
The people owned the web, tech giants stole it. This is how we take it back - okket
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/23/people-owned-web-tech-giants-facebook-cambridge-analytica
======
judah
What a bunch of populist clap trap. The people owned the web, but tech giants
stole it? Please. Tech giants gave people what they wanted. Google, Facebook,
Amazon: they gave people what they wanted and are compensated richly for that.

~~~
loggedinmyphone
A better headline might be, the thing everyone thought they wanted is now an
obviously terrible idea.

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
>the thing everyone thought they wanted

I’m a really firm believer in this. The Henry Ford quote is the most succinct
way to describe it I’ve ever seen, but the topic of “miswanting” is dear to
me.

------
bcoughlan
Can anyone explain to me what part of the Cambridge Analytica / Facebook thing
is news?

We've known for years that tech companies have made their money off collecting
data, profiling users and selling access to the users and their profiles. The
general public never cared before. They signed in with Facebook around the
web, knowingly gave the app permissions to read their personal data, and
agreed to give third party apps access to that information.

People are not stupid. They traded privacy for convenience. Why act
dumbfounded now? Why blame Facebook instead of ourselves?

~~~
Angostura
Every time stories of this kind come up, you can’t pretty much know that the
top comment will be from a privacy-savvy commenter asking ‘why is it news?’

Why is it news to you that a large proportion of the population aren’t privacy
savvy?

The same people who are worried about Facebook are still fine giving WhatsApp
unfettered access to all the contacts on their phone, so it knows who their
bank, dentist, and employer is. Go figure.

~~~
JBlue42
Or have to be told that even though '123' as a password is 'easier' for them,
that no, it's really not a good idea.

As to FB, if you were there in the beginning, you can definitely watch the
scope creep:

Some of us hopped on Facebook in college when it expanded from Harvard to
other schools (02? 03?) and it was a completely different beast. You could add
friends or people from your classes, send messages, connect with that cute
girl in your class (because you could search by classes), personalize it with
quotes and photos, etc. It was basically a cleaner MySpace. As it expanded, I
used it as a personal address book to keep track of folks I met while abroad
and could see what they're up to. Over time though, it really changed, was
less useful, and I honestly had no reason to go on it except for once a year
when people would chime in with a happy birthday and I would catch up with
them.

I'm much more worried about how integrated Google is into my life or the
flashes of guilt when I order something from Amazon, which used to book that
quirky bookseller with a poorly-designed website that had free shipping (5-10
days) but is now a behemoth that sells everything on a poorly-designed website
that has different tiers of shipping which might be leading to abusive
practices of its workers.

------
Yetanfou
Nobody "stole" the web as such, what they did was lure in the sheep to the
herd like what happened in "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" [1]. The web grew, both
in number of users as well as in size, from Geocities (also centralised, grew
annoying habits like adding advertising to users' pages) through Myspace to
the current Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Snapchat/Tumblr/etc. concoction. I
consider these to be growing pains, as long as there are no China-like
restrictions on actual internet connections the web - or what follows after it
- will find a way to grow past this stage.

The _real_ problems will start when the censorship and leaching of data is
moved to the entry points for the 'net, i.e. the internet access providers.
The only way around such an obstacle would be some form of "darknet", either a
"virtual" infrastructure on top of the physical one offered by the 'net or
something which bypasses it altogether. We're not there yet but it doesn't
take that much thought to realise that once some form of self-hosting takes
off - with more and more fibre-connected users this becomes a viable
proposition - those who call for censorship will not be satisfied much longer
when they see the efficacy of their filters dwindle.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin)

------
marknadal
Yeah, I missed the "how we take it back" part. This is a pretty poor article
that is largely the author's political complaint and rant being twisted into
the slightly relevant click bait title that is trending right now.

If you actually want to take the internet back, join SSB or build a
decentralized web like with [https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-
a-p2p-twitter-wi...](https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-
a-p2p-twitter-with-e2e-encryption-f90505b2ff8) .

~~~
loggedinmyphone
The author's suggestions are fairly ridiculous. It's as if he can't fathom the
idea people could use something other than Facebook. Quote:

It could be regulation; it could be anti-trust legislation to break up those
tech giants that act as virtual monopolies. I like Derakhshan’s idea of
obliging Facebook and others to open up a marketplace of algorithms: if you
don’t like the current social media preference for popularity (retweets) and
novelty (“latest”), you should be free to choose a different algorithm that
acts on different values.

