With Google’s recent monopoly status being a topic a discussion recently. This article from 2017 argues that we should nationalize these platforms in the age of platform capitalism. Ahead of its time, in fact the author predicted the downfall of Ello.
Using anti trust laws to ensure a free marketGiving ownership of the monopolies to the government… whose leaders are funded by said monopolies…
This is a dumb idea even for politicians.
How is democratizing dumb again?
Government bureaucracy. Social networks should be as close to direct representation of the people as we can get, like the fediverse.
This is a dumb idea even for politicians.
Politicians are usually smart, just parasitic and destructive.
Giving ownership of the monopolies to the government… whose leaders are funded by said monopolies…
So this idea gets promoted by people from that loop you are describing here. What’s dumb? It makes sense that they are doing this. It’s in their interest. They are stronger than you and are forcing you into that bent over position. It’ll only be dumb if you can prevent them from succeeding.
The only thing worse than a monopoly is a government owned monopoly
There’s not really much difference. Either way it’s a legal entity defined by the state and run by the extremely privileged.
One has the power of corporate lawyers to enforce it’s will, one has an army and a prison system to enforce it’s will.
You prefer your monopolies to not be democratically accountable?
I prefer no monopolies, but if it’s something that is a natural monopoly, I certainly don’t want it by a for profit foreign company.
Maybe the answer is to split these guys up by country and each government decides what they do with their chunk. We’ll see which works best.
Independent not for profits, straight up nationalised, private still(baby Bell), publicly owned and privately run, etc etc.
Best case it’s gonna get bloated and beurocratic (any monopoly, but especially state run ones) and if it’s government owned they’ll use the power of the government to prevent competition (more than a private monopoly which will still try but won’t have as much power to do so).
Worst case it goes off the rails and the service is unavailable/unusable. If it’s anything important - say the Soviet’s food production - anybody who needs that service doesn’t get it.
See things is, I’m a Brit. Water and rail are going to be brought back under groverment control because running them privately has failed. Buses are another one where when the local government has taken back over, services have improved. Partly because they are run providing a service, not a profit.
Certain bit of society’s infrastructure is better run at a loss for the better running of the wider economy. If every bit is run at a profit, the whole can be less profitable. Most countries don’t have all private road system. France has lot of private motorways, which are strangely empty, because the local avoid them because of cost. Like the M6 Toll in the UK.
Okay, which nation gets them?
Can we go with Egypt? I feel like they should get some more time in the history books.
Not Ello!
Jk, I was the only person I knew with an Ello account. I know more people on lemmy and mastodon and fediverse stuff than I did on Ello. It didn’t take much to predict it wouldn’t work out.
I, too, predicted the downfall of Ello, where’s my praise?
The government doesn’t need a warrant to browse data that it’s already in possession of. Food for thought.
Good thing they already possess it all via realtime backdoors into every major tech company. The only thing that would change, is the (im)plausible deniability.
I agree, though. We’re all in danger.
Sounds like it really shouldn’t have possession of that, although my sympathy is limited for fools who post their crimes on the Facebook
That’s not the kind of data they’re looking for, if you post it somewhere publicly available they already have that without a warrant or anything. The kind of data to be worried about is the kind that those companies collect about where you travel and when, and what kind of people you talk to through email or private messages. Even if you don’t think there’s anything incriminating in there, law enforcement loves to collect evidence that they think can be used to pin any crime on anybody, even if they don’t know what that crime is exactly.
This
Exactly this
The government doesn’t need to know my search habits without a warrant
Maybe not a warrant, and IANAL, but government agencies aren’t necessarily at liberty to share information amongst themselves. For instance, IRS needs a court order to share returns with law enforcement (IRC Section 6103(i)(1)).
But yeah…this seems like maybe not a super great solution…
They also don’t need a warrant to browse data that companies just give them freely. The government can often easily get your data without a warrant if it’s stored by a megacorporation.
Lol. What a ludicrous idea.
How high do you want your taxes to be, for a start?
How high do you want your taxes to be, for a start?
High enough to cover proper healthcare and education (including higher education) for everyone. Personal wealth should never be a factor when it comes to education and healthcare.
Right. But do you realise how high they would have to be to nationalise multiple trillion dollar companies?
Considering it wouldn’t need to run for-profit, it would cost much less than their market evaluation.
I’m not the guy suggesting nationalising SoMe, and I actually don’t think it’s a good thing to nationalise that particular function. But shutting down for-profit driven SoMe would probably be a good idea.
Someone needs to learn world history before making proposals like this.
Someone should say what they’re referring to before hitting enter and be done with their cryptic comment
Presumably, they are referring to literally every other time a government seized control of the media. This isn’t exactly the same, but it’s fairly close to some of what happened in the early stages of some of those cases.
How about just making them actually pay an amount of taxes commensurate with the burdens they apply on society?
Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon? If somebody posted that on Google, Facebook and Amazon, I’d say, “well, they seem to not know better”. But posting that in the noncommercial Fediverse? Why?
I found the idea interesting, just something to think about as these platforms continue to develop.
Nationalize Google search circa 2008 (or whenever it actually was good pre-SEO), kill off everything else.
Note:
This article is more than 6 years old
lol that wouldnt happen though
Nationalizing Facebook is a terrible idea. 1a would turn it into an almost unmoderatable hellhole Twitter would pale in comparison to.
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Ever seen the discussion on a government Facebook page where they’re not legally allowed to block trolls?
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First I’d propose a nationalization of internet services.
Without that is partly like being without electricity.
Yes, you’d survive but it’s damn inconvenient in the modern way of life.
