
We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon - kawera
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/30/nationalise-google-facebook-amazon-data-monopoly-platform-public-interest
======
bem94
I think a lot of the "oh my gosh nationalisation is such an awful idea" / "not
in my free society" comments are missing the point.

I too believe nationalisation is a bad idea _in this case_ , but given the
enormous reaction it would bring, can you imagine how awful the situation
appears to be from the authors (any many other non-tech-bubble) peoples
perspective to even contemplate such a thing? Let alone write an opinion piece
in a national news paper. You can argue it is a bad idea all you like, but
ultimately, Facebook Google and Amazon are building something that scares
people. Scared people do stupid things.

If the tech bubble does not look at articles like this as symptoms of a
growing scepticism, or a check on the implicit (and often abused) trust of
their users, then the backlash is only going to grow. The tech bubble
inhabitants will have only themselves to blame.

You can argue all you like about whether people are logically correct to fear
the big three. What matters is that they are fearful, and how the bubble
reacts to that.

~~~
peoplewindow
You seem to be saying there's a high threshold for extreme opinions to be
published in the Guardian, so the fact that someone wrote such an article
suggests that there is a genuine problem that needs to be taken seriously.
Guardian writers do not live inside a "bubble" and therefore, there is
inherent merit to what they write.

I wonder how often you actually read the Guardian, which is famous for having
wildly extreme opinion pieces, especially lately. It's basically the Breitbart
of the left, a more or less constant stream of clickbait designed to make
people angry and upset.

Just a few random headlines I got from clicking around just now:

"Who paid for the leave vote? Brexit should be halted until we know"

"The car has a chokehold on Britain. It’s time to free ourselves: Our insanely
inefficient transport system is in thrall to the metal god. Electric vehicles
are not the answer"

"Ask Hadley: Why do older people hate millennials so much?"

"Men on the left are sexist. Labour needs to do more to fix it."

"Feminists don't hate men. But it wouldn't matter if we did."

... and in case you think asking the government to take control of internet
companies is new idea from Guardian writers:

"The Guardian view on censoring the internet: necessary, but not easy"

"Internet regulation: is it time to rein in the tech giants?"

"The EU is right to take on Facebook, but mere fines don’t protect us from
tech giants"

I wouldn't exactly claim the Guardian floats above bubbles and groupthinks.

~~~
kiliantics
> It's basically the Breitbart of the left

Please. The Guardian is establishment liberal media. The opinions they publish
aren't even that extreme. There are plenty of journals that are far more
radical and much further to the left.

It's funny how conservative HN looks when posts like this appear.

~~~
peoplewindow
The opinions they publish are fantastically extreme and often deeply
offensive. The Guardian constantly pumps out honest to god racism, sexism and
other deplorable viewpoints. The only reason you don't believe it's comparable
to Breitbart is you haven't sat down and done an honest comparison.

My post simply lists out Guardian headlines for all to see. It originally had
something like +15 points and now it's sitting at zero, apparently it touched
a nerve with some people who can't stand the idea that the Guardian and
Breitbart might be comparable.

Here are some more headlines from their opinion writers, just to disabuse
anyone of the notion that the Guardian is somehow not a bastion of radical
extremism. They hate white people, they hate democracy, they hate men, they
hate voters, they hate tea and Thomas the Tank Engine. They make money out of
peddling hatred.

"The budget should be less macho - how about it boys"

"Why do women lie more than men? Because we're nicer"

"The Whiteness Project will make you wince. Because white people can be rather
awful"

"Sexists are scared of Mad Max because it's a call to dismantle patriarchies"

"Are you too white, rich, able-bodied and straight to be a feminist"

"Tea is a national disgrace: Britain's favourite beverage is a boring relic of
our colonial past."

"The tyrannical world of Thomas the Tank Engine. Kids love this little
dipstick of an engine ... but what a chilling isle Sodor is."

"What if men had periods? It's a question worth posing"

"Democracy is a religion that has failed the poor"

"The country is screwed, the electorate is evil, but here are nine reasons to
be cheerful"

"The week in patriarchy: take a moment to step away for survival"

"Did you weep watching Wonder Woman? You weren't alone"

"Remember when men and women could be friends? Republicans don't"

"Why the mediocre male's days may be numbered"

etc etc.

~~~
maym86
Care to go through each headline and explain your issues with each? I don't
see any extreme or unreasonable views in the list you've posted.

~~~
peoplewindow
Seriously? I really shouldn't have to explain this. If you don't see any
extreme or unreasonable views there, I hate to tell you this, but you're
probably unreasonable and extreme yourself, without even realising it.

Just try a simple thought experiment: invert the genders or skin colours in
the headlines and see how they sound.

"The Blackness Project will make you wince. Because black people can be really
awful"

Does that not sound extremely racist to you?

"Why the mediocre woman's days may be numbered"

It's a statement of pure sexism. The article, in case you care, is about how
much men suck. Try publishing the same article with men and women swapped
around and see what your progressive Facebook friends think.

"The country is screwed, the electorate is evil, but here are nine reasons to
be cheerful"

I don't think it is possible to make a more extreme statement than this. You
can't go bigger than the entire country (short of going to the entire world I
guess), and you can't go worse than "evil". So describing the entire voting
population of an entire country as evil is pretty much the definition of
extreme.

Note that thinking democracy is awful and ordinary people around you are evil
has a historical correlation with murderous extremism. It's like the classical
warning sign that someone may be about to do something really bad.

------
olau
Actually, I think behind the nationalisation idea, which doesn't seem workable
given the circumstances, there's an interesting thought: these companies are
sitting on basic infrastructure so instead of treating them like other
companies, perhaps we should treat them like utilities.

Note that this piece appears in The Guardian. I don't know how it works in the
US, but I'm of the impression that in many European countries, basic
infrastructure like energy or transportation or communication links is either
very tightly regulated or owned by a non-profit organisation that in turn is
owned by either the local consumers, the local authorities, or by the state.

DNS operates in this way, as far as I'm aware.

Can we move in this direction with things like search (Google) and personal
publishing (Facebook)?

Perhaps if the tech community delivers the software, and the societies
themselves start a serious discussion about it and delivered the users?

