Does Big Tech need to be regulated?

jmayo

biko wrote: »

AWS, Twitter, Google and Facebook needs to be broken up.
They are much too powerful, don't pay enough taxes and generally seems to become more sinister.

I agree on the taxes.
It is a joke that some of them avoid paying taxes because they register an algorithm or a piece of code in a tax avoidance haven and then wash all their profits through it so they pay shag all tax.

And yes we help what is probably the biggest tax avoidance scams in history.
No wonder some other countries are complaining.

But the laugh is those same countries often do something similar when it benefits themselves or their own companies.

The other big thing that should be done in particular to Twitter and Facebook is to remove Section 230 protection immediately.

The amount of people around the world that have been mentally tortured, harassed, lives destroyed because of this shyte about free speech and them not being publishers is colossal.
They have become a sewer of hatred and then claim it is nothing to do with them.

Yesterday I heard sample of interview with James McClean and it is absolutely sickening the abuse he and his family receive online and Facebook and Twitter do sweet FA about it.

And football in England make a big fooking deal about taking the knee, yet where is the public outcry about the type of shyte McClean has had to put up with for the last decade.

Invidious wrote: »

They are public companies, owned by their shareholders. And they've made a lot of people fairly wealthy.

Yes the founders, the lucky ones that worked for them early and got massive share options, the ones who had money to invest in the first place, but don't play it that they are some great benevolent companies making everyone rich.

It is easy to be a very profitable company when you pay feck all taxes on your massive profits and then you have huge cash reserves to either buy out competition or drive it out of the market.

Added to that the likes of Microsoft and Apple have been often a triumph of marketing over good functional products.

FFS Microsoft's entire existence has been built on providing substandard products to it's customers and expecting them to fix them and make them some way fit for use.
If the same mentality and modus operandi had existed in other industries you would be forever trying to fix your fridge, washing machine, car or TV.

Fair enough Apple have created good products along the way, but they are also a triumph of marketing where somehow they convinced people to dump perfectly working products to run out and buy another brand new one of theirs.
They turned expensive technological devices into fashion.

Varik

Kivaro wrote: »

Their friends? That's odd.
The news and print business in Australia is in serious difficulty at the moment with dozens of regional newspapers about to shut down. They just want to be paid for their content that is used by the likes of Facebook and Google.

And their content is no longer used, problem solved.

News media is going to lose out on a lot of reach now, same as what happened in other countries; see spain. They benefited from stories being posted and linked, and wanted to be paid for the privilege of getting free advertising.

rossie1977

Yes every major corporation should be regulated as they are unwilling to regulate themselves. We have seen it over and over in financial sector, energy etc so technology is no different.

If people have to follow certain rules in daily life then corporations should too

10000maniacs

Kivaro wrote: »

Looks like Facebook unfriended Australia this morning.
Imagine blocking news on their widely used platform in the middle of a pandemic, because this is just what they did, and the Australians are not happy. These giant tech companies have become too powerful and need to be regulated. What or who are they going to cancel next?

Facebook never asked or wanted people to share news links. It was entirely the choice of the user to do so.
I can see their point.
Let's see how the newspapers flourish with Facebook not sharing the links now.
It's like being invited to the party and expecting to be paid for their attendance.

10000maniacs

jmayo wrote: »

Added to that the likes of Microsoft and Apple have been often a triumph of marketing over good functional products.

FFS Microsoft's entire existence has been built on providing substandard products to it's customers and expecting them to fix them and make them some way fit for use.
.

Worked with Microsoft products for years.
In what way are they sub-standard?
There would be no tech industry in Ireland if it wasn't for Microsoft. Windows since NT in 1999 has been a great product. And Windows 10 is currently hanging MacOS out to dry.

Fighting Tao

The onus should be put on the media outlets to stop access to their websites from the likes of Facebook if they do not want the free advertisement they are currently receiving.

jmcc

Varik wrote: »

And their content is no longer used, problem solved.

News media is going to lose out on a lot of reach now, same as what happened in other countries; see spain. They benefited from stories being posted and linked, and wanted to be paid for the privilege of getting free advertising.

That's one part of the argument. The other is that companies like Google are effectively getting free content for their portal site and take enough in a snippet to ensure that people stay on Google properties rather than clicking on through to the article on the news site. In effect, the news companies are losing readers. It is hitting newspapers hard because how people read articles has changed due to the Internet. The long form article has been replaced by the listicle and it is really a battle for users. Many of these users have shortened attention spans. Presenting them with snippets of the relevant facts can often be enough. Google gets to put ads in front of these users.

