A truly free market have a high likelihood of self-correcting once one group gets too influential.

It never will. You libertarian types say that it will, but it never has and never will. First there are no mythical pure free market and also when you have a lot more capital, resources and bulk. They can comparatively throw endless amounts of money towards a problem and RnD. They can afford to fuck up and have a money buffer, they might just generally stagnate and be ok. When your potential challengers can only usually have one chance and, when they fail they will get bought out and usually by the same monopoly that they were trying to challenge and thus enforcing that monopoly with whatever innovation that the up with, or they just take the patent just so that nobody else gets it. And what has alphabet for example doing. it’s been shopping smaller tech and IT companies all around the world and it integrating them into itself.

Or the alternative: lower the barrier for others to compete.

how will you lower the capital cost that would be required to challenge google/alphabet? Servers, battalions of code monkeys and engineers and RnD don’t just drop from the sky for free you know. That is the biggest problem of challenging any monopoly, it’s just too damn expensive to try when it reaches a certain point. There comes a point when you can’t just anymore get into the market with two shovels and some elbow grease and you need massive loans for fleets of excavators and trained crews to run them just to be competitive. There is also the problem that at some point nobody will fund your venture to dethrone the market leader, because A) it’s expensive as fuck B) there is 1% chance that you will succeed and the investment will provide 100x return and 99% chance that failure awaits and the money will be lost. No sane bank or financier takes that bet and nobody does that kinda things for charity.

Government is most effective as a police to shut down bad behavior, it’s really ineffective at actually providing services

Again, your government just sucks. You draw the incorrect conclusion that therefore every government must suck as badly as yours.

Google is basically a government in itself regarding it’s resources, GDP, personnel and the power that it wields, and they can do it just fine. Actually they are doing it so well and smoothly, that nobody notices being fucked by them. Your government just sucks in general, we know this. Instead of demanding less government, singing praises of private companies and people as fixes to everything, and then watching everybody getting railed by private interests twice as badly as before, you should instead demand better government.

Following any “let’s chop up google” replace it with another platform is just a game of fools whack-a-mole. No matter how small you would chop up google the same monopoly would still form under a different name, maybe in a little different configuration. We have been in this moment before in the past. You can’t kill monopolies, no matter the field because free markets internal logic will create monopolies no matter what you do and then it seizes to be a free market and you get all the anti-consumer, anti-competition, gatekeeping, general parasitic behavior that you got before. it’s not that google is run by bad people or is inherently evil now. it’s current tricks are what is required by the market and it’s investors because they want every single cent out of it’s customers. It’s that maximizing profit no matter the cost that is combined with cornering market on several sectors that is the real problem and creates that anti-user behaviors. You wouldn’t have that with a government institution.

With monopolies it’s either suffer or make them work for you. That is what a nationalization would be, since even a sham democratic control and following of social goals would be improvement on private interests doing the same and worse. If you are worried about governments spying on you, then don’t be. They already pay google to do that for them already. the real problem really is that companies like google and Microsoft are so big and influential that global politics would enter into play if US did anything to their pseudo independence from the state, no matter how benign their intentions.

Not on it’s own, I recall. it carries it’s weight inside google’s ecosystem, but outside it, it wouldn’t make economic sense to keep that many servers streaming video all over the world with just add youtube internal add revenue and premium subscriptions. The data harvesting is a big part of it.

Yes, but it still would be only a momentary stop AND it would create worse service, because many google products are uncompetitive in themselves and can only exist because google steals everybody’s data through these platforms and sells it to advertisers. Like how much does google pay for youtube servers to keep running and how much would it cost for the users for the same thing and it to not be part of google. Every google alternative would either have to be worse service or be subscription based. I know I’m a devils advocate here, but still.

The real sane option would be nationalization of google under some international body, not breaking it up, or leaving it, and just waiting the market just centralizing itself around some other company that will repeat what google has become and done.

And that’s basically nothing since generational performance improvements have long since gotten into diminishing returns territory.

Because almost nobody uses Matrix compared to Telegram. And it’s not even about if some people can slip through the fingers of western intel services, it’s about controlling the narrative and putting the clamps on information and telegram is almost as much of a news site as it’s a live chat. Telegram is just popular enough that it pokes holes into narratives and harms the mainstream media bubble.