~~~
amelius
A simple solution is to treat these companies as telcos.

We could learn something from history. See e.g. the Mann-Elkins Act (1910),
[1]. And the telecommunications acts, [2], [3].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann%E2%80%93Elkins_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann%E2%80%93Elkins_Act)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996)

~~~
rayiner
What we should learn from history is that ICC regulation was crippling (nearly
destroying the rail industry in the US:
[http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-nation-
der...](http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-nation-derailed))
and the county has been a lot better off since railroads, air freight,
airlines, and yes telcos were deregulated.

That is not to say that we can't regulate things we care about (data privacy,
competition, etc). But looking with rose-colored lenses at ICC regulation is
foolish. It's the worst sort of regulatory regime: where government
bureaucrats are in charge of approving/denying the rail ties that go in the
ground and how much can be charged for a ride.

~~~
kiliantics
Definitely no bias in the take you linked...

Whatever you wanna say about how regulation worked out for trains in the US,
the situation in the early era of US rail was not a good one. It was one of
the worst monopolies we've seen and was terrible for the workers.

~~~
rayiner
What bias? As far as I can tell, the author has no connection to the rail
industry.[1] As to your other point, the fact that early rail monopolies were
bad doesn't mean that ICC-style regulation was good. You can have labor
protections, antitrust enforcement, and safety regulations without having the
government be involved in deciding how much a trip from Chicago to Milwaukee
should cost. There is a reason there was a _bipartisan_ effort to get rid of
those regulatory regimes in the 1960s-1990s, and why Europe copied those
reforms in the 1980s-2000s.

[1] If you're referring to the fact that the article appears in the American
Conservative, merely being conservative is not a "bias." In any event, left-
leaning organizations like the Brookings Institute have featured similar
coverage: [https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-success-of-the-
stagge...](https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-success-of-the-staggers-
rail-act-of-1980).

~~~
kiliantics
I wouldn't call Brookings left-leaning. Centre-right or better neoliberal.

I agree with your points though, the rail situation in the US is awful. Good
regulation is hard to do, especially in a place where regulators typically do
not share the interests of the people they are in the service of.

I don't think Europe copying the reforms you mention is necessarily a good
endorsement of them. The rail situation in (at least Western) Europe has also
become quite bad.

------
Veratyr
I totally agree that Google, Facebook and Amazon have too much power and too
little accountability.

However they're all global companies and as bad as they are, I trust all of
them more than I trust the US government (I am not American). Can you even
imagine how their business would work when these are state entities? You're no
longer buying ad placements from a marketing company, you're buying them from
the US government. You're no longer selling product through a third-party
storefront, you're selling through the US government. Google and Facebook, two
of the most important information gateways, are now controlled by the US
Congress and Senate. All that information on people all over the world is now
in the hands of the US government.

The very thought of this terrifies me.

~~~
panic
If Google and Facebook were nationalized, why would they need to sell ads?

~~~
poooogles
Same reason that BBC Worldwide does.

------
an_account
Governments have broken up large companies in the past, and that works out
pretty well. Why suggest nationalization over that? The article only mentions
“huge economies of scale”, but doesn’t do a good job convincing me that there
isn’t room for broken up Amazons, Google’s, etc.

On the other hand, nationalization is a terrible idea for so many reason. It
also goes against the fabric of the American economonic system.

I know it’s opinion, but hard to believe that the guardian published this with
how poorly written it is.

~~~
linkregister
Considering their irresponsible painting of Whatsapp's end-to-end encryption
re-key scheme as a "backdoor", I no longer can be surprised by The Guardian's
lack of editorial quality.

------
ucaetano
The author spends a long time talking about how companies are planning to make
money (shocking news!) on AI, and then concludes with "What’s the answer?
Nationalization!"

But he forgot to ask the question he's trying to answer.

This article doesn't even make sense.

------
dasil003
> _For the briefest moment in March 2014, Facebook’s dominance looked under
> threat. Ello, amid much hype, presented itself as the non-corporate
> alternative to Facebook._

Okay, this is a terrible opener. Ello never appeared to have any greater
traction than as a hipster fad, much less posing a material threat to
Facebook.

Also, you can not nationalise any of the companies listed, because they are
not British nor of Commonwealth country origin. Perhaps we could _nationalize_
, but that's not really Trump's style.

