Comment on Cory Doctorow: Interoperability Can Save the Open Web
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
A small wrinkle, industries seem to have little issue with acting collectively to spend cash on enacting policies that benefit those industries. For example, the oil industry successfully has successfully blocked climate change action for decades even after they knew an action was needed. Perhaps they’re not as powerful as Standard Oil but they surely are powerful enough to profit maximize at the expense of so much else.
I think the best analogy is to cybersecurity. What’s the point of patching devices when they’re inevitably going to be hacked again in the future? Because they’ll also be patched again afterwards. Security is a dynamic equilibrium, not a static one. Similarly, no fix to corrupt corporate power is permanent. We need constant vigilance.
Also, it’s been a hundred years, and tech is a new sector that didn’t exist 100 years ago. Breaking up Standard Oil isn’t going to help with Apple and Google.
I think the idea is to break up google and apple ;)
Isn’t that essentially the same wrinkle that was mentioned in the article with the Napster reference and the movie and music industries banding together?
Yeah, and I don’t buy the argument. It only works if the players haven’t figured out they have conmon goals and that they have to pool resources to achieve them. That’s not a hard thing to figure out. The tendency to cartelization demonstrates this. But you cartelization only demonstrates that people can figure out they need to pool resources. They don’t need a cartel to pool money and funnel them into politicians pockets. All they need is industry lobbying associations and think tanks. Wouldn’t you know it, we have both and they’re working splendidly to further the regulatory interests of the corporations funding them.
Kichae@kbin.social 1 year ago
The rich have class consciousness, and own the media companies, ensuring that the poor never risk coming close to developing it for themselves.
wtfeweguys@lemmy.whynotdrs.org 1 year ago
We have tools both new and old to work collectively against megacorp consolidation and we can do it directly in the market. Here’s what I would love to see more of:
Equity crowdfunding: Let’s have users/communities/customer bases finance new companies at the seed stage instead of relying almost exclusively on venture/investment banking-backed startups. I believe this greatly reduces the misalignment of stakeholder interests in finance/business.
Buying collectives: Let’s leverage our buying power to receive lower prices and have more say in the ethics of supply chains. This can happen at the individual level and amongst cooperative/independent/small chain retailers. This combined with equity crowdfunding implies an opportunity to work our way up (and down) the supply chain from consumer to retailer to distributors to manufacturer.
Open Source R&D via Invective Prizes: Ever heard of the X-Prize? Imagine a crowdfunding platform where the crowd determines the goals for projects and contributes to the purse and people/teams compete to solve it. The winning submission open sources their result in exchange for the prize. This gives the crowd an alternative to corporate-funded IP held behind walled gardens purely to extract profit.
Open, interoperable web infrastructure: Most features of social media platforms could be baked into protocols and made readable by any 3rd party software that chooses to integrate it. The fediverse we’re posting on right now is a great example. We have to have free, open digital communications to have agency as free peoples.
All these options reside naturally in a market-based economy and IMO further empower political action while not inherently relying on it. It’s a powerful “yes, and”.