Dominant companies: Google, social media
Computing has a history of companies becoming dominant in different fields.
It might be in the nature of computing that this kind of thing happens.
The 45 largest companies in the world (by market value) as at 2015.
From
FT 500.
Note IT companies:
Apple, Google (Alphabet), Microsoft, Samsung, Oracle, Facebook, Amazon, IBM, Intel.
The Google monopoly
- Search engine market share
(and here)
shows Google with a near monopoly in search.
Is this bad?
Will this stifle innovation?
- Criticism of Google
- Some differences perhaps with the Microsoft monopoly in OS:
- Users pay no money to Google. It is a free service.
- Users can switch overnight to a different search engine at no cost.
- Note that despite being free to users,
Google is hugely profitable.
- Entry for parent company
Alphabet
shows summary of profits.
An old example of a Google flaw
Here is an old example of a Google flaw, which shows the problem in depending on one company.
The problem:
Google used to use third-party titles
from the DMOZ directory
instead of the site's own title.
In this old screenshot,
Google linked to my site, not using my own title,
but using a misspelled title written by someone else.
Google allowed a way of stopping this using
NOODP
but many sites never discovered this.
It was just a bad idea by Google.
I even saw sites which were given hostile third-party titles
which Google used to link to them.
Today,
DMOZ is gone.
My site's title is now correct.
|
The YouTube monopoly
YouTube (owned by Google)
has massive
power over what videos people worldwide can see.
You generally need to be on YouTube to be found.
If people are unhappy with YouTube, switching video hosting service is not easy
since people lose their channel, uploads, subscribers and view count.
YouTube has a lot of power.
The real issue is the "Web 2.0" revolution.
"Web 2.0" and content-hosting megasites
In the early Web, you hosted your own content on your own web server.
The whole "Web 2.0" revolution
of megasites hosting everyone's content with handy software (YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter)
is very useful,
but it
has led to those megasites having massive power over what people worldwide can see.
First, roughly what kind of site will it be:
- Will the site allow all content that is legal for adults? (Which might include hardcore porn.)
- Will it ban porn but allow "18 cert" material which would be NSFW ("not safe for work")?
- Will it ban "18 cert" material and try to make the site "safe for work".
- Will it try to make a family-friendly site, safe for kids?
Some decisions:
- Facebook tries to be broadly "safe for work".
- YouTube allows cinema-level 18 cert material.
- Twitter allows porn.
There are further difficult topics the sites must make decisions about:
racist speech, Holocaust denial, terrorism promotion, gore, blasphemy,
stalking and bullying,
doxing, death threats, innocent nudity (e.g. medical),
allowing accounts for foreign dictators or terrorists.
You might agree or disagree with their decisions, but that's not the point.
The point is that these megasites
have massive and unaccountable power
to decide what people can see.
The Twitter monopoly
Twitter basically invented its market, and so deserves to have a monopoly!
But again, this gives it power.
Many of its decisions are controversial.
If people become unhappy with Twitter, switching "short message" service is not easy
since people lose their followers.
Social media sites have power
Social media megasites have huge power to decide who can publish:
- North Korea
has accounts on Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook.
- In fact, almost every dictatorship
in the world has social media accounts.
- And almost every
terrorist group
in the world has social media accounts.
Social media companies are mostly American.
Perhaps US government tolerates this for purpose of
information gathering.
Or perhaps US government is just not on the ball.
But either way,
the point is that decisions on who gets a good platform to speak
and who does not
are made by
corporations
not governments.
The need to decentralise the Web
- Mastodon
- decentralised social media.
- Solid
(web decentralisation project)
led by Tim Berners-Lee
- Scheme where you
own your social media data,
and it is shared with all apps you give access to.
- Existing social media companies may not co-operate with this.
But what if new ones do?
- Tim Berners-Lee's 2009 papers
Anti-trust to force open standards API
- Another angle:
US government anti-trust
action to force an open standards API.
-
Require social media sites like Twitter and Facebook
to interoperate with competitors, the way email does, with multiple clients.
- Then you post to the "Twitter network".
Users can read it on the Twitter (censored) platform.
Or on a different (uncensored) platform.
The user can choose.
Ancient Brain