist."
sometimes people present reductive versions of an argument and drop relevant contextual information and then complain that others respond unfairly. that said, favoring deportation for unlawful entry - wholly absent of any context or further data - doesn't contain much information to assert 'racist'.
however, there are serious 'racial implications' of various immigration policies, such as the 'papers please' arizona law, which says officers can harass people simply by being 'suspicious that the individual is an illegal immigrant'. if a person's status is unknown, the means by which such suspicion is derived would seem to principally lie within racial profiling and similar tactics. among other problems, this profiling creates an unreasonable burden on american citizens that are hispanic (particularly those of mestizo heritage).
> I constantly see others who have the same beliefs getting accused of being racist
Probably because of the massive amount of racist rhetoric used in support of that position. It's not an inherently racist position, but when such a large portion of arguments in favor of the position use racist rhetoric it's hard to avoid being lumped in with those arguments.
Lumping totally dis-similar arguments together is just intellectually lazy, which is most of my problem with the use of words like "racist, sexist, etc." They have valid applications, but are often used to circumvent rational debate.
Most people are intellectually lazy. Better get used to it. If you want your arguments to be consistently distinguished from the racist ones you will have to put in more effort to make them seem more distinct.
And to add onto your point there's a lot of nuance in terms of what it means to be against illegal immigration. Some people define it very harshly (toss out everyone that's an immigrant), some people define it as providing avenues for hard-working undocumented immigrants to become US citizens even if they are illegal.
So when you come out against illegal immigration, your stance can run the gamut of not racist at all to incredibly racist. It just turns out that most of the time the statistics simply don't line up for illegal immigrants committing more crime, stealing jobs and so forth. Which then makes the argument not about fact, but about feeling. Which then tends to be more inclined towards racism.
All right, here's some context. People are classified as "racist" for believing that the culture that came out of northern Europe is not inherently oppressive. (Source: Watching what's happened on university campuses for the last couple of years. I can't point you to a specific documentation of a specific event at the moment.)
When that's the definition of "racist", then racism is indeed "nearly meaningless" - it's become such a broad term that it no longer means anything. To paraphrase The Incredibles: "When everything fits the definition... then nothing does."
> Watching what's happened on university campuses for the last couple of years
Have you been on a university campus recently?
Contrary to what some reactionary conservatives seem to think, they are not generally oppressive places with no tolerance for conservative thought.
Yes, occasionally 19 year olds say and do some silly things. That's kind of what being young and having your first taste of adulthood is supposed to be about. And if you only consume media that highlights those silly things and never actually visit a university and talk to young people, yeah, you can easily get a very negative view of what universities and academic culture are like.
> People are classified as "racist" for believing that the culture that came out of northern Europe is not inherently oppressive.
Well, it is inherently oppressive, as is just about every other traditional culture, and citizens have to be constantly vigilant about to make sure that oppressive nature is held at bay as much as possible. Can there really be any doubt about this? Consider, among many other facts, the fact that Alabama just very nearly elected to the US Senate a man who thinks the US was better under slavery and that the constitutional amendments granting women and blacks the right to vote should be revoked. If that's not enough to convince you that racism is a serious problem I don't know what would be.
>Contrary to what some reactionary conservatives seem to think, they are not generally oppressive places with no tolerance for conservative thought.
It varies from university to university. Most universities don't experience anything like the authoritarian-left chaos at Evergreen [1], but you can find student organizations at universities all over America who hold these far-left beliefs. We had no scandals like this at my east coast university, but I'd estimate at least 10-20% of the student population holds extreme beliefs of this nature. You could see inklings of it on campus in the form of posters and group demonstrations and events. I have no statistics about the political leanings of universities in general, but if even 10 big universities have these issues (and it's definitely more than 10), then it's worth discussing.
At my university, even though it didn't seem to lean that much to the left, holding conservative views was definitely a stigma. Conservative students were routinely mocked and ostracized. And this isn't some self-pity, as I consider myself to have been and to be pretty left-wing on most social and economic issues. I just saw what people on the opposite side had to deal with.
>Consider, among many other facts, the fact that Alabama just very nearly elected to the US Senate a man who thinks the US was better under slavery and that the constitutional amendments granting women and blacks the right to vote should be revoked. If that's not enough to convince you that racism is a serious problem I don't know what would be.
Pointing to proof of a problem isn't proof that all opponents of that problem are justified. The position of many university campus students, and some professors, is not merely that racism is still a serious problem in the US but that non-minority groups have effectively been born with some innate sin which they must seek constant penance for due to historical power dynamics. Connected to this is a set of very tribalistic and insular beliefs not unlike what you see in alt-right communities. It's anti-intellectual and it's encouraging college students to view the world in a very narrow way. Oppression of minority groups was and is a dire issue, but it's important not to overcorrect.
Saying we've overcorrected on racism is like saying we've overcorrected on feminism. If 2017 has shown us anything, its that there are a lot of skeletons hidden in many closets.
There's extremist in both groups that fight for overcorrection but lets not confuse that with an actual overcorrection of any kind.
There is no "we", just individuals and groups. Some individuals and groups do hold positions which have overcorrected for racism and, yes, even sexism. A big problem that is still in need of much correcting can still be overcorrected for.
"Yes, occasionally 19 year olds say and do some silly things. That's kind of what being young and having your first taste of adulthood is supposed to be about."
My god. I really wish more people would point this out. The hysteria about University politics is such a bore now.
If that's inherently oppressive then it's not much of a leap to say that disagreement, categorization and even existence is inherently oppressive. Which makes oppression a good thing.
I find a lot of US faux-'liberals' to be quite bigoted in terms of acting like measures against against illegal immigration from Mexico somehow are racist - implying all Mexicans are illegal immigrants. Similarly the same people speak as if all black people are working class, all white people are middle class, etc., which is also bigoted.
I can't agree with this at all because it doesn't reflect reality, in fact, is a projection of how conservatives "feel" so they can continue to ignore reality. Immigration isn't a black and white issue. Maybe if you feel that what liberals are implying has some merit of truth to upset you, then you would look at how to change those signals rather than pretend they're not there.