------
wonton2
Thech giants never stole the web. Governments have just failed to regulate
them or failed to see the power they get with their currently vast scale. They
need laws and a set of ethical rules people will leave them for breaking.

~~~
loggedinmyphone
What did Facebook do that should be illegal?

~~~
patkai
Already four years ago they ran experiments [1] on how to program your mood.
They built an API to your emotions, and they started selling it, without you
knowing it.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-
tinke...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinkers-with-
users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html)

~~~
loggedinmyphone
Are you proposing a law against trying to manipulate people's moods?

~~~
TheCoelacanth
You mean a law against non-consensual psychological experiments? Yes.

~~~
cannonedhamster
Would this not outlaw the entire field of marketing and advertising? It's
essentially entirely to cause an emotional reaction that bypasses your logical
need centers to encourage you to purchase something.

~~~
uoaei
Not the previous commenter, but many people have looked critically at
marketing and media long enough to come to exactly this conclusion, myself
included.

To my mind, there is something inherently _wrong_ about the techniques used to
sway opinion about products and services. They prey on our animalian reflexes
and bypass the part of the brain even capable of consent. Marketing "should"
(and I don't use that word often) be prohibited to use such tactics, and
instead be an exposition of the product and service and any traceable,
trustworthy qualifications bestowed upon it. Such a system is still hackable
(selling awards for instance), but it's a way better alternative to marketing
practices than what we have today.

~~~
loggedinmyphone
I dislike advertising and I'd love to see marketing move from a "push" to a
"pull" model, where consumers ask for information about products they want.
It's not easy to see how we get there. Defending the right of consumers to
block ads, and moving from ad-based funding to subscriptions could be a start.
An outright ban on ads - I don't see how that could happen without
overreaching to non-infringing speech.

------
aembleton
He could have recommended Privacy Badger [1] so that his readers can block all
of the data that The Guardian sends to Facebook and Google about which
articles they are reading.

1\. [https://www.eff.org/privacybadger](https://www.eff.org/privacybadger)

------
lupinglade
The problem is that a lot of people are relying too much on
Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/etc and not contributing to the web in other more
direct ways.

------
nipponese
FTA...

    
    
      Thanks to social media, the internet had apparently 
      decentralised power. In the old days, information was 
      passed down from the mountain top – by a government, say, 
      or a news organisation – to the crowd below. Now the crowd 
      could speak to each other and to the world. At least one 
      aspect of the techno-utopians’ early hopes seemed to have 
      materialised.
    
      And it’s that hope that Cambridge Analytica has shattered. 
      For what we now understand is that those at the top, the 
      political parties or governments that could afford it, have 
      been engaged in a radical act of recentralising power. They 
      saw the way social media was working, empowering 
      individuals and networks of individuals, and they decided 
      to grab those same weapons for themselves.
    

I find it hard to swallow this piece since the data was collected before "any
of the early hopes seemed to have materialised". If social media is
responsible for negatively impacting a US foreign policy adversary, that's no
fluke. The only difference between pre-CA and now is Trump.

~~~
racer-v
> And it’s that hope that Cambridge Analytica has shattered.

Seems more accurate to say, that hope was shattered when people gave up on
decentralized infrastructure like RSS and email in favor of Facebook's walled
garden. Now there's an opportunity to go back (to the future!) and do it
right.

~~~
mikekchar
I know this seems completely naive (and it probably is), but the internet was
_awesome_ before the endless summer. What's the main difference between then
and now? It seems to me that we've spent a lot of time making the internet
accessible to the masses and now we're complaining that the masses are
controlling the shape of the internet.

It might go beyond the ethos of HN, but I honestly wonder how much we should
consider arguments like, "Normal people won't be able to use it" and "You
won't be able to build a business on that because only a tiny fraction of
people would want to use it". I often think about PGP/GPG (and especially web
of trust) that way. I know it's useful to me and I know that the people I want
to use it with are more than capable. But they decline.

RSS is an even better example. Why are we not building RSS tools? Why are we
not building a brand around blog posts, FAQs, etc that contain RSS? Why is it
not the "secret password" that opens the gate to the "good content that's not
being gamed for the masses"?

~~~
extra88
> endless summer

Do you mean the eternal September [0]? Going back to the Internet being only
for governments and universities is a bad idea, a bad thing to want.

I think the complaint at the moment is not the that masses are controlling the
shape of the Internet but that a few corporations are both directly shaping it
and, intentionally or not, shaping the masses.