They are already cooperating with law enforcement and 5 eyes. There is no reason to arrest them. Pavel was arrested because they want a backdoor in Telegram to spy and sensor. But I guess it’s the good kind of spying and censorship :)

“Oooh! we wanna help the environment! Look at how green we are! It’s gonna last you a lifetime. Such quality. Such emotional investment into your personal mouse!”

Bitch! You are just inventing stupid ideas about how to turn a hardware company into a service company, because you know that is where the money is.

Hey it still works and does it’s job it was designed to do. The problem with driving in a model T is that you can’t easily get a mechanic, manufacturers support or spare parts if something breaks down or you want to like want to install a new modern sound system for example. Like with the floppy disk the real problem is that they can’t upgrade it very easily and make compatible with the upgrades that is ten tech generation ahead of the existing systems, not that it’s old per se.

It might have been selected just for reliability sake. That is how especially militaries usually want them. better to have a tested lesser product of the last gen, than to have the current gen wild card tech that may or may not have a intolerable amount of bugs and problems that could in a combat situation get the ship wrecked and the crew killed.

as always in government, you get the minimum that satisfies the contract.

This is true. That is what you get when you combine governments nearly unlimited budgets with private profit seeking and very little to no oversight. It’s either audit the private contractor in everything all the time or have some state company or institution do the product or service for you.

Because reddit still has a huge userbase compared to Lemmy and that brings content, engagement and revenue, they are an institution of the internet at this point. Reddit posts are part of google results while Lemmy does not, when people have a problem they find old reddit threads for help, guides and tech support, not so with Lemmy. I would say 95% of reddit userbase doesn’t even know that Lemmy exists. One fuck up will not kill reddit as it currently is, they are too massive, one fuck up might kill Lemmy, if it just doesn’t slowly waste away. Reddit would have to fuck up constantly over a long period of time, kill communities, put features behind paywall, get caught in spying of the users, etc. And each time Lemmy would have to be advertizing itself in every twist and turn to get those users and not alienate them and be able to support the growing userbase and gain some benefit from them and them not just be a cost sink of lurkers.

Who fact-checks the fact-chekers, There is the real problem?

This.

Most of the tech stack is american controlled and that is a security and privacy risk to everybody. From instruction set architecture to control over the social media. To American enemies, American allies… american’s themselves nobody is safe… probably the those that are best at mitigating said risk or take any steps at all are the American enemies.

I haven’t had much hope that if there was an major asteroid racing towards earth that there could be much done about it, but I also know that likelyhood of it is very small so there is no need to lose sleep over it.

While wikipedia is decent at giving overviews on some scientific and technical topics, but when there is a topic about something that is historical and/or any way politically or monetarily relevant there will be an edit war to change it to suit one interest groups wishes or anothers. It really is a cesspool of psyops, misinformation and articles to be basically corporate PR at certain topics, and that is just because google usually gives wikipedia articles as first or second result on any given subject and it’s a really cost effective way to propagandize people and doing it is really low cost. Now Russia just monopolizes the propaganda inside their own borders.

Cold war boomers trying to legislate tech they know nothing about

It’s the only big non-US owned social media. They hate that because it’s much harder to control. It’s not even about the profits to be had, tiktok gets more eyeballs and especially it gets the young people’s attention and has more public thrusts than all of the MSM combined and because Bytedance doesn’t hate their HQ in the US the US government, intelligence or special interests, can’t just call them and strong arm them into censoring whatever talking point that they don’t like currently. It’s not much more complex than that. “Chinese spying on Americans” is just projection of what all the other platforms do.

Those who push this will not be happy no matter what Tiktok does or whatever concessions it makes. They already hold american data in American and EU data in the EU for example. Did that stop the “muh CCP influence” propaganda? Well, no… Their main goal would be to get Bytedance to sell the platform to Americans, atleast the american business. I guess they would rather let it get banned and sacrifice American or even all the western markets than to let that happen. It would be a loss to them either way.

wtf is this comment 😅

And who decides what is being taught if this is to be solved with education? That still just falls into the same dogma enforcement that presupposes objective truth especially in political matters. it just turns from censorship to indoctrination of some kind. There can be no real discussion about political matters if it’s presupposed that there is such thing as objective truth in some hard science sense in political discourse, because then every side in an argument from a position of objective truth and there is no way to compromise or approach the other side when everybody are either heretics or believers to your side.