We need different words (or perhaps phrases) for "mainstream (US) liberalism" and "classical liberalism". The problem is that "liberalism", without modifiers, used to mean "classical liberalism", and now most often means "mainstream liberalism". This leads to confusion (sometimes deliberate, as mainstream liberals try to wrap themselves in the mantle of respectability that classical liberalism earned).
Yes, and your average Bayesian reasoner also "adheres to their orthodoxy" with little "openness to other opinions". Opinions don't move Bayesians. Opinions shouldn't move Bayesians. Stop demanding that other people shift their priors towards yours and show evidence.
I've heard all the alt-right arguments, long before the term alt-right made it into contemporary vernacular, and concluded that they are meritless ideas coming from idiots who lack the ability of genuine critical thought. They can say whatever they want, I don't really care, but I reserve the right to mock them and discriminate against them for being dangerous idiots.
Being open to new and alternative thoughts is not the same as allowing unrestricted hate from racist triggered cowards. If I deem an idea as non-constructive or even destructive I will discard it. Alt-right ideas and ideologies are dead, a hangover from times past. What we are experiencing is the final purge, the virus is rearing up again like a cold sore and the collective immune system of society will stamp it out for good. This is a necessary yet uncomfortable inevitability which is why I'm perfectly ok with it.
> I've heard all the alt-right arguments, long before the term alt-right made it into contemporary vernacular, and concluded that they are meritless ideas coming from idiots who lack the ability of genuine critical thought.
All more the reason to shine a light on these ideas. They won't hold under scrutiny. Blind obedience is not a reasonable expectation of people. We need to understand how our civilization got to where it is while others failed. There really is no such thing as "final purge". If purging becomes part of our ideology there will always be another enemy to deal with and the division will never end.
> All more the reason to shine a light on these ideas. They won't hold under scrutiny.
That assumes people are rational.
What we know is, people are more likely to believe things they have heard before (mere exposure effect), and are more likely to believe things their peers believe (bandwagon effect).
I believe in free speech. As in, the government must not censor peoples speech. But we're crazy to think bad ideas will go away just because we expose them, or scrutinize them with arguments.
When you have an idea that is dangerous and perceived as fringe, you must individually choose not to give that idea more exposure. The risk is you normalize the idea for a segment of your audience.
When the idea is dangerous and breaking into the mainstream, you have no choice but to confront it. But you can't do so with arguments alone. You need to blend logical arguments with emotional appeals, because 1. that's how humans work and 2. the other side is doing it and you are at a disadvantage if you don't. Remember that the art of rhetoric originally encompassed 3 areas: Logos (logic) Pathos (feeling) and ethos (credibility).
>If purging becomes part of our ideology there will always be another enemy to deal with and the division will never end.
This is a natural process of any organically evolving system. It keeps what helps it and expels what doesn't.
I agree there will never be an end to problems and division. The nature of them will simply change.
Regarding shining light on the ideas... this is pointless. First they come from an emotional place so discussing them with logic won't work. Second I could argue with flat-earthers all day but what's the point.
> This is a natural process of any organically evolving system. It keeps what helps it and expels what doesn't.
I don't think it is natural, I think its a sickness. The goal isn't to improve things the goal is to have an enemy to destroy. There is no point where behaviour of the un-purged will be acceptable enough.
> Regarding shining light on the ideas... this is pointless
So you understand the arguments, learned that it doesn't hold water and are therefore in a position to speak intelligently on the issue but you don't want others to go through the same process? That doesn't make sense to me and leaves the biggest question un-asked which is who gets to decide what can or cant be discussed?
I never said I don't want others to go through the same process. Just don't expect anything from me. We all live in our own realities and I'm lucky to be privileged enough to be able to ignore hardcore Nazis. Life is too short to waste energy on debating them. I suspect many feel this way.
If it comes to a head and I find that I suddenly can't avoid them anymore I know where I stand and will act accordingly. If you spend you whole life arguing with everyone you disagree with on important issues no matter how ridiculous their counter-arguments are then it is likely you will carry the weight of the world on your shoulder and become terribly depressed. I've seen this happen too many times to count so I checked out and focused more energy on things that bring positive energy to me and the world. If that's a problem to you, that's your problem not mine, and you'll have to deal with it.
This conversation on the other hand is fine because valid questions were raised and points were made without judgement or threat of violence. I may or may not agree with you but as I said I can handle valid alternative thoughts I disagree with (which ironically is not a feature of alt-right ideology).
Everyone believes their opponents are dangerous idiots. Democracy only kind of works because people listen and tolerate each other anyway. The massive amount of political polarization you are creating is going to destroy the country.
Nitpick: Galileo was put under house arrest from the church not because of his heliocentric views, but because he publicly mocked the pope (making him "Simplicio" in Dialogue), even after Galileo was warned not to.
> Which makes me ask the question: do you, gentle Hacker News reader, really want diversity of opinion and why?
I speak only for myself, but the answer is an absolute, complete and emphatic YES. The reason is quite simple: in all of human history, there have been only three "families", broadly speaking, of epistemological methods[1]:
* Mysticism: you have been told what is true by an unquestionable (and often distant) authority. Think Moses descending from the mountain--only he can safely speak to God. While God is ultimately the original [claimed] source of the knowledge, it must be funneled through Moses first.
* Socratic debate: two humans can talk about the topic, trying to apply abstract reason to determine the "best" answer. Note that in a "pure" Socratic debate, only logic and not any evidence is used.
* Scientific study: humans can attempt direct inquiry of an answer from the physical universe. Note that logic need not apply to scientific answers: the results of many particle physics experiments such as the delayed choice quantum eraser are not "logical" in that they violate what "common sense" tells us the universe should allow.
Now, there no reason I had to use a religious example for the first family, but they do not exist for the other two: literally, both debate and science cannot work correctly if you do not admit the possibility of contrarian or "heretical" ideas.