~~~
aestetix
When Ello first arrived, I saw it as a very welcome competitor to
Twitter/Facebook, and was using it. The questions of "how will Ello make
enough money to survive?" came up. I was one of the vocal supporters of a paid
account, as I would gladly pay them $5 a month just to help them continue to
exist. In the end they took money from VCs, at which point I promptly stopped
using them.

I can't speak for anyone else, but their move to take VC money instead of my
money is largely what killed their traction for me.

------
Quarrelsome
The sad thing is that I actually trust Google, Amazon and Facebook (maybe less
the last two) more than I do the British government. Obviously that can change
but at least these giants understand tech. Their response in the Snowdon leaks
to being tapped was correct. The UK's response to any perceived threat is to
question the validity of core technologies such as encryption.

Nationalisation of the big tech services by government would just lead to
pointless tail chasing as the they learn in the slowest possible way that the
internet can route around the blockades they wish to implement. Giving the
government something like Facebook is akin to giving the reins to some
unchecked righteous teen who thinks they know how to make it all "better".

------
lvoudour
>We’ve only begun to grasp the problem, but in the past, natural monopolies
like utilities and railways that enjoy huge economies of scale and serve the
common good have been prime candidates for public ownership. The solution to
our newfangled monopoly problem lies in this sort of age-old fix, updated for
our digital age. It would mean taking back control over the internet and our
digital infrastructure, instead of allowing them to be run in the pursuit of
profit and power.

The article is a mishmash of sensationalism and trending buzzwords.

OK let's accept the argument that said companies are "too big". Why
nationalize them? To nationalize a company you first have to ask the question
_what are the consequences for the nation if company X increases prices
/fails/stops offering services?_ If the answer is not _dire_ , you don't touch
them

I'll buy that search is important, but what's the vital utility of google
apart from that, e-mail and maps? Android? Facebook is a chat/opinion/vanity
medium, are we really saying that losing facebook (or whatsapp or whatever)
access is a national emergency? I can't buy the argument about "our data".
Privacy is important and mishandling of personal data should be severely
punished, but that's not an argument for letting the state operate those
companies - that's an argument for better laws and enforcement.

And how do you nationalize a globally accessed service with limited physical
national presence anyway? This is getting more silly by the minute

There are antitrust/competition laws in every capitalist country, if a company
is too big just break it - it won't be the first time or the last. If you
think a company mishandles or has privileged access to something it shouldn't
(your citizen's data) just punish it and limit its access.

~~~
jerrre
>Facebook is a chat/opinion/vanity medium, are we really saying that losing
facebook (or whatsapp or whatever) access is a national emergency?

Not a direct answer, but this triggered me to wonder how many
relations/connections would be lost because people have no other details of
each other than what's on facebook.

~~~
lvoudour
Sadly that's true, but the blame for this single point of failure falls
entirely on those people. In this day and age it's inexcusable not to have
multiple ways to contact people you care about.

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
I don't think it's fair to individualize the problem in that way. Just like
yesterday with our security thread, it's not reasonable to expect every
individual to go to the extremes necessary to prevent data leakage. There's
plenty of excuses and the one you're most likely to get is "I didn't think it
was a problem" or maybe "I have a busy life, how can I be expected to do/know
that?"

------
polotics
Wow this guy does not mention taxation and the huge advantage governments
bestow upon large companies by making it possible to engineer taxes away, an
opportunity much less open to small companies. Instead he wants a merger with
the biggest responsibility-shirking enterprise of all: the state!