Regards...jmcc

Varik

jmcc wrote: »

That's one part of the argument. The other is that companies like Google are effectively getting free content for their portal site and take enough in a snippet to ensure that people stay on Google properties rather than clicking on through to the article on the news site. In effect, the news companies are losing readers. It is hitting newspapers hard because how people read articles has changed due to the Internet. The long form article has been replaced by the listicle and it is really a battle for users. Many of these users have shortened attention spans. Presenting them with snippets of the relevant facts can often be enough. Google gets to put ads in front of these users.

Regards...jmcc

All that google shows is the Source, Title, timestamp, and maybe a picture. Google news didn't have any ads at all.

When they pulled out of Spain, the larger news sites saw a 6% drop in traffic while the smaller ones saw a 14% drop.

Tony EH

rossie1977 wrote: »

Yes every major corporation should be regulated as they are unwilling to regulate themselves. We have seen it over and over in financial sector, energy etc so technology is no different.

If people have to follow certain rules in daily life then corporations should too

Careful now...that's "communism" you're talking there. :pac:

A certain political wing of politics has spent, literally, decades trying to undo regulations for the corporate sector. You know, the...ahem..."free market" and all that.

TP_CM

I don't understand how facebook isn't already helping news agencies. How does it work? I follow news pages and when they share a link I click on it and I'm taken to the news website. How is facebook gaining there? Surely facebook is helping the news agencies with their click bait? I'm missing something I know..

AllForIt

TP_CM wrote: »

I don't understand how facebook isn't already helping news agencies. How does it work? I follow news pages and when they share a link I click on it and I'm taken to the news website. How is facebook gaining there? Surely facebook is helping the news agencies with their click bait? I'm missing something I know..

I'm not on FB so I don't know precisely how it works, but the fact is FB are making profits off advertising linked with online news articles somehow. I'd guess they embed articles ripped off news sites and link their own ad to it from which they make a profit.

It's not the sharing of links that is the issue. What FB are saying by blocking its users from sharing links is well if we can't use your news we will stop our users from promoting your news website. After all if you won't help us we won't help you.

Fighting Tao wrote: »

The onus should be put on the media outlets to stop access to their websites from the likes of Facebook if they do not want the free advertisement they are currently receiving.

There is technically no way to do that. Otherwise they would have done it by now.

joseywhales

How dare they make lots of money! It shouldn't be allowed!

All of these tech companies are just lucky that they revolutionized information technology and democratized data making it freely available to more ordinary people than ever before and instantaneously.

They are so sinister for using their merit and innovation to become so powerful.

They must be stopped!

We as people cannot be expected to be responsible for the content we create on social media, it is the bad rich guys in the Facebook tower that make me produce bigotry and take part in collective bullying campaigns online. We can't help it, we are just useless people being led by our sinister tech overlords.

How dare they, as publicly traded companies, who are responsible only to shareholders and the law, try to legally minimize their tax burden.

We as good citizens would never do such a thing if we had the know how to do so. In fact I love paying extra tax as I know it goes where it is needed most, like the contractor for the national children's hospital and I believe that google should to.

TomTomTim

joseywhales wrote: »

How dare they make lots of money! It shouldn't be allowed!

All of these tech companies are just lucky that they revolutionized information technology and democratized data making it freely available to more ordinary people than ever before and instantaneously.

They are so sinister for using their merit and innovation to become so powerful.

They must be stopped!

We as people cannot be expected to be responsible for the content we create on social media, it is the bad rich guys in the Facebook tower that make me produce bigotry and take part in collective bullying campaigns online. We can't help it, we are just useless people being led by our sinister tech overlords.

How dare they, as publicly traded companies, who are responsible only to shareholders and the law, try to legally minimize their tax burden.

We as good citizens would never do such a thing if we had the know how to do so. In fact I love paying extra tax as I know it goes where it is needed most, like the contractor for the national children's hospital and I believe that google should to.

Sarcastic posts as such never come across as good as you think they are in your head.

jmcc

joseywhales wrote: »

How dare they make lots of money! It shouldn't be allowed!

So let's say that they take your data and make lots of money from your hard work but you don't make anything from your work. Still in favour of the "democratization" of your data and hard work?

The problem with companies like Google is they have built their businesses on other people's data. For a while, with Adsense, they have been helping monetise that data but, of late, they have been increasingly pursuing an AOL/Yahoo portal strategy that seeks to keep users on Google properties rather than sending them to the relevant articles on other websites. The abject scumbaggery of plagiarising Wikipedia for the Google "Knowledge box" thing is a good example of this kind of greed and disregard for the content producers. It has also been trying to shift towards being an "answers" engine rather than a "search" engine for queries.