Since I wish to live in a society jointly directed by reason and science, I must allow (and to some small extent, seek) contrarian and heretical ideas.
1: I'm speaking of epistemology not in the definition taught in philosophical classes (e.g., "How do we know what is real or what is knowledge?"), but a far more direct, literal, and practical application of how knowledge is generated and transmitted between societies/individuals.
The thing about Socratic debate is that to do it well, and actually produce NEW information that's not the two sides yelling stuff they already believe at each other, the two sides need to agree to not engage in any of the informal or logical fallacies. Not a lot of people are familiar with the informal fallacies. Since they are arguments that can be used to support any argument, when I'm debating something online and I'm in the mood for putting work into it, I will use fallacies used against me to prove the exact opposite of the argument the fallacy user is trying to make. Anybody who has some education in rhetoric can adopt this technique. It makes arguing on internet forums kind of fun because it at least allows for an opportunity to demonstrate the reasons behind rhetorical rules. This is what these free speech platforms are good for, because you can really get into it with people in a debate before it gets cut off for not being polite enough to popularly held fallacious ideas.
For example, I sometimes go on to right wing forum and argue that the Jews are unfairly targeted for criticism as a group. It's a challenge to bring people around, but for some reason I kind of enjoy it. It's like fight club for my brain.
I think the fallacious arguments are getting more automated lately. I was once on a thread where there was some sort of auto-insult bot that would just hurl insults. I would reply with the insult back with the terms switched around. The lazy shill, or the bot would reply back. This went back and forth for a while until I asked the other guy if he was a bot and then it stopped.
You're making a good point, and I would suspect that it's valid in general.
I've definitely had unpopular opinions, and even when I don't, my questioning of the basis of a given argument is often misinterpreted as holding the opposite(and objectionable) belief. This isn't because I knowingly hold some dogma, but that I care about whether something is true or not. Even though I do think global warming is a real issue, I'm careful to point out whether or not a piece of evidence is specious because too often I've been classified as right wing or anti-science.
What I used to value about the internet was how I could have no-holds-barred debates with people from around the world and not be worried about my life being destroyed. From about the age of 11, I visited lots of anarchist and free-speech forums, sites about drug use, politics, etc., and ended up learning quite a bit having to argue with both total fools and those more savvy than I was. Even that young, what I valued was not the "criminal" aspect of these channels but the ability for myself and others to express their true selves, or at least the personae that people portrayed.
That's the internet I miss, but it's also the internet that took some skill to use and was far less profitable than it is today. Now that everyone is on it, the people want a level of safety that is dubious and stifles what originally made the web great. Joe Hacker inherently saw the value of libre speech, but the average person either doesn't understand that value or is afraid of being judged for holding that belief.
The internet isn't really different from anything else that we censor as a society. I don't believe that the same people who value freedom of speech on the internet would keep around entities like the FCC that quite obviously do not exist to protect the public from anything. The average person either doesn't understand what the FCC is for, or they would shrug and say that it's not such a bad thing.
I suspect that HN has a greater than average population of individuals who want an end to censorship online, but I would still agree with narrator in that most of us don't actually want a diversity of opinion. The reality is that most people are self-interested, and that usually doesn't mean that they're interested in hearing different opinions. They want the freedom to express their own opinions, but are still appalled when someone holds a radically different one. People are not very principled and they will move the goal posts out of convenience.
I want diversity of opinions, yes. I want people with opinions I vehemently disagree with to have a platform. In particular, I don't want censors because I don't want other people deciding what I should be exposed to. The solution to speech one does not like is more speech.
I would say Facebook and Google does the exact opposite of insulating people from alt-right media, it hobbles their competition quite a bit leaving alt-right media spread unhindered.
Serious publications spend a lot of money on research, distribution, and marketing that alt right publications like Breitbart and their smaller, European counterparts don't need to bother with because their material distributes itself. All they need is a headline that makes you angry at minorities and social media does all the legwork for them, people are not even going to open the article before they click "share" or interact with a reaction that promotes it in the personalization algorithms.
So, when Facebook and Google are basically the only digital players who have increasing ad revenues we have a serious problem.
Humans are social mammals. If you want the benefits of herd membership, then that requires some degree of conformity and surrender of autonomy. That is the price we all must pay. If you want to be independent and go another way then do so and don't cry about the consequences of your choice.
Don't show up to a high end night club wearing swimming trunks and crocs and expect the bouncer to let you in. Don't go to a klan rally preaching racial tolerance and expect to be invited back. Don't hang out in a diverse, multi-ethnic environment preaching white supremacy and expect people to pat you on the head.
But anyway, Mastodon exists as a good Twitter alternative, and it's not made by alt-righters. It's decentralized so no company or politically-motivated group can censor it.
This is the first I heard of the Prager U parental filtering and demonetization.
The videos are certainly conservative, both culturally and economically, but the ones I've seen aren't objectionable in any way. In many ways, they are less objectionable than a lot that goes out over the AM radio bands in the U.S.
What do you think about the fact that this WSJ article though is "the first you've heard of it"? Could the story itself perhaps have been suppressed in some deliberate manner by Google?
That literally the line they use every time they are talking about the 'evil internet'. They really don't like that people don't just follow them anymore, now they need to grab attention like all those internet blogs they so hate.
Some of the PragerU videos are rather disturbing but I'd rather have them public because picking them apart with friends is quite an interesting activity. They are an amazing conversation starter on a variety of topics.
I'd hate it if Google started removing them completely, despite me not even closely aligning to their ideology.
Keep in mind that this content is (in my estimation) fine for terrestrial radio broadcast, which are supposed to be family friendly, hence the speech codes enforced by the FCC.
> Some of the PragerU videos are rather disturbing but I'd rather have them public because picking them apart with friends is quite an interesting activity.
I hadn't watched one before, but I just watched the facism one to try picking it apart. I was expecting something considerably more in line with conspiracy theorist youtuber's I have watched.
Its rather disturbing how the roughly correct facts (I'm not sure about complete correctness as I haven't read much about fascism) are quickly assembled into an argument that conservatism is "better" than liberalism.