------
okket
Imagine there would only be only one car company where you could by good,
affordable cars for some reason. Now image this car company would not be an
American one. I'd say there were national regulations, taxations and tariffs
in about zero seconds.

~~~
icebraining
There are already national regulations and taxes that apply to Google,
Facebook and Amazon. Hell, there's a story on the front page right now about
that.

------
ucaetano
Let's do a mental exercise: the US government decides to nationalize those 3
companies.

1) Buying them would require at least 30% over their market caps, so let's say
$1.3T for Google, and $1.3T for Amazon and FB combined, which is about 2/3 of
the entire US Gov budget, so there's no way the government is paying fair
market price for this

2) Since the government isn't paying fair market price, it essentially needs
to seize the shares by force and then go through the courts for years to fight
it off. Millions loose hundreds of billions of dollars in their ETFs, and
their retirement savings take a massive hit

3) Even if the government seizes the shares by force, there are very few
actual assets owned by those 3 companies, most of the value is in data,
systems, growth expectations, employees, etc.

4) With the government forcibly taking control of those companies, countries
around the world would take action and either take control of the local
subsidiaries or just detach them from the US company, everything starts
breaking down

5) Employees quit em masse, there's nobody able to run the systems, the
government either has to arrest employees and force them to work, or simply
let all the systems go down one by one. Hiring new people won't make a
difference, as the learning curve is massive, and you wouldn't even have
access to the systems

6) The products offered by those companies quickly fail, and the former
employees open new companies that offer similar products, the government wiped
out trillions of dollars from the global economy, a massive economic colapse
ensues

7) As the global economy crumbles, the author blames the companies and the
employees for not being willing to work for a shitty government job in a gulag
with no opportunity for innovation, and refuses to take responsability for
his/her stupid idea.

It doesn't take a lot to understand how stupid this idea is. I usually don't
like to call things stupid, but whoever came up with this idea put so little
critical thinking behind it, that it isn't just bad, it's stupid.

------
jmull
What a terrible idea.

It's also a terrible article, since the conclusion isn't supported by the rest
of the article. It gets in to some things about these new large companies that
have problematical aspects but just grazes by on what those problems are. I
guess the evil can just be assumed?

Since the main problems haven't been clarified there's no way to argue about
if or how nationalizing would help solve them.

Meanwhile nationalizing has some huge issues of its own which aren't even
hinted at here... (1) do we want the government controlling the platforms for
our scocial interactions, purchases, and information retrieval? (2) these are
global companies so you'd have to break both the company and the platforms
they run by political boundary. How is that not nonsensical? There are other
issues, but I'll leave it at two fatal flaws for now.

As an alternative, why not regulate the problematical aspects of these
companies? Let's figure out each one and determine a regulatory framework that
lets us get to the root of the problem without stifling, and develop the
regulations to drive it.

------
Kluny
Did he bother thinking about what Google, Facebook and Amazon thought of the
idea? Google is the worldwide leader in search because they have an army of
the world's brightest engineers working 24/7 on improving their algorithms...
Why would those people continue working if you seize their company and tell
them they're now public employees? If they wanted to be public employees,
don't you think they'd be doing that already? We are, after all, talking about
people who have their pick of pretty much any job they want. Google isn't a
product that you can bottle up or store in a warehouse. It's made of people.
People who might have other opinions.

------
dcraw
Most people seem to be evaluating this question on an egalitarian premise:
what's best for the greatest number of people? On that premise, taking money
from very wealthy people and giving it to others will always seems appealing
(even though it destroys wealth).

But let's evaluate it from the premise of justice. By what principle can we
remove control of these companies from those who created them? From those who
have worked there and earned equity in them? From those who have invested in
the public stock in order to fund growth and earn a return? By what principle
can a government interfere with a private contract, one that has governed how
a group of people work together for 15 or 20 years, and unilaterally break it?

The argument is that the companies have too much power. But what kind of
power? Can they take money out of your paycheck without your permission? Can
they prevent you from erecting a building on your property without their
approval? Can they imprison you for failing to appear at a hearing?

There is a difference between government power and economic power. Government
power is the power to compel, and it the source of the power is the army and
the police, or, more bluntly, the gun.

Economic power is the power to create. The source of economic power is the
value that is offered. Sometimes a business offers something so valuable that
people shape their lives around its presence and start to take it for granted.
These are the businesses we punish most.

Should we turn economic power into government power? The immediate implication
is frightening. All three of these companies have well-staffed legal
departments challenging the government's requests for private information
about their users. Who will fight those requests when these companies are
agencies of the executive office?

The long term implications are devastating. Who will create the next Facebook,
Google, or Amazon with the prospect of working 20 years and having it taken by
force, as punishment for succeeding too much?

And would a nationalized Google have created a self-driving car? Would a
nationalized Amazon have invented AWS? Would a nationalized Facebook invest in
high-speed internet for Africa? Nationalization destroys growth.

Economic growth follows economic freedom. The world has experimented many
times, and the theory and the experiments agree—Venezuela is only the most
recent tragic example. At the root of any other argument is a desire to
redistribute wealth.

------
mikehain
Relevant is this quote from another link recently posted here on HN:
[https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/08/when-it-
comes...](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/08/when-it-comes-to-
internet-privacy-be-very-afraid-analyst-suggests/)

"Europe has more stringent privacy regulations than the United States. In
general, Americans tend to mistrust government and trust corporations.
Europeans tend to trust government and mistrust corporations. The result is
that there are more controls over government surveillance in the U.S. than in
Europe. On the other hand, Europe constrains its corporations to a much
greater degree than the U.S. does. U.S. law has a hands-off way of treating
internet companies. Computerized systems, for example, are exempt from many
normal product-liability laws. This was originally done out of the fear of
stifling innovation."

------
sidcool
In my opinion, apart from Medicare, Infrastructure, Law enforcement, Defence,
Prison System and a few other should be nationalized, not
Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft etc.

------
nnq
As a non-american, I'd be 100x times more scared of these giants being owned
by the US gov. Actually I'd completely stop using the services of the two of
them that I still use. I'll take a nice faceless profit driven shady
corporation any time over a foreign government.

Heck, what freaks me out the most about Facebook is that they act very
_unlike_ any of the classical profit driven corporations... which may mean
they have other more dubious interest than "just profit". Profit-drivenness is
in a sense "pure" and "fair"... when something is state owned/controlled it
becomes infused with _ideologies_ and these are known to make people do way
more stupid and cruel things that the thirst for more money (hint: Hitler,
Stalin, Mao, Pol-Pot and their followers where _not_ profit-driven!)

------
throw2016
Is this really leftism or a provocation? Either way it backfires by playing
right into the simplistic right narrative of theft and jealousy and makes the
left look like clueless out of touch jokers with no solutions for innovation
and a weakness for ill thought sledge hammer constraints. It's a disgrace.

The bigger problem is significant gains in western democracy and liberalism
are being watered down with serious issues around regulatory capture,
surveillance and accountability growing. Or current systems, laws and
legislation would have been dealing with some of the privacy and market
problems caused by Google, Facebook and Amazon.

The EU is trying but it's not in the US interest to interfere with the growth
of these companies for many reasons from surveillance to market domination so
they will not meet legislation here.

------
empath75
We'd do better by nationalizing Comcast and Verizon, tbh.

------
csdreamer7
Why doesn't the author mention Microsoft? Why hasn't anyone else mentioned
Microsoft in the comments?

Mobile might be what people use most of the time. But for productivity,
specialty applications (X-Ray software, billing, medical applications,
scientific, tool software, video editing, 3d rendering, ATMs, cash registers)
Windows dominates. There is a huge body of software that can not be used on
mobile.

Bill Gates threatened to withdraw Windows from the market during the anti-
trust trial. I assumed this would also include security patches and key
registration. This would have threatened millions of businesses and government
services. If you can have any argument against a tech company operating
against the public interest you have to include Microsoft.