RSS could maybe make a comeback. Podcasts are RSS and are more popular than
ever. Subscribing to YouTube channels, following people on Twitter, these are
actions people understand and do, it could be extended, "hey, why not use this
thing that lets you subscribe and follow your favorite stuff not on individual
web sites but everywhere?" The problem is, it makes it harder to make money
off those eyeballs than to keep them in your walled garden.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)

~~~
racer-v
There's a tendency for too much money to ruin things. I agree that excluding
all non-government and non-university participants from the Internet would be
a bad thing. But there were some wonderful qualities to the Internet in the
days before mass commercialization, and it's not a bad thing to want those
qualities back.

------
marcus_holmes
I missed the bit about how we take it back... ?

~~~
koonsolo
With standards and open source.

Email is great because there is no vendor lock in. Open source is great
because large groups of people can decide to fork it (or even inividuals).

The blockchain tech now opened a lot of applications that could rival these
current tech giants.

Just 1 example: OpenBazaar received 3 million dollar investment. I'm curious
what these kind of web 3.0 techs will change.

~~~
marcus_holmes
Nothing. They will change nothing.

The illusion that "no-one is in control" of blockchain applications is going
to meet the brick wall of regulatory reality pretty hard.

~~~
koonsolo
You mean the same like the regulatory of copyrighted material on BitTorrent?
Can't wait. BitTorrent is indeed another nice example of what I meant.

~~~
marcus_holmes
In which case, yes, you're absolutely right. Open-source protocols could
possibly change the situation.

But that's got exactly zero in common with funded organisations making
applications using the blockchain.

You can't monetise what you don't control.

~~~
koonsolo
The example that I gave (OpenBazaar) is not an organization making application
using the blockchain. That's like saying Bitcoin is such an organization.

Yes, they got 3 mil for developing their open source platform further, which
in my opinion, is mind blowing. Especially since they don't have any clear
plans on how to make revenue out of this.

See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBazaar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBazaar)

------
lifeisstillgood
The people own the web, in the same way we, the people, own the real world.

all cambridge analytica and every retargetting ad firm does is to try and
trick that power into mistakenly choosing against the powers own interest -
but that has always been true, and the old solutions, of free press, free
association and education are still the solutions.

where those rights are enshrined in the real world we will triumph, where they
are not we will have to fight a bit harder.

I recognise the value of articles like this in highlighting the problem, but
it's not hopeless, it's actually the opposite - the web is awesome, and now we
get to keep the awesome, and clean up the problems ready for next time.

------
whataretensors
As with media today, they don't get the problem right and have terrible
solutions ready.

The real way forward is decentralization. We need to remove the
authoritarian's 30-50% cut from everything.

------
adventured
Yeah, the Web was so much better before Google made search and email radically
better. Just loved that Excite search and Hotmail in 2001 where I could store
dozens of photos in my couple of megabytes.

It was better before Wikipedia (a legitimate giant) existed and Google sent
them vast traffic to help them build out their service.

It was better before Yahoo gave me access to free, rapidly updated stock
quotes.

It was better before Netflix carved up the old TV content monopolies. Those
awesome days when old media held me entirely hostage.

It was better when classified ads were spread across the entire country in
localized newspapers and you couldn't easily access them in a centralized
giant service like Craigslist.

It was better when real estate pricing and information was a black book.

It was better before Spotify, Pandora, Apple, Amazon, YouTube gave me easy,
low cost access to all the music I could ever possibly consume.

It was better before Amazon made shopping online easy, with a vast selection,
relatively inexpensive for shipping, and very consumer friendly customer
service.

It was better before I could easily and inexpensively send money to other
people using PayPal or Venmo or 37 other solutions.

It was better before I could take ten minutes, plug in a few things, and
accept payments via Stripe or Square.

It was better when I had to use a janky static Mapquest, or spend money on
cumbersome physical maps just so I could navigate a new city. Back in those
amazing days when hunting for stores or locations was so much fun.

It was better when I had to go through hell to operate my own hosted
infrastructure. This whole insta-infrastructure AWS, Azure, Google Cloud,
DigitalOcean, Linode, stuff must stop. And who the hell wants a free CDN, down
with Cloudflare!

Those old glorious days.

~~~
racer-v
This comment is pretty wide of the mark. The article points out that consumers
made a mistake in trusting Facebook and rejecting a decentralized Internet.
It's valid to make that criticism without inferring that all software of the
past 15 years has been a mistake.

~~~
scrollaway
The comment seems to reply to the headline.

Is it surprising that when authors use clickbait, people ignore the substance
and reply to the most egregious part? Especially if an awful title gives no
desire to read the content.