It's funny how competing groups rally around terms that sound the same. Terms that carry positive connotations and share common words. "Pro choice" vs "pro life". And now we have "diversity and inclusion" vs "diversity of thought."
update: haha, there's a wikipedia section on this called political framing.
Another one: Feminism and Postfeminism. I think it's basically because you can respond to a question about A with B with some melodic alliteration, the kind which draws cheers from the crowd. This idea seems to have been ported from the "yes, and ..." idea of improvisational comedy. That is, for maximum offense in a debate, agree with all the accusations of your opponent, and then hit them back with a small "but".
Are you pro-choice? I'm pro-life!
Do you care about diversity? Yes, of thoughts.
Are you a feminist? I'm postfeminist!
The Justice Dept has a very strict definition of monopoly [0] -- it requires both 1) the ability to raise prices profitably above that in a competitive market, and 2) anticompetitive conduct.
That means that Google receiving 90% of all searches wouldn't automatically imply market power or anti-competitive conduct, and I can't see how Google or Facebook can raise their prices higher than a "competitive market" if they don't charge anything for their product.
How would a competitive market in search and social networking even look?
Their product is the advertising platform, so the price-raising should be evaluated there. Their consumer "products" eg newsfeed, mail, messenger, search etc are just mechanisms for demographic gathering for the purposes of advertisement sales, or for direct advertisement delivery.
Fully agree. Heck Bing is one less character and nobody is stopped from using. Chrome takes work to download versus MS browser come preinstalled.
If you do not want Android buy an iPhone. Gmail, YouTube, Google photos and pretty much every other Google thing works fine on the iPhone.
Do not want a Google home buy an Echo. We really should not be penalizing a company for creating a better product and winning in the marketplace, imo.
Google gave away Android source code and Amazon used to create the echo. Google gave away Chrommium and companies use. Google gave away Borg with K8s and TF and all their papers including map reduce and others.
Since Google's entire ad-platform is based on the 2nd bid price auction and they have no control over the prices that advertisers bid, I don't see how they can be raising prices other than making their delivery platforms more valuable to the end consumer.
One way they raise prices is artificial shortages and altering supply/demand in a way that favors them.
The only side that is really a "free market" is content advertising because they don't control all the levers of optimization... but it too will bite your ass and favor them in both marketing and publisher suffering.
On google search, they can invoke quality score, sort scoring, auction optimization and create a funnel/flow that advertisers must continually optimize against much to the favor of Google.
They also change their TOS to be beneficial to their algorithm all the time now. Take the recent 200% budget change, they can now spend 200% of your budget and they optimize this 200% spend over long(er) terms. Seems to be removing the human touch and favoring the algorithm.
They also optimize their CPA to be a black box. I recently switched to CPA because they told me to. What you learn the hard way is that their pricing is modeled in their favor and over averages/terms that benefit them. When you say you want a $1.00 CPA you're not protected against paying exponentially more than that... They even trick you by getting you to update google analytics with "smart actions" that only add bull crap as to what a CPA/conversion is - once again in their favor
All of this seems to just scare away the smaller buyers because they can't compete when industry pricing and averaging excludes them from being able to plan/budget and pay for advertising accordingly.
The only people with the pockets to play the game are the encumbered organizations that also do other trades with Google - such as large purchases of Google G! Suite, Large deals with Google cloud or their data/analytics services.
Login to google adwords, it says "hey switch to CPA" then eventually "hey, use smart campaigns" and sooner or later you can't even control the crap your buying because you can't block/filter/target anymore because the borg is doing it for you and oh btw, we spend your entire budget at 12:01 am sending you 1000 visitors a second even though its not an accelerated campaign and we doubled your budget and we told you to reach more visitors to add more to your budget. Oh, did we not tell you that we weren't running your ads until you increased your budget and now that you increased it we're going to spend 200% more?
its crazy...
It wouldn't be so bad if these giants weren't trying to kill natural search and natural engagement so fast but they realize the only way they can grow is to monetize the entire funnel and the only people that can afford to do that are the giants..
I wish i could spend more on bing but it doesn't have the traffic mostly for what appears to be obsession for google. In the USA bing is great.. i've heard it sucks elsewhere, but i wish they could compete more.
That would be a different kind of "monopoly". The government (usually local) granted rights to a single provider in an agreement that they install connections to a minimum user base or geographical area. What would happen otherwise is the providers would only install access in areas that are profitable and not extend further out into the more rural area.
What needs to happen is these granted rights should be re-evaluated from time to time.
> providers would only install access in areas that are profitable and not extend further out into the more rural area
That is a argument often made by those ISPs but I don't believe it for a second.
In Sweden remote rual villages get together, fund a fiber connection to their village (and quite often actually help dig) where some companies is allowed to lay fiber but is required to allow any ISP to compete.
The market (and admittedly good general regulation in Sweden) leads to an effect where free people in voluntary association get together with private business).
As long as you have single monopoly access these ISP will never update their infrastructure and voluntary offer higher speed and better service.
Exactly. These franchise agreements are the real culprit behind the issues consumers have with ISPs. I'd much rather have a federal can on franchise agreements than Title II.
Yea actually I am curious here, I don't know the difference. Not sure why you are downvoted, I for one would appreciate someone who knows more to explain.
They are a local monopoly (and in case of comcast more then just local). But you see this is very different.
This is essentially a state created monopoly, so the left does never really seem to care about them. They were pretty much born as monopolies.
The left is only interested in the 'free market great monopolies and we need to protect the people with regulation narrative'.
The right on the other hand does not really care about things that are nominally private, even if it is a 100% imperfect form of a market. They care about symbolic reduction in the state and the state budget itself, plus why go after somebody that has huge interest that the left not be back in power as that could mean absorption in the state.
This is a categorically false assertion. Almost everyone hates comcast. And left, right, and center numerous municipalities are trying to break Comcast's local monopolies, but are being stopped by state legislatures. Regulatory capture is a big problem, and the buying of politicians is a problem on both sides politically in the US.