~~~
alpb
You should look at the Four Horsemen talk by Scott Galloway. Microsoft just
doesn't possess the same power and market cap proportional to its age as these
three companies. Note, Apple is also not mentioned.

------
gkya
As "googling" becomes the most common way most people obtain information, I
believe we do need some means to provide for this need w/o private enterprise,
and lots of new regulations to defend the users, e.g. in case of Facebook.
Persons' private data has become an acceptable good traded silently behind the
scenes. The industry needs to gain a means to maintain the quality of
software, and basic software needs must be guaranteed by those who we appoint
to furnish us roads, electricity and water. WRT nationalisation, well, nations
are slowly becoming obsolete as globalisation progresses, and what is most apt
instead is that we engineer a globally distributed system at least for search.

------
tzury
"We need" \- Who are _WE_?

As far as I know, Google and Facebook helped and helping people in places
where almost everything is nationalized - by providing alternative to local
gov-controlled media by making the information and data available to anyone
with internet connection.

As far as I know, users are sharing and storing their data and trusting those
organizations, rather than their governments. The problem starts when
governments try to enforce the providers to tap or provide records our of
their data centers.

The internet is good as is, and improved every day, and will continue
improving. We need no nationalization over here.

Not really, thanks, but no!

~~~
659087
> The internet is good as is, and improved every day, and will continue
> improving

You consider mass centralization and being almost exclusively under the
control of a few massive companies an "improvement"?

~~~
tzury
This will evolve and changed over time I believe. But, we are certainly in a
far better place than we were 2 decades ago regarding freedom of speech and
information availability, aren't we?

------
euyyn
By "we" does he mean the UK? How do you nationalise a multinational?

~~~
semperdark
I thought that was funny as well. If anyone's going to be nationalizing them,
it'd be the US, and I'd wager that non-US residents would like that even less.

------
golergka
You know, there's this simplistic view about the left - that it's only
interested in taking things that other people have created, forcibly, and
redistributing them.

I wonder, where that simplistic view comes from.

------
maus42
One fascinating question is _which_ country should be responsible for
nationalizing them. According to the Snowden leaks, the US government is
already more than happy to cooperate with FB and Google and alike to spy on
non-US citizens; handing the private data to the US government bureaucracy
appears to be not much of an improvement from a point of view of an EU citizen

Maybe these megaliths should be split according to the national boundaries,
not unlike how the AT&T / Bell System was structured as a combination regional
telephone companies.

------
visarga
FB, Google, Amazon should be split on many levels. The companies, the
datacenters, the data. Especially the user data. The new system should
federated, like email and SMS, with account and user data portability.

There should be public access to the unique datasets these companies collected
from user interactions - all done in a privacy conscious way, for the
betterment of sciences and society.

We can't let this valuable, unique data (that only exists in the largest
companies of their field) benefit only those companies. It's our data,
ultimately.

------
wslh
I share the sentiment that we are dealing with a new kind of companies that
don't fit into our "capitalism 2.0" thinking but I wonder: where are those
crazy and capable people trying to compete with them in a realistic way?
Probably optimizing ads and investment models. Please don't mention
blockchains as a solution to this problem.

I have some very raw ideas about this. For example, I really think that Google
search engine is unique and its complexity almost almost irreproducible but
back in 2013 I wrote[1] a small piece thinking about layered search engines
where web sites, specially the top ranked ones, improve their local search,
and subsequent layers improve the global searches. Local searches within a
specific site are usually awful. I am thinking of these web sites sharing the
search "parameters" so we can integrate these information along the different
layers. I find many flaws in this thinking but it is good to start discussing
different ideas.

[1] [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bKpAf08NQa7ChQnGQh--
YwdP...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bKpAf08NQa7ChQnGQh--
YwdPa6o_Uah3JIKsf8SHqsY/edit)

------
jondubois
I agree that advertising should be nationalised and Facebook is a particularly
good target. Advertising makes capitalism more centralized; whoever has the
biggest budget gets all the customers. Having worked for both big corporations
and small companies in the tech industry, I'm certain that big corporations
are less efficient overall; I think that they are successful in spite of their
innefficiencies because of their advertising power.

Centralization reduces the number of people who have wealth (increases
inequality); there are so few of these people and their money is in such high
demand (and they have so much of it) that they are effectively incapable of
investing it efficiently - Their investing bandwidth is all used up (they are
spammed-out with investment opportunities). If wealth was more spread out,
more people could be investors and they would have more time to really think
through and consider opportunities and because they would have less money on
an individual basis, they would be much more careful about their investment
decisions.

------
fetbaffe
Lets assume it would be possible to nationalize Google, Facebook and Amazon.

But by whom? US government?

So a nation should run a global company in everyone's interest? Everyone as in
the entire population of the world?

Why would I as a non-US-person use a US government system?

Should I then as a non-US-person have a say in how the US run these companies?

This does not make sense.

I guess next article from Guardian will be like 'We Need to build a global
government'.

------
ckastner
I believe that the fact that the article doesn't compare the solution of
nationalization with the prevalent alternative of breaking-up says all you
need to know about the quality of the article.

Hell, it doesn't even _mention_ the alternative, even though it's the
prevalent one.

------
TheAceOfHearts
Not sure if that's the right path to take, but I definitely agree something
need to be done to add further consumer protections. Many people have a large
chunk of their lives tied up tightly into their ecosystems, with no simple way
out.

I've been reflecting on the impact of oauth / openid during the last few
years. For some people, losing your Facebook or Google account could mean
ending up locked out of dozens, if not hundreds, of services! Haven't checked
Facebook's TOS, but Google's TOS says they can shut down your account at any
time. Considering the size and reach of both, I think they should be required
to at least provide a reasonable migration period before fully closing down an
end-user's account.

