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Tim Berners-Lee Says Tech Giants May Have To Be Split Up (reuters.com)

Posted by msmash on from the closer-look dept.

Facebook and Google have grown so dominant they may need to be broken up, unless challengers or changes in taste reduce their clout, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has said in a new interview. From a report: The digital revolution has spawned a handful of U.S.-based technology companies since the 1990s that now have a combined financial and cultural power greater than most sovereign states. Tim Berners-Lee, a London-born computer scientist who invented the Web in 1989, said he was disappointed with the current state of the internet, following scandals over the abuse of personal data and the use of social media to spread hate. "What naturally happens is you end up with one company dominating the field so through history there is no alternative to really coming in and breaking things up," Berners-Lee, 63, said in an interview. "There is a danger of concentration." But he urged caution too, saying the speed of innovation in both technology and tastes could ultimately cut some of the biggest technology companies down to size. "Before breaking them up, we should see whether they are not just disrupted by a small player beating them out of the market, but by the market shifting, by the interest going somewhere else," Berners-Lee said.

2 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Yes, that has worked so well in the past by jodido · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Split up Standard Oil in 1910--how well did that work out? Split up Ma Bell--happy with the result? Split it up and the parts will recombine in some other form but functionally equivalent.

  2. Re:The problem is private infrastructure by bigpat · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We don't need to break them up, we only need to mandate interoperability between the platforms.

    Let's start with video calling so I can video call with my kids from my android phone or desktop or Skype or Facetime or whatever Amazon calls their service. It is completely absurd that there is no standard interoperability in common use to be able to video call between platforms. This is a real failure.

    Then let's reinvent social platforms to be blockchain based, open source and encrypted so you can share your contacts with other contacts and selectively and securely communicate and filter without reliance on a third party provided like Facebook.

    And then let's embrace decentralized AI and decentralized search indexes to reduce reliance on centralized providers like Google. I want my personal AI assistants to exist on local hardware without spying on me and relaying that information to big corporations and the government. And gigabytes of search indexes can be seeded, shared and synced by your personal preference without reliance on a centralized repository.

    And then let's work on making all the lessons of Amazon work with an efficient decentralized supply chain, delivery system and decentralized e-commerce ecosystem.

    We knew the day was coming when our collective laziness would be exploited by eager corporations and their well earned successes would make the winners so big that they become systemic risks. The day is here.