*Edit: I'd be curious to know why people disagree with my statement.
Maybe you are misunderstanding me. Maybe I was not clear.
With state I'm 'the government' not 'state government' in case this was not clear.
I was just trying to say why on federal level does not try to fix these issues on a higher level. My point was that neither sees it as a important enough issue, not to mention complicated because of all the different levels.
It's very concerning that there is so much influence concentrated within such few hands. However I have to ask - would the WSJ would be so concerned if Google or Facebook were conservative leaning outlets? Normally the WSJ defends this kind of duopoly kind of thing - if either Google or Facebook had some sort of right side leaning the WSJ would be preaching to us about the genius of capitalism and the wisdom of the markets.
This is exactly why "viewpoint diversity" is something people are increasingly concerned about. The basic premise is: we all engage in motivated reasoning. We all accept weak arguments sometimes if they reinforce or flatter our existing world view. If we shut out all dissenting views, we'll let lots of bullshit go unchallenged because we were never forced to actually defend our beliefs.
So I think it's totally fair to call out perceived inconsistency in the WSJ position. Maybe the WSJ has a blind spot where they are more willing to accept consolidated power when it favors them. But I think that illustrates exactly why viewpoint diversity is important. WSJ will have blind spots sometimes, but other times they may be able to call other media on their blind spots.
Put another way, you can think of society as a whole as a mind. Just like our individual minds, the societal "mind" can have conflicting or competing ideas. The mind functions best when these different thoughts can "have it out" and try to convince each other that they are correct.
I would think most news organisations benefit from fractured media platforms more than a duopoly. If merely because they can risk being banned on one platform if they publish a dissenting opinion about that platform. Those high risk articles often get many clicks, so I imagine they want to publish them if the risk is smaller.
I appreciate your thoughtful, reasonable and balanced response. It also treats the opposing viewpoint, the WSJ's opinion, with a degree of intellectual integrity.
Your point about 'blind spots' though is a very gentle jab to my larger point. I don't believe this is a 'blind spot'. My point is more basic - I don't think the WSJ has any real intellectual integrity.
In all honesty I think its bad from a viewpoint diversity to have such a small number of outlets control this much of the flow of information. And so if this was a real concern of the WSJ then maybe they would take that approach to very similar and present concern - the purchase of Tribune Media by Sinclar. Tribune Media owns 40+ TV stations. Sinclair owns at least 100 stations. In some cities Sinclair owns 3 stations. Certainly if the WSJ cares about 'viewpoint diversity' they would be concerned about a single company owning that much of the media landscape.
Except they don't take issue with Sinclair the same way they have concerns of Google/Facebook. As a matter of fact the WSJ probably loves the Sinclair merger. I disagree with your point, I do not believe this is a blind spot. I think its much simpler.
WSJ doesn't like the Facebook/Google duopoly because they represent a viewpoint they don't like, a more left or liberal viewpoint. And they do at least tacitly approve of the Sinclair merger because Sinclair does have a viewpoint they agree with, a more conservative one.
There is no intellectual heft to "we don't like it when they do to us what we do to them". So the WSJ has to manufacture some phony principled argument that under normal circumstances would contradict their typical position.
I'm not here to argue the for or against the government intervention trying to prevent a narrowing of the diversity of opinion. I'm saying the WSJ does not give a crap about diversity. They have no real ideals. They only care when their side has a disadvantage.
I can't read more than the first paragraph due to the paywall. But I do think that the WSJ is being intellectually dishonest when they try to advocate against Google/Facebook narrowing the diversity of opinions when its more like "we don't like it when the other side can crowd us out'. The WSJ hates opinion diversity, unless it is their own.
I get the distaste for what can easily be seen as political opportunism. I think it's entirely possible that you are right that WSJ would not care about viewpoint diversity unless that position was benefiting them at the moment.
But after years of following endless cultural trench warfare carried out on social media, I strongly believe that focusing the debate on the perceived evil of certain people/organizations (like WSJ) doesn't help. I think it's actively toxic and prevents us from finding common ground.
I have no particular love for WSJ, but viewpoint diversity is something I feel very passionate about. This cause is being spearheaded by Heterodox Academy, who focus specifically on academia: https://heterodoxacademy.org/problems/
So even though I might disagree with WSJ on all sorts of other things, I'm still happy to see them popularize an argument that I care about. I can feel "in coalition" with them on this issue, even if I might disagree strongly with them on other things. Pointing out contradictions in their argument (as you have done above) is totally fair game and could force them to reconcile these inconsistencies if enough people call them on it.
> I'm not here to argue the for or against the government intervention trying to prevent a narrowing of the diversity of opinion. I'm saying the WSJ does not give a crap about diversity. They have no real ideals. They only care when their side has a disadvantage.
I feel exactly the opposite: I'm not here to argue whether WSJ is a sinner or a saint. To me it's a fruitless question because even if you could prove they have bad motives, that doesn't tell us what we should think about this argument. People can make good arguments for the wrong reasons. That doesn't mean we should throw the argument out based on who is making it.
By the way, I say this as someone who has broken this rule countless times over the years. I don't say all this because I think I am better at productive argumentation than other people. I say this because I've spent too much time over the years on toxic discourse that goes nowhere.
I think this is how blind spots are supposed to work
> Except they don't take issue with Sinclair the same way they have concerns of Google/Facebook.
Facebook case could be a very different proposition compared to traditional media outlets precisely because of it's sheer size and network effects. If you have concerns with a small media outlets controlling how we consumer information and view the world, Facebook is an order of magnitude bigger threat than Sinclair
> In all honesty I think its bad from a viewpoint diversity to have such a small number of outlets control this much of the flow of information. And so if this was a real concern of the WSJ then maybe they would take that approach to very similar and present concern - the purchase of Tribune Media by Sinclar. Tribune Media owns 40+ TV stations. Sinclair owns at least 100 stations. In some cities Sinclair owns 3 stations. Certainly if the WSJ cares about 'viewpoint diversity' they would be concerned about a single company owning that much of the media landscape
I'd actually love to but the WSJ has a paywall. Generally speaking the WSJ editorial page always defends unfettered markets, less regulation, and anything that would be considered pro business. The WSJ calling for some sort of intervention to deal with the duopoly of Google/Facebook is very out of character. Any principled conservative would admit to that.