~~~
simonh
At a minimum you should be able to export your data for some period after
account suspension. At the moment are there any cases where they summarily
delete everything?

I've been thinking about automating a periodic export but not got round to it.
I know they have APIs and services for this under the DLF project but I've not
looked into it yet. Does anyone have experience with this?

------
orblivion
The scary thing is that you'll find conservatives are going to come on board
with this, if you pay attention to ruminations recently. They're very
concerned about censorship. I am as well, but I'm too libertarian to want the
government to be the solution.

------
Steveorevo
[https://joinmastodon.org](https://joinmastodon.org)

~~~
pferde
Don't bother. It turned into yet another microblogging echo chamber with
nothing but propaganda and RSS newsbot reposts.

------
nl
The politics of this discussion is really interesting. I think this might be
the only substantial policy topic where The (progressive leaning) Guardian and
(fairly right-wing) Breitbart[1] both push roughly the same approach.

The thing both have in common is that they are media destinations, and are
deadly afraid of the the power Google and Facebook have to direct traffic.

Not sure why Amazon is included in this though..

[1] [http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/07/28/report-steve-
bannon...](http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/07/28/report-steve-bannon-wants-
google-facebook-to-be-regulated-like-utilities/)

------
throw83123123
Nationalizing said companies might sound like a good idea at first but one
must wonder if this is indeed for the better.

In theory, we own the Govt. in a democracy but it's often realized that in
practice, it is owned by whosoever can afford to lobby ignorant politicians,
who often care neither for the profit of public industries, nor for their
constituency composed of generic ignoramuses.

This seems reminiscent of how 'communism' came to indicate a crony-
capitalistic system with a single worst crony possible - the state itself. I
for one don't believe public ownership is the same as being owned by a state
agency.

------
norswap
You know who I trust less than Google, Facebook and Amazon? The U.S.
government.

Also "nationalize". The author seems blissfully unaware of the existence of
other countries where said services operator (about 200 of them!).

------
radisb
If one considers the big three to have become a problem then there is a simple
solution. One should just stop using them. Why bring politics into it? The
users made them what they are, the users can undo it.

------
unityByFreedom
How can someone make this argument without considering broadband monopolies?
Don't these limit our ability to even access content from the likes of Google,
Facebook, or Amazon?

Why should "platform" monopolies be regarded as more important than ISP
monopolies?

I'm not trying to say that there aren't platform monopolies. I just don't see
the point in making them a higher focus when our ability to even _access_
these platforms is under threat by the current FCC.

------
krylon
I am not opposed to public ownership of these companies per se. Letting them
just go on uncontrolled does pose dangers we are just beginning to understand.

But given rhe massive surveillance and largely uncontrolled data hoarding our
governments and their intelligence agencies have engaged in, I do not think
handing control of Google, Facebook and so forth over to the (any) government
is a good idea.

In the long run, we need to do something, bur I think we need to come up with
a better idea.

------
Klockan
I doubt that it is possible to nationalize Facebook since it means that you no
longer have a global user-base and creating inter-op between such complex
systems is all but impossible especially when we have hundreds of countries.
This means that any free actor with one system for the entire world will
always provide a better experience, so as soon as you nationalize a service
most users will migrate away from it making the whole thing moot.

------
jasiek
So currently, you have a choice _not_ to use google/fb/amazon. If they were to
be nationalized (a truly silly idea), you may lose that choice.

~~~
simonh
This might look like a silly comment, but it really isn't. Let's say FB was
nationalised. So now if you want to contact your local government office you
do so through Facebook. The library service is accessed through FB. Drivers
Licenses and professional certifications are linked to your FB profile as are
medical and criminal records.

Government information and services would only be indexed in Google. Amazon
would become a branch of the postal service and used to deliver passports and
driving licenses. In practice you'd hardly be able to function without using
them.

~~~
kbart
Don't know about other countries, but at least in Lithuania there are laws
against such scenarios.

