Comment by dgudkov
5 years ago
One corporation must not have so much power over billions of citizens of many countries. A power like that must only come from a transparent non-profit organization with a publicly elected management board.
We will get to that point sooner or later. But the road there will be long and painful.
Said NPO will be captured and subverted when the need arises and it is cost effective to do so.
> We will get to that point sooner or later.
Is there anything in particular that makes you believe that it'll eventually happen?
Because personally my outlook on things is a bit more pessimistic - oftentimes the main concerns of individuals and organizations alike are financially-oriented and few share the enthusiasm for transparency and openness like Richard Stallman does.
The trend of SaaSS ( https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s... ) because of companies not wanting to invest time in engineering their own solutions or even using FOSS, alongside with how many of them are handling GDPR and even cookie compliance, with the use of UX "dark paths" (e.g. it being easier to accept advertising cookies rather than deny them) doesn't let me keep a positive outlook on things.
It feels like we'll all be reliant on the "tech giants" for a variety of things for the decades to come, even "de-Googling" oneself not always being feasible.
>Is there anything in particular that makes you believe that it'll eventually happen?
Humans have demonstrated the ability to eventually improve social systems to make them account for the needs and demands of the majority of stakeholders. In the offline world it has evolved into what is known as democracy. It started several centuries ago and eventually evolved into modern governments as we know it - publicly elected management boards.
Recently, there was an excellent article [1] on HN. It rightfully compared the current state of internet to the feudal times and warlords common in the offline world many centuries ago. From that point through a long and painful process we've come to elected governments as the most sustainable form of governing a large number of humans. All other forms of government turned out to be unsustainable (no matter how attractive they were to certain individuals or organizations) and inevitably led to all kinds of social catastrophes.
I believe, the same will eventually happen to the internet, our new brave world we used to love, but now seem to become increasingly disenchanted with.
[1] https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-...