If they really had any principle they would take a similar stance against the Sinclair/Tribune merger. But they won't.
Because Sinclair is a conservative new outlet. It has somewhat similar opinion on politics that the WSJ has. It has said nothing and most likely favors the Sinclair merger. It opposes Facebook/Google duopoly. Why the inconsistency? Because the WSJ sees the F/G duopoly supporting political opinions it does not like.
I'm not really asking, the answer is obvious. It's because the WSJ editorial section actually has no real principle or integrity on this issue.
Well perhaps they support the propping up of old media because, on average, there is more integrity than in so-called new media, regardless of what you consider a left/right argument. Like perhaps bailing out the banks in 08 was more about stability than some evil leftist plan to quasi-socialize the core function of our economy.
Right wing propaganda is so strong and coordinated these days that they can develop a new goal and drive a single message repeatedly across multiple platforms for months or years. This attack on Google is a new right wing message developed this year but they just keep hammering at it across all their channels tailoring their argument to the different audiences and continuously building mind share and momentum.
Both right and left wing propaganda is strong and coordinated these days. I can't say anything that doesn't toe the line with either side and not have them look at me like I'm an asshole. I've been called both a socialist welfare state supporter and a reactionary corporate feudalist. Which is it folks. The division is worse than it ever was in my lifetime.
In Peter Drucker's memoir, Adventures of a Bystander he relates the story of a contemporary, and onetime colleague of his, who rose fairly high in the Nazi regime, who mentioned, when Drucker was preparing to leave Germany in the early '30s, that he had low-numbered membership cards in both the Nazi and Communist parties.
Welcome to identity politics and the over saturation of a politically correct ruling class run amok.
If people weren't so fucking reactionary to everything they read, see, hear and experience, we wouldn't be in this mess and rational discourse might have a chance. As it stands, people are so easily offended, there isn't any space for an actual discussion.
As someone who considers myself an Independent, I spend hours every day reading articles on both sides and then attempt to form a cohesive thought process on where I stand. Do you have any idea how exhausting that can be with the amount of misleading and straight up false reporting there is these days? Nobody cares about the facts anymore, "journalists" just want to frame their stories in a political meaningful way for people to reinforce their "filter bubbles" they live.
We're not encouraging dialect on topics by simply providing the facts, we're actively and purposefully dividing people.
I pretty much agree, I'm lucky not to be american, but that what it seems like to me. At least in the Bush area it seemed like the US was arguing about things, now one sides seems to have gone beyond logic and discovered trolling while the other is only mostly arguing with itself about how to argue.
> I spend hours every day reading articles on both sides
I have pretty much stopped reading any of these things. You can pretty much read the title and 99% of the time you pretty much know where the argument is gone go. Just stick to books and papers that are about a focused subject. That will isolate you and you will disagree with everyone because people don't actually know or care what happened in the economic crisis of 1893 or any other historical event and they also don't care.
This sort of false neutrality, tinged with the cynicism of putting scare quotes around "journalists", and the indecency of somehow mistaking their rather pedestrian fare of contrarianism with exceptional smartitude is exactly what I think of when faced with peoples' incredulity at the continuing existence of "independents".
Well given the fact that pretty much all major news organizations blatantly pick a political side, putting "journalists" in quotes and being skeptical of any single source isn't too crazy to me.
If news sites prioritize view counts over maintaining an unbiased viewpoint, Roy Moore is what results. Republicans did not trust liberal news organizations to tell the truth.
Here's a litmus test, how do you gauge your reactions to these statements:
African-Americans, in this time and place (America in this decade), commit more crime when compared to Europeans and Asians as a percentage breakdown by race.
Women and minorities have plenty of public resources (facilities, social programs, and information) to succeed academically and enter white collar professions.
Income taxes, which are currently near or above 50% at the higher/highest brackets is plenty and whose rates do not need to be raised. Governments need to cut or curb spending instead of raising the income tax higher.
Stand your ground law is needed to protect a citizen's civil rights and the political arguments made in the wake of Travon Martin's death have been insufficient in changing that status.
These are what I consider to be right wing statements or facts that conservatives don't ignore/insulate themselves from. This is all relative to American politics - in Europe the political climate is much different. Hacker news, from what I've seen, seems to be very left-wing. Also, left wing tends to be cruelly and irrationally/coldly dismissive/patronizing towards rural Christian conservatives - which is more than disturbing to me, but some of the arguments made from them (in my opinion) are not wholly incorrect. I have arguments/beliefs in both sides, but find that most media besides Fox push progressive agendas (i.e. even the 'impartial' reports will use rhetoric and facts which fit in well with progressive agendas).
This sounds glib, but it's revealing: if you're not sure what the left wing is, it's you. Just like for extreme conservatives, for whom they and others like them are "just regular people," "Real Americans", you're so immersed in your half of the divide that the left wing is just "reasonable people," "people who don't suck."
I think it’s interesting that you think antitrust Google benefits right wing groups over left wing groups.
I think this thought is mainly due to the dichotomy of “google = good” and “republican = bad” having some transitive logic making “stuff against google = republican.”
I'm not saying the argument is right or wrong. I'm just amazed at the message discipline across many channels. Steve Bannon declared in july that they were going to start pushing for this [1] and since then the message keeps popping up everywhere. It's amazing power to shape the public discourse.
Yet Bannon's push against big websites wasn't done in a bubble. Public sentiment towards these sites is changing, with revelations about James Damore, Russian propaganda, Alexa being an overtly feminist Black Lives Matter supporter[1], and many other things like this.
Like it or not, culture matters. The fact that all of these powerful sites are blatantly picking sides while at the same time accruing massive amounts of power is inevitably going to gain attention from legislators.