~~~
simonh
Sure, but in a scenario where the government was so interventionist and
controlling that it nationalised a search engine, social engine and retailer
how likely is it that such laws would stay on the books?

------
janlukacs
Never reading a Guardian story again, crypto-communists - no other word for
them, pretty much every day some kind of idiotic leftist agenda is being
pushed.

~~~
nl
Steve Bannon proposed a fairly similar idea:
[http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/07/28/report-steve-
bannon...](http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/07/28/report-steve-bannon-wants-
google-facebook-to-be-regulated-like-utilities/)

------
swalsh
If the current state is 0, nationalization is 10. Maybe we should look for 5.
Something like a law that requires customer generated content to be accessible
via API, and allows customers to PERMANENTLY delete data they've generated,
the code, and data can be subject to random audits. Companies will only be
subject to the rules if their customer numbers are > x. Or something similar
to that.

------
dgudkov
Nationalization is probably too much, but indeed, these mega corporations lack
accountability. Maybe we need a new kind of corporation, where users are
voting stakeholders. It seems to me we, as users, gave up our personal
information for too cheap. We underestimated (and still are underestimating)
how much control over our lives we've given up in exchange for "free"
services.

------
Animats
What if we had tax brackets for corporations, as we do for individuals? Tie
them to market share? As market share goes up, so does the tax rate.

------
Klockan
No, I don't want the people who are responsible for all of my data to also
have the authority to put me in jail.

------
marenkay
That misses an even more important point:

At this point any kind of cloud environment should be considered public
infrastructure. It is not so much about all these companies, it is more about
being able to keep the things you bought after these services reach their
inevitable deaths, as no company survives forever.

~~~
jedmeyers
> At this point any kind of cloud environment should be considered public
> infrastructure.

Why? Public infrastructure like sewer, or roads, is tightly coupled with the
fact that it's close to impossible to gain physical land/space to build a
second one. AWS/Azure on the other hand neither blocking you from accessing
the land nor implemented any regulatory capture to prohibit you from building
your own version of cloud infrastructure.

------
panic
Facebook in particular should really be governed by its users, whether that's
indirectly under the public ownership of a democratic state, or directly
through some built-in form of democratic governance. Nobody should have so
much power without some form of accountability.

~~~
jedmeyers
People had voted to give them this power, by signing up to use the services.
They are free to leave any time.

------
ringaroundthetx
Flashback time, anybody remember when AIG insured multiple claims on the same
pieces of property which were overvalued and unable to be paid for by an
individual plebe's income, and got Congress to use everyone else's money to
pay for this business practice by having the Treasury/Fed buy shares of AIG?

And then AIG used the surplus floated capital to give bonuses to the
executives and traders, because that quarter happened to be awesome,
numerically.

And then AIG was part of a lawsuit that sued the Treasury/Fed under the
expropriation clause of the 5th Amendment because the value of the shares was
not deemed correct?

Well. ultimately the Fed made like an 80 billion profit, 1/12th of what they
make from annual tax collection, so if they keep that up maybe they won't even
levy income taxes to fund the Federal Government's general operations anymore.

With that logic, nationalize all the things because I can't stand paying for
the general operation of this plunder.

Partial sarcasm.

------
anonu
I guess Netflix didn't make the cut - even though its the N in "FANG"... Maybe
the hype around Netflix is overblown. After all, Google has Youtube and Amazon
has Prime Video which probably give Netflix a run for its money.

------
adrianmonk
So the problem is that one big organization has all this data, and the
solution is to put it all under the umbrella of a different organization?

How does that help unless we assume that government can do less bad stuff with
it than a private organization?

------
ben_jones
Why don't we just nationalize the compute power? There is a billion dollar
barrier to entry to offer services like Youtube for free. Nobody is going to
do it because they don't have a giant Ad company to subsidize it.

~~~
flukus
Why nationalize what we can distribute? There is no reason a future youtube
has to be centralized and many good reasons that it shouldn't be.

~~~
visarga
I am amazed that there is no open source, distributed search engine to rival
Google. We let Google get too much data about us. Search engine research has
advanced a lot, we can use that.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
"Search engine research has advanced a lot, we can use that."

A strong part of Google's search engine results is leveraging the data it has
from Google Maps (including the almost unique Google Street View), actions
tracked through the user’s Google account, and proprietary image-recognition
technologies. It’s hard for another party to compete with that; Google hasn't
been a mere web crawler in a long, long time.

------
nanch
We need [Trump]'s administration to run Google.

We need [Trump]'s administration to run Facebook.

We need [Trump]'s administration to run Amazon.

In 4 years, substitute your own -- no thanks.

No offense, Nick Srnicek, but please keep the authoritarianism on that side of
the pond.

------
org3432
Nationalizing doesn't mean the decisions won't be for the benefit of a single
person, a single person can manipulate them regardless, and the people will
support it.

------
oh_sigh
What would happen to those companies if nationalized? I'm pretty sure most
googlers et Al don't want to be government employees and would quit
immediately.

------
Grue3
Guardian just went full communist. Never go full communist.

------
hzhou321
Or, I think the other way is more sensible or probably already in motion -- we
need let Google, Facebook and Amazon govern.

------
0xbear
I think we should start small, from, say, nationalizing the authors' personal
possessions and primary residence.