Regards...jmcc

joseywhales

TomTomTim wrote: »

Sarcastic posts as such never come across as good as you think they are in your head.

So what you are saying tomtomtim is that you don't like my post.

joseywhales

jmcc wrote: »

So let's say that they take your data and make lots of money from your hard work but you don't make anything from your work. Still in favour of the "democratization" of your data and hard work?

The problem with companies like Google is they have built their businesses on other people's data. For a while, with Adsense, they have been helping monetise that data but, of late, they have been increasingly pursuing an AOL/Yahoo portal strategy that seeks to keep users on Google properties rather than sending them to the relevant articles on other websites. The abject scumbaggery of plagiarising Wikipedia for the Google "Knowledge box" thing is a good example of this kind of greed and disregard for the content producers. It has also been trying to shift towards being an "answers" engine rather than a "search" engine for queries.

Regards...jmcc

I find it so reductive to say "google have built their businesses on other people's data". It is a great diservice to the millions of man-hours by some of the most talented engineers in the past 20 years. We are all far more knowledgeable now than the average person in the year 2000 for example. These companies have changed the world. To pretend that they are without merit is disingenuous.

With regards copyright, well there are copyright laws right? If they need to be updated so be it.

Montage of Feck

joseywhales wrote: »

I find it so reductive to say "google have built their businesses on other people's data". It is a great diservice to the millions of man-hours by some of the most talented engineers in the past 20 years. We are all far more knowledgeable now than the average person in the year 2000 for example. These companies have changed the world. To pretend that they are without merit is disingenuous.

With regards copyright, well there are copyright laws right? If they need to be updated so be it.

I'm not so sure.

completedit

We definitely aren't. Our heads have been filled with more vaccuos nonsense and fluff.

Do we live in a better society than circa 2000? Hard to say yes imo. Have our lives been truly enriched by the Internet? Depends on the metrics you use. Hasn't been without its drawbacks. One thing I took from the book Sapiens is that developments don't happen for the betterment of our societies, sometimes they just happen, take for instance Facism. Other things emerge that benefit us but not all things do in all ways. In the long run my view is that the emergence of the Internet has taken us that bit further away from our biological essence and fundamentally detached us from our real world experience.

As for deregulation I am in favour because all I see is the emergence of feudalism 2.0.

AllForIt

joseywhales wrote: »

I find it so reductive to say "google have built their businesses on other people's data". It is a great diservice to the millions of man-hours by some of the most talented engineers in the past 20 years. We are all far more knowledgeable now than the average person in the year 2000 for example. These companies have changed the world. To pretend that they are without merit is disingenuous.

With regards copyright, well there are copyright laws right? If they need to be updated so be it.

Google didn't invent the internet. They provide services on the internet. Noone has to use their services at all. There are plenty of alternative to everything google does. We don't have to thank google for anything.

jmcc

joseywhales wrote: »

I find it so reductive to say "google have built their businesses on other people's data". It is a great diservice to the millions of man-hours by some of the most talented engineers in the past 20 years.

It is a bit longer than that but I do respect their work. The problem remains that Google has built is business on other people's data. Those engineers and programmers would be among the first to admit the critical part that other people's data plays in Google's business.

With regards copyright, well there are copyright laws right? If they need to be updated so be it.

The "fair use" clauses of various legislation has been used as an argument for search engines quoting snippets from webpages.

Regards...jmcc

joseywhales

completedit wrote: »

We definitely aren't. Our heads have been filled with more vaccuos nonsense and fluff.

Do we live in a better society than circa 2000? Hard to say yes imo. Have our lives been truly enriched by the Internet? Depends on the metrics you use. Hasn't been without its drawbacks. One thing I took from the book Sapiens is that developments don't happen for the betterment of our societies, sometimes they just happen, take for instance Facism. Other things emerge that benefit us but not all things do in all ways. In the long run my view is that the emergence of the Internet has taken us that bit further away from our biological essence and fundamentally detached us from our real world experience.

As for deregulation I am in favour because all I see is the emergence of feudalism 2.0.

We definitely aren't is a fairly definitive statement without any backup. Even in terms of education, there are far more people now, particularly in developing countries, with primary and secondary education and far more women. I would say the world we live in is getting significantly better,less laborious, less war and more fulfilling for the average person every decade.

There is a tonne of noise I grant you and we are not naturally capable of dealing with it and it is a burden of living in the modern world. However, I would argue that having vast amounts of decentralized knowledge available at our fingertips, makes the human race more rubust, more capabale of adapting to new challenges and even being aware of them in real time. This is objectively better for humanity as our primary goal is survival.

jmayo

10000maniacs wrote: »

Worked with Microsoft products for years.
In what way are they sub-standard?
There would be no tech industry in Ireland if it wasn't for Microsoft. Windows since NT in 1999 has been a great product. And Windows 10 is currently hanging MacOS out to dry.

ehh this would be the Windows 10 whose updates to fix sh*t that is wrong with it breaks yet more sh*t?