Exactly. I seen it on Reddit like crazy. The right wing is after Google but would guess it will move at some point to someone else.
Funny that Apple would not allow GAB in their app store and Google did but since pulled it yet they are mad at Google. Plus you can use other app stores on Android and use GAB and not on the iPhone.
People do not realize GAB is some right wing social media site.
Turn on virtually any television station, cable channel, read a newspaper, search for political topics on Google and you're going to be absolutely flooded with left-wing messaging to the tune of 10 to 1 vs right-wing.
>Right wing propaganda is so strong and coordinated these days that they can develop a new goal and drive a single message repeatedly across multiple platforms for months or years.
If that is the case, why is it that we see mostly left wing propaganda on social media and most news sites?
What's the right-wing counterpart to Shareblue? I have never seen something equivalent to the effectiveness of modern "grassroots" messaging campaigns sponsored by certain democratic chessmasters. The fact that full-time protester is now a decently paid and socially acceptable job is incredible.
In Illinois, we have the Illinois Policy Institute, IPI, which is a "think-tank" by definition. In reality, it is a modern grassroots messaging campaign sponsored by Republican chessmasters. IPI, and it's sister organization Illinois News Network, is more local than Shareblue, but still very comparable.
I don't know what my comment has to do with libertarianism, or why it's being down voted. I was simply mocking the blatant corporate bootlicking, and the branding of all criticism as evil right wing attacks.
Sitting down to use the internet in 1995-2007 took a certain kind of personality. It was an act that required isolating yourself for long periods of time.
"Normies" are very unconcerned, easily distracted, and quickly trusting of Big Apps.
Agreed, it's just weird to think how much that mindset has infiltrated the HN. This place is supposed to be populated by engineers with critical thinking skills, yet any criticism of these large corporations is met with censorship via down votes.
Left wing propaganda is so strong and coordinated these days that they can develop a new goal and drive a single message repeatedly across multiple platforms for months or years. This defense of Google's monopoly is a new left wing message developed this year but they just keep hammering at it across all their channels tailoring their argument to the different audiences and continuously building mind share and momentum.
> In a November speech, Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, argued that “edge providers” like social-media websites and search engines “routinely block or discriminate against content they don’t like.”
...
> He also pointed to Twitter’s suspension of a pro-life campaign ad from Rep. Marsha Blackburn, an action that would have been illegal if done by a TV or radio station.
Which is interesting, considering this FCC decision in 2014:
Is the FCC going to begin licensing social media sites?
Does the FCC consider internet traffic to be a broadcast mechanism? When newspaper publishers are not required to follow the same laws/statutes as radio and TV when it comes to political advertising?
In addition, in 2009 Mike Pence sponsored the "Broadcaster Freedom Act of 2009"
(https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/house-bill/226). This bill "amends the Communications Act of 1934 to prohibit the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), notwithstanding any other provision of any Act, from having the authority to require broadcasters to present opposing viewpoints on controversial issues of public importance."
Without getting into the ideological minutiae, is it not possible for the government to know that there's something wrong in the marketplace, and not be obligated to address it?
It should be possible for both the FCC to acknowledge that censorship by large, private, commercial entities is bad for free expression, while acknowledging that it is their platform to do with as they please, IMO.
Apparently having a large market share in advertising also means that you somehow own communication.
Yes, a lot of people use Facebook and Google but that doesn't mean that there aren't 50 bajillion means of communication. Network effects are strong but ultimately they don't prevent you from communicating with anybody. The person on the other end of the line who has a strong preference for their chosen form of communication does. There's also basically no barrier to switch, I mean I've got 12 different messaging apps on my phone right now and it's not even close to a burden. And that doesn't even include email and IRC. And when it comes to broadcast communication which this article seems to be focusing on Facebook and Google are by far not the only sources of broadcast. Hell you should be looking at the consolidation of print and broadcast television if you want to see a true cartel on information distribution.
This. Completely agree. Google out competed established search engines when it released. AOL & Yahoo were entrenched.
History flies in the face of what this article is trying to say. Tech giants can be out competed with new and better technology. It's that simple even though it's very hard.
Google and Facebook are not the 'monopolies' we should be focused on.
Verizon and ATT own the last mile and can literally shut down traffic to a site instantly at the network level! Talk about monopolistic power. Can't exactly out compete broadband unless you figure out how to network with muons or other subatomic particles.
> I've got 12 different messaging apps on my phone right now and it's not even close to a burden.
This might be a generational issue. I have older relatives who can't use more than one app. If at that. Maybe the people who complain about these things are just bad at discovering other apps and platforms.
> Maybe the people who complain about these things are just bad at discovering other apps and platforms.
Or maybe some people just want to keep their life as simple as possible, attention economy and all?
With my mid-30's I don't consider myself "that old", but just the idea of having to manage through a dozen different messenger apps is driving me super anxious just in the same way I like to have all my email accounts in one client/app and not spread across a dozen different clients/apps.
There's also something to be said about efficiency; Keeping up with a dozen apps (not just in content but also software version) is a whole lot more effort than doing it with just one app.
Maybe I'm actually that old? I just think simpler is usually better and to me, there's nothing "simple" about doing the same thing trough 12 different apps, to me that feels counter-intuitive and in the context of Internet communication, very archaic.
Nobody is requiring you to use 12 apps. The point is that there are 12 (and actually many more) apps that people could choice if they were in any way unhappy with their current choice.
Even search, where google has the clearest leads other offers exists.
You can not expect your definition of monopoly to be 'any costumer must be able to immediately switch service without any transaction cost on any of the many, many application any company provides'. That would be pretty insane.
> Nobody is requiring you to use 12 apps. The point is that there are 12 (and actually many more) apps that people could choice if they were in any way unhappy with their current choice.
I can only make that choice for myself, if my family and peers are on none of these apps, then what gain will I get from switching to them?
> You can not expect your definition of monopoly to be 'any costumer must be able to immediately switch service without any transaction cost on any of the many, many application any company provides'.