~~~
NoGravitas
We're coming for your toothbrush, 0xbear.

~~~
0xbear
μολὼν λαβέ :-)

------
RestlessMind
I never imagined I would support this position, but after seeing CloudFare CEO
disabling a website just because he woke up in a bad mood, I fully support
that any corporation should

\- either be not allowed to amass quasi-monopolistic power

\- or if they want/have to, they should be heavily regulated (eg. utilities)
and not allowed to discriminate based on their "values"

------
ajdlinux
A further alternative - require that certain businesses that reach this level
of monopolistic influence transition into some kind of Public Benefit
Corporation.

I don't quite know what this would look like, but I'm thinking of some kind of
framework where we develop controls and accountability mechanisms on a
company-by-company basis.

------
calebm
Who is John Galt? (I'm not a huge fan of the book, but it's so fitting here.)

------
grondilu
As someone who owns stocks of Google and Amazon, I'd like to compare the
effect the title of this article had on me, to what a woman would feel if she
stumbled upon an article titled "We need to legalize rape : here is why."

I'm all for free speech, but this guy is dancing on a thin line.

~~~
NoGravitas
That's a really terrible comparison, and you should be ashamed of yourself.

------
exit
which nation?

perhaps, instead, we need to tokenize them:

[https://blog.bigchaindb.com/tokenize-the-
enterprise-23d51baf...](https://blog.bigchaindb.com/tokenize-the-
enterprise-23d51bafb536)

------
bachaco
If you nationalise Google and Amazon, say good bye to innovation.

------
smegel
We need to stop posting links to the Guardian.

------
tuxt
The answer is no.

------
featherverse
That's the _worst_ idea I've heard this week.

First of all, "Nationalizing" corporations is not something that free
societies do.

Second, the effect of this would be to further stifle competition from smaller
businesses. Which is also not something that free societies do.

I question the motives of the author.

~~~
kagamine
You keep saying "not something that free societies do" as though that phrase
in itself has meaning, but fail to explain why. From a socialist's pov putting
a profitable industry in the domain of _everyone_ and sharing the profits is
freeing capital from the few and providing an (more)equal share to all. It's
not capitalism but that does not mean it isn't "freedom".

What is "freedom"? Market competition The way Amazon, Uber etc have been set
up, using hundreds of millions in investment, able to operate against smaller
competitors for literally years without breaking even until the opposition is
crushed and consumers are herded into being customers... is that freedom?
Maybe for the already established wealthy. For everyone else it's an unfair
advantage. There is no freedom for the average Joe to start a publishing an
distribution powerhouse

I agree it's a terrible idea to nationalize these companies, but citing
'freedom' as the reason why is not why it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea
because it would lead to excessive bureaucracy, higher prices and is unlikely
to benefit the competition much. It might help governments get those companies
to pay some tax though.

~~~
CryptoPunk
>From a socialist's pov putting a profitable industry in the domain of
_everyone_ and sharing the profits is freeing capital from the few and
providing an (more)equal share to all. It's not capitalism but that does not
mean it isn't "freedom".

I don't believe all ideologies and their definitions need to be given equal
respect. Socialists shouldn't get to just redefine "freedom" to mean a
government monopoly running major industries, by outlawing private citizens
from owning productive enterprises in those industries, and have everyone else
accept their definitions as equally valid as a classical liberal's.

Think about it practically for a moment: what is the government going to do
when private citizens in another country fire up thousands of servers and
begin providing web services to the people within the government's
jurisdiction? Put up a firewall? Start raiding anyone running a relay node
that bypasses the firewall? How is that congruent with any reasonable
definition of freedom?

We can pretend that we're frameless and judging all perspectives as equally
valid, but in actuality that will never happen, as it would make any sort of
meaningful communication impossible. Someone could argue war is peace, slavery
is freedom, etc, and there would be no way to reject their statements as
unequivocally wrong. We would be uttering words to each other that mean
completely different things to different people, because we would no longer
follow the basic convention of language, which is that the widely observed and
long established definition trumps the unorthodox one.

~~~
panic
The whole point is that these companies are inherently resistant to
competition. Nationalization doesn't require limiting access to any other
service or restricting competition in any way.

~~~
simonh
In which case there is no need to nationalise, because by definition if
another competitor can be created then the government can create one itself.

All nationalising would do is give the government a leg-up in having an
existing user base. In practice government inertia would lead to the service
atrophying and becoming outdated and overburdened with bureaucratic controls
and costs. Page & Brin, Bezos and Zuckerberg (or someone new) would each raise
capital, start their own competing services and in a few years time we'd be
back where we started.

This whole idea is so utterly misconceived and pointless it blows my mind how
many people here are trying to justify or defend it. Unless you actively
regulated to prohibit competing private services, it would be doomed from he
start and if such regulation was enforced - literally banning other search
engines including Bing, banning other social networks, banning any other
online retail businesses, the lurch towards dystopianism would create a very
different world to the one we live in. Even China hadn't come even close to
anything like that.

------
yahna
Nah.

Just rip them apart and start going after them for anti-trust reasons. Instead
of going after Apple for harming consumers with their ebook BS (actually, in
addition to) go after Amazons monopoly on the space.