You know the updates that they release even though their Beta testers have told them that they will break sh*t ?

Why not ask people in say Powercity or Currys about how many people have been back to them because yet another Win 10 update has caused an issue with their computer.

This would be the windows 10 that offers less power in how and when you can update in comparison to XP or 7 ?

And their answer is let it update even though you know it will break sh*t and then you can try remove the update.

You had power in Win 7 Pro that now you can only get in Enterprise.
Yet another way of squeezing yet more money out of it's customers.

The Windows 10 that has a bags of a fooking interface.
The Windows 10 that asks stupid fooking questions that one would ask setting up a phone or a tablet even though you are setting it up on a desktop ?

They rolled that shyte interface across into servers for some unknown reason.
Yeah somebody working on a server needs a fooking tablet style interface.

Every fooking Microsoft product needs updating and often.

Remember years ago how you could just install something and you didn't have to update it every other fooking week. :mad::mad::mad:

Microsoft as the world's biggest software developer set the bar as regards software development and pumping out continous releases.
Now the entire industry is that way and I have even heard gimps selling online accounting and ERP systems bragging how they update their software every other week.
In business software updates and upgrades invariably mean having to carry out complete testing in order to ensure nothing is broken by the updates.

Hell Microsoft ethos has made to aviation where we have the old additional features that cost extra.

Well we all seen how well that worked out for some passengers, didn't we.

How many servers and desktops do you support ?
Do you support Teams (good luck getting a microphone working with it half the time) ?
Ever tried to compact an Exchange server only to get a meaningless error when it gets 99% after 6 hours ?
Yeah great way to spend one's saturday. :mad:

Fighting Tao

AllForIt wrote: »

There is technically no way to do that. Otherwise they would have done it by now.

I do not believe that to be true. It’s more a case that they won’t spend the money, and they are a slowly dying industry hoping for government mandated handouts from other companies.

McGinniesta

Enough has come out about the big tech firms to suggest that they don't always play by the rules.

When it is suggested that they are regulated what exactly does this mean?

Eric Cartman

Has anyone else noticed google has started blocking or captcha’ing searches if you search for things they don’t like, been happening me for a week now. A worrying new development

Eric Cartman

Eric Cartman wrote: »

Has anyone else noticed google has started blocking or captcha’ing searches if you search for things they don’t like, been happening me for a week now. A worrying new development

Couple of reasons that error happens, if it detects searches that seem automated from your ip that tends to get flagged as a bot. It's nothing to do with them not liking your searches. So probably something being run on your network and it's not new, has happened to me in the past.

Dyr

completedit wrote: »

W
Do we live in a better society than circa 2000? Hard to say yes imo.

Well in 2000 the west wasn't a dystopian ****hole so probably not. It was all going swimingly until the mid 2000s when the internet turned into a handful of monopolies with unprecendented global reach and zero regulation.

astrofool

Eric Cartman wrote: »

Has anyone else noticed google has started blocking or captcha’ing searches if you search for things they don’t like, been happening me for a week now. A worrying new development

This usually means that you, or your ISP has been flagged for suspicious activity, boards.ie does this as well via cloudflare protection (I hit it all the time when travelling and using hotel WIFI).

Kivaro

AllForIt wrote: »

I'm not on FB so I don't know precisely how it works, but the fact is FB are making profits off advertising linked with online news articles somehow. I'd guess they embed articles ripped off news sites and link their own ad to it from which they make a profit.
......

It is a good day for local news and media outlets in Australia, as Facebook announced yesterday that they will match Google’s $1 billion news investment in the country. This happened on the day that Australia passed a new law requiring Facebook and Google to pay for news content. On Tuesday, Facebook restored Australian news pages, ending "an unprecedented" week-long blackout. Regarding the blackout, Facebook now realises the error of their ways and have admitted that they made a mistake. Nick Clegg, head of Facebook global affairs said:
"that in blacking out all news in the country, “we erred on the side of over-enforcement” and acknowledged that “some content was blocked inadvertently” before being restored."

Sunny Disposition

Given the size of the companies obviously Big Tech does need to be regulated, and I would say broken up. Not so sure the Australian model is a good one either, I feel it's a kicking the can down the road exercise.
The internet has of course been fantastic, there's no question. But I think Google in particular needed to be prevented from becoming as big as it has. Facebook is also too dominant.