There have been several opportunities to break up major tech monopolies and in each case, the relevant authorities failed. Imagine a world where Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, etc. were each less than 1/5th their current size, and meaningfully punished for breaking otherwise unenforced laws, and prevented from hiding their financial chicanery. The mind boggles.
The relevant authorities failed because the wealthy wanted them to fail. Look at how easily fascists can completely ignore the rule of law and break everything on behalf of the wealthy. Why can’t we ignore the rule of law they rigged in their favor and make the world better for the 99%?
Yeah, it certainly doesn’t. What happened yesterday could’ve been easily avoided if so many countries and businesses had made their own in-house systems rather than depending on Microsoft…
But the problem is that for a lot of businesses, it just doesn’t make financial sense to set up their own decentralised systems when centralised systems already exist, offering services way cheaper than you could ever make for yourself - unless there is a specific need it can’t fulfill, or you already have appropriate staff and equipment to facilitate/maintain it on the cheap.
And it doesn’t help that the general population also lean towards centralisation, all coralling where their friends and family are. And beating that momentum is almost impossible - heck, I’m still stuck using centralised chatting services because convincing anyone who doesn’t already want to move with you is like pulling teeth, and worst part is, it only takes one minor inconvenience to undo all that convincing.
Having said all that, the one group I won’t excuse is the Government and Public Sector. There’s no excuse for tax-payer funded services to not be operating on their own services and/or using other sovereign services, rather than continuing to pump money out if their economy and into the hands of US tech giants!
But the problem is that for a lot of businesses, it just doesn’t make financial sense to set up their own decentralised systems
The exact opposite is true. For every company big enough to have any in-house IT capacities it’s cheaper to do it yourself. There is a reason AWS and hundreds of similiar smaller comanies globally became a provider of computer services and server capacities: it developed as a side-gig from over-capacities in their own infrastructure. Infrastructure build because it made finacnial sense to set it up to themselves to save money and have actual control over their data and stuff.
Hopefully change becomes easier with FOSS options becoming more capable.
- LibreOffice can handle most common document formats for business, I think the main thing they’re missing is a MS Projects alternative.
- NextCloud can handle cloud syncing.
- There’s plenty of email managers like Thunderbird, and there’s already a wide variety of email providers and a large company can afford to manage email themselves.
- Matrix and XMPP are developed enough that they can easily replace Teams and Slack
And the best thing (for businesses) about all of these options are that there’s no licensing costs. There’s already some companies switching to FOSS tech stacks, and so long as they’re successful the trend could spread. Even more so if Europe succeeds at breaking away from US tech companies, since their adoption would mean even more funding for FOSS development
As much as I hate to say it, Matrix and Nextcloud are too janky for the general public. Nextcloud having to download and run multiple MBs of php code makes it feel so sluggish to use the WebUI, and Matrix…
Well, I think Matrix couldve been good but
Waiting for this message,You don't have access to this message,⚠️ Unable to decrypt message,This room has been replaced, and its very confusing for people who are used to Slack/Discord style UIs where you only need an invite link to join every room and not just joining the space, where you have to join every room individually.And the best thing (for businesses) about all of these options are that there’s no licensing costs.
But who would bribe the comany or department bosses to use their stuff in particular when there is no money to be made from licensing costs… 😉
“It doesn’t have to be like this.”
-Every system that is demonstrably horrible and propped up by people who are too apathetic, lazy, or tired to change.
Or more like some dumbass back in 1986 made an arbitrary decision and it’s now hardcoded into every system on the planet, and the improvement is not enough of an improvement to justify breaking backwards compatibility.
What happened in 86?
jorts.horse is back??
A tale as old as time.
We would most likely have distributed computing everywhere if we let engineers finish their work on the next generation of operating systems, but IBM needed to sell mainframes. And who knows what the Web would be like if we didn’t let Google write half of the modern RFCs…
The fear of opening a port is what killed us IMO.
Imagine connecting to another computer, without (Gasp!) going through a centralised server?!!
/Rant off I guess
I think that’s already a consequence, TCP/IP is very much a protocol suite that works well for client/server architectures, and HTTP (which eventually, somehow, became the de facto “everything” protocol) even more so. So when you mix these roles and you have machines that act as both client and server at the same time all the deficiencies come to light quite easily. A world with first-class support for mutual authentication and authorization, encryption, peering, roaming, etc at the lowest of network levels was possible, but that ship has sailed.
I’m still kinda that Opera Unite didn’t take off. It was a decentralized server built into the Opera browser, that was easy enough for regular people to use. You just set it up in a config UI in the browser and could enable features like chat, blogs, photo galleries, a music player, etc. At the time, everyone had UPnP enabled, CGNAT wasn’t a thing, and Opera handled UDP hole punching for it, so it mostly just worked. https://www.wired.com/2009/10/opera-unite-puts-the-web-server-in-your-web-browser/
This was back when Opera were still based in Norway, had their own browser engine, and were very innovative. A large number of features that became commonplace were in Opera years before any other browser, like tabbed browsing, full-page zoom (browser zoom used to only increase font size while keeping everything else the same size!), restoring your tabs when you re-open the browser, pop-up blocker, a new tab page that shows your commonly accessed sites, private/incognito browsing, sidebars, and more.
Sure, there’s a bunch of downsides to a server being built into your browser, but it was an interesting idea. People that don’t know anything about servers were able to easily try it out.
Instead of just adopting ipv6 they started sharing ip addresses across customers lol
One does not simply adopt ipv6
We gonna get ipv8 before ipv6
And who knows what the Web would be like if we didn’t let Google write half of the modern RFCs…
But it has to be like something and there will be consequences of any system. TBH I’m fascinated by the possibilities that aren’t too. But there are many more “broken” than fixed and that could matter who you are. Not saying it’s great is it is, but I feel like we are at an end.