I didn't define any monopoly at all, I'm merely pointing out that there's something to be said about keeping it simple and "centralized" with certain things.
This is also the same reason why Facebook is one hand good (one centralized place to handle all your online social interactions) but also bad (with that comes a lot of influence).
Why not look for solutions where we still have the advantage of aggregation, without the disadvantage of being dependent on a single party?
You can't just expect your own decision to change the market. There are of course network effects and eventually you have to make a choice if you want to support all clients and thus all people or if you don't want to do that then you have to make choices.
The point is that there are many networks and there is lots of competition on every level and as a costumer you have the choice how to organise your live.
> I didn't define any monopoly at all, I'm merely pointing out that there's something to be said about keeping it simple and "centralized" with certain things.
I agree, if the market is relativly free and a dominant player emerges, it is usually an efficent result, even if many people are not very happy.
That is why many free-market economist don't agree with the idea that anti-trust law is needed to prevent the centralisation that marx proclaimed and many modern progressive economists defend in new ways.
So I'm quite ok with one player, like Whatsapp, dominating for a time. For myself however, I dislike centralisation in fundamental infrastructure, so I make the personal choice to also have Signal, Matrix and many other chats. Depending on what group of friends I use a different app.
So we need to be carful with what are your personal choices and interest, and what are our acceptable market outcomes. Many people have a much to narrow view about how the market outcome 'should' look based on their assumtion of cost (typical example is transportation threw centralised nodes that many people think 'make no sense').
I don't think this is necessarily true. If proper regulations are in place Google and Facebook can certainly be out competed in some of their core services.
Verizon and ATT threaten diversity much more than does Google or Facebook. That should be painfully obvious to anyone who's done their research.
Also WSJ is owned by Rupert Murdoch which should also raise some flags on this article.
Not sure ther issue with Google. I use Google Alerts and get a mixture of content and definitely not slanted one way or another.
I am pretty liberal but I am someone that can deal with reading the otherside and do not have to put my head in the sand. I will even watch Fox from time to time just to see how they are talking about things.
Google would know my slant so putting Breitbart articles in my alerts and on the Google Assistant suggests they are not filtering.
Heck I get negative Google stories and clearly if Google was going to filter be the first thing to filter out.
I really do not use FB so can not comment about it.
Here's something: ask your Google Assistant how old the Earth is. Now ask how old the Moon is. Do you think it's just an innocent oversight that Google Assistant doesn't reply with the age of the Earth? Perhaps it is.
Given that it gives the wrong answer for the moon (even though it's source has the right answer!) and given its spotty coverage of other similar information pairs where there is no credible ideological motive (e.g., sunrise times vs. moonrise times), yes, I think “Knowledge Graph is spotty, incomplete, often inaccurate, and has insufficient human attention” is the Occam’s Razor-compatible answer, despite how fun conspiracy theories can be.
Or it could also be that the source knowledge graph has inconsistent information because of religious mis-information - there's that Occam’s Razor-compatible answer for you.
Journalism is dead. We can't, in near real time, detangle the complexities of the plans of large entities such as governments/corporations and the effects of their policies. That's typically what journalists were really good at.
That's the real problem.
Colorful thought and artful diversity is the spice of life, but priority number one is consumer safety.
We just need to know what's going on!
It's been on the downward trend towards the grave for a very, very long time. Facebook/Google are simply nails on the coffin.
This has been troubling me for a while. We mainstream liberals seem to be calling for more diversity, but the most vocal amongst us seem to want only superficial diversity (i.e. a variety of physical appearances) instead of diversity of thought/ideas.
Take, for instance, the firing of Denise Young Smith from Apple. She correctly argued in favor of ideological diversity being a worthwhile goal for an organization, saying: “There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blonde men in a room, and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience.”
She was crucified by (ostensibly?) mainstream liberals, who apparently felt that such a comment didn’t reflect the true goal of diversity: having a variety of phenotypes in a room.
This is only one concrete example, but it’s representative of what I’ve noticed is a growing trend. Not sure if anyone else here has seen it as well, but I suspect some of you have. I hope we all wise up and recognize that what we truly want is a mixture of experience and viewpoints, not just mere phenotypic variety.
It's really amazing how quickly the topic shifts after the repeal of Net Neutrality. Places were pushing this topic constantly in attempt to shift debate on why insuring ISPs don't do any silly things with user traffic. It very quickly became 'Google and Facebook are monopolies and are controlling all of your content / censoring everything'.
This isn't to say that I don't agree that Google and Facebook are exceedingly large companies with far-reaching tendrils controlling a lot of what we see and do. But rather it's blatantly obvious that it's setting up a new target to avoid backlash against giving ISPs effectively more power, especially over said companies. I mean it would be less obvious if he literally didn't come out and say that thing, plus various far-right websites repeating the topic but that's the world we live in right now. I have a feeling the topic won't stick at all beyond being a convenient whataboutism.
Ok, I can't read the WSJ article because it's behind a paywall, but I did read an ArsTechnica story about the issue [1]. With _only_ that information (which isn't admittedly much) it appears to be a run-of-the-mill story of YouTube's content policies running amok. Some see nefarious purposes in YouTube's incompetence, but that cynical view doesn't hold up when one considers how consistently YouTube disappoints everyone.
Seriously, just search for "YouTube demonetization" and you'll find dozens of similar stories that have _nothing_ to do with politics.
YouTube's content filtering and management is a mess and it's always been a mess. Whether it's take down notices, tagging copyrighted content inappropriately, issues with demonetization and advertising, YouTube has consistently struggled with striking a balance between creators, consumers and advertisers.
To take that mess and turn it into some sort of commentary about politics, censorship or a general threat to diversity of thought is cynicism and pandering that's worse than YouTube's alleged sins.
I expect better out (or used to) out of my Hacker News commentary, but alas, few bothered to even look up the basics of this particular story.
Food for thought: What if Google+(or any othe google social initiative) had succeeded and this duopoly were to become a monopoly. How worse the world would be?
