> Fighting insanity with more insanity: Asking the EU to force break up american corporations.
If the corporations conduct business in the EU, they must abide by EU regulation. How this impacts the corporations in practice is not EU's concern. Requiring a break up seems sensible given the situation.
> Tech is inherently monopolistic due to network effects and infinite scaling
No, tech itself isn't inherently monopolistic. Companies that operate with centralized resources are. The solution is technology that operates in a decentralized way, which has existed since the dawn of the internet. The main reason companies don't like it is precisely because it doesn't allow them to control resources and hoard capital.
I raise the counter that all decentralized systems eventually become centralized once they reach mass appeal.
At a mass scale, the users on the network are not sophisticated or trained, and end up having very common failures that result in a move to a trusted central authority.
Your account got taken over? Need to reverse transactions? Need recourse if someone defrauded you? Don’t want to check each factoid you read? Need to ensure that users are not spreading actual terror content?
Bad actors alone, are a sufficient force that generates social pressure that drives centralization through regulation.
But thats an easy example, the other force is the unsophistication of the average person - as a result they gravitate towards tools that simplify their lives, and do a lot of the work they are not interested in doing.
When network effects come into play, this creates a pressure where firms with more resources buy smaller players and consolidate, once again creating a small network.
People don’t want to deal with the over head of creating new accounts for example, or the overhead of moving their content from X service to Y.
> I raise the counter that all decentralized systems eventually become centralized once they reach mass appeal.
Not necessarily. Systems built on decentralized protocols can still avoid centralization. We see this with core internet protocols (DNS, BGP, TCP/IP, SMTP, etc.), and modern protocols alike (BitTorrent, XMPP, Matrix, most blockchains, etc.).
It's true that many people may gravitate towards a specific service operating on one of these protocols for whatever reason, and particularly with federated protocols, but it wouldn't be correct to say that e.g. Gmail or Cloudflare DNS are centralized in the same way that e.g. Google Ads or YouTube is.
Even when services built on decentralized protocols become popular, decentralization avoids vendor lock-in by definition, and users are free to choose any other service according to their needs. It also avoids monopolies since anyone else can build a competing service that caters to the same market.
> Your account got taken over? Need to reverse transactions? Need recourse if someone defrauded you? Don’t want to check each factoid you read? Need to ensure that users are not spreading actual terror content?
All of those are service concerns. Yes, they are easier to address when the system is centralized, but not impossible otherwise. The main reason we don't have good decentralized solutions to them is because companies have no incentive to invent them. And in the cases when they do exist, they have no incentive to use them.
I believe this is in large part due to the failing of the WWW to be decentralized from the start. Its original proposal[1] included a phase 2 of the project where "authorship becomes universal", which failed to materialize. This made it lucrative for hosting companies to fill a functional void, which gave way to tech giants, social media, and Big Tech as we know it today. I think we still would've had a need for centralized services regardless, but they would've been much less popular and powerful than they are today.
Even decentralized protocols trend towards centralization at scale. You might not need to use Gmail to do SMTP, but if you want your SMTP sent mail to reach a wide audience smoothly, you’re probably going to wind up buying SMTP forwarding from a centralized source that solves the “trust vs spam” problem. Same with DNS, you don’t need to use cloudflare sure, but ultimately your DNS is only as good as the root servers that everyone else is using too. DNS itself might not be centralized, but all the TLDs absolutely are.
That's not centralization. Specific providers might be more popular than others, but the user always has a choice of which to use. It's a myth that it's not possible to run your own mail server. Many people do so without issues.
DNS is hierarchical, so of course every provider will ultimately peer with the same root servers. And TLDs definitely aren't centralized. They're managed by different companies, and users can use any number of registrars.
It seems that many people here misunderstand what centralization is.
The fact that Google is the largest email provider doesn't mean they have a monopoly on email. That's ridiculous.
Yes, they can take advantage of their position to influence the market and strengthen their position, which would be illegal. They're arguably doing that with Chrome, as Microsoft did decades ago with IE, but that's a legal matter.
The difference with email is that it's possible to use it without depending on Google at all. It is a public service not controlled by any single entity precisely because decentralization is built into the protocols. Again, the popularity of individual providers makes no difference.
That's a very reasonable point. Could there perhaps be a middle ground by requiring interoperability and conformance with standards?
By way of analogy, I'm sure that the vast majority of people purchase their appliances from a couple of big brands. However, because the various hookups are standardized, there is still a reasonably large market of alternatives. Similarly, early in the internet most people used, for example, AOL Instand Messenger; however, due to interopperability it wasn't unheard of for someone to use something like Trillian.
I'm sure that wouldn't be enough to fully solve the problem of big tech having too much power, but it would probably significantly help.
Google in and of itself is decentralized from an engineering perspective. There's no giga-computer in Mountain View that all search requests funnel though. It's a highly distributed system, much like the internet itself - just a distributed system that a single entity controls.
The issue isn't central or decentralized systems or engineering. It's centralized OWNERSHIP and CONTROL. That is the aspect that needs to get cracked open... what a monopoly is to a capitalism, is what this is to the internet.
> No, tech itself isn't inherently monopolistic. Companies that operate with centralized resources are. The solution is technology that operates in a decentralized way
To emphasize that a bit; I argue what we need is public, open standards that, e.g., prevent social media lock-in or make government computer and networking contracts open to real competition, not just Microsoft licensed resellers competing on who adds less middleman markup.
Academia produces simple standards at good interface points -> industry evolves (with community/regulators pushing back on unnecessary complexity) -> standard published -> competition laws written to require use of standard
If there were an EU-mandated ad marketplace standard, then competitors to Google could spring up, and we wouldn't have the centralization we do now.
Governments have a bad track record in picking winners and losers, but a decent one in fostering competitive marketplaces by mandating use of interoperable standards.
If the corporations conduct business in the EU, they must abide by EU regulation. How this impacts the corporations in practice is not EU's concern. Requiring a break up seems sensible given the situation.
> Tech is inherently monopolistic due to network effects and infinite scaling
No, tech itself isn't inherently monopolistic. Companies that operate with centralized resources are. The solution is technology that operates in a decentralized way, which has existed since the dawn of the internet. The main reason companies don't like it is precisely because it doesn't allow them to control resources and hoard capital.