Or Google. And I do not just mean the search engine. Its communication tools are vital to the functioning of vast numbers of organisations, from my university onwards.
…
So, are any of these other, more critical services immune from being taken over and destroyed? I see no obvious reason to think that they are in any way safe from such attack. And that leaves society massively vulnerable to these companies.Worse, by letting these companies create technologies that are protected by absurd patent and copyright laws we have made it very hard for states to replicate what they do, which is ridiculous.
Musk and Twitter provide a real warning. We are deeply vulnerable to relatively few tech companies, and we can rely on none of them. My question is, what is society going to do to protect itself against the madness of this situation?
Isn’t now the time to work out and on the alternative? Shouldn’t this be the moment the US and EU cooperate to build an alternative to Twitter, and whilst they’re at it to look at how keeping the web going if other critical companies fail might be found?
They tried that. Anyone else remember Project Quaero?
Government’s even more shit at this stuff than it is at much else it tries……
When Franco-German Quaero ended in the inevitable tears, Germany then launched its own google-slaying project, “Theseus”, to a fair deal of noise at the time. Optimistic coverage in German media and so on. But I can’t find any trace of it post-announcement. Obviously it died a death but does anyone have the grisly details? At least the demise of Quaero was quite well-covered in the press, if only because the Germans and French were so loudly slagging each other off about who was to blame for the debacle.
Worse, by letting these companies create technologies that are protected by absurd patent and copyright laws we have made it very hard for states to replicate what they do, which is ridiculous.
Why would states need to replicate what is already in place? Ah yes, so fat failed accountants can control them.
Musk and Twitter provide a real warning. We are deeply vulnerable to relatively few tech companies, and we can rely on none of them. My question is, what is society going to do to protect itself against the madness of this situation?
Has Murphy abandoned Twitter? What with it being an existential threat and all?
Does anyone care apart from obese sex gods like Murphy?
Can anyone suggest why Twitter is a necessity? Would anyone other than Meghan and Murphy miss it if it stopped existing? Smart porn stars are on onlyfans and other sites
When we needed several million lateral flow tests, we had to turn to the Chinese to get them manufactured. If we suddenly need a new Google or whatever, we will similarly be beholden to the American capitalists. Fix the private-sector obstacles and you’ll never have to worry about public-sector provision.
“Its communication tools are vital to the functioning of vast numbers of organisations, from my university onwards.”
Nothing Google offers in ways of communication tools is unique. Nor are they anywhere adequate for many purposes. Well… other than a fat potato dictating his views to his sycophants. For “free”.
“Worse, by letting these companies create technologies that are protected by absurd patent and copyright laws we have made it very hard for states to replicate what they do,”
The State has such a brilliant track record regarding large, or hell… even small, IT projects, innit?
And his Tuberosity completely misses the fact that the core of Google’s tech is in fact fully Open Source.
Google is stopping no-one from building anything. They may well buy you out if you come up with something they can use though, but that’s something else unrelated to actually coding and building a system.
“Musk and Twitter provide a real warning. ”
Yup… Your Woke friends will sell you out if someone dangles enough money around.
Nothing stops Spud from complaining to ..what was it again.. their Chief Customer Complaint Officer?
With a bit of luck he’ll actually get a reply as well.. Hopefully in a way that Spud can’t hide… 3:)
Worse, by letting these companies create technologies that are protected by absurd patent and copyright laws
I doubt *any* of the important technology is under patent or copyright protection, anywhere.
Trade secrets are never patented, because that would involve publishing them, whereupon they are no longer secret. They are quickly reverse engineered.
This is one of those things that anti-capitalists trot out, with no understanding that patents make things more open, not less. Nor do they have any idea how short patents are in practice, given the lead in times to get things to market.
And the Tuber would be all over copyright law if he thought *his* material was being infringed.
Off topic but FFS. From the BBC.
“The firebombing of an immigration processing centre was motivated by extreme right-wing terrorist ideology, police have said.
Tim Jacques, senior national co-ordinator for counter terrorism policing, said: “After considering the evidence collected so far, whilst there are strong indications that mental health was likely a factor, I am satisfied that the suspect’s actions were primarily driven by an extremist ideology.
“This meets the threshold for a terrorist incident.””
Where do the police mention “right wing”?
Google? What’s that? I’ll ask DuckDuckGo.
Google search results are increasingly useless due to the narrative driven curation in their algorithm.
DDG isn’t much better. During the COVID scare their CEO abandoned their commitment to neutrality.
I am reminded of David Cameron’s comment: “Too many tweets makes a twat.” Semms about right to me.
@NN… That’s one of the few honest and accurate things that the twat ever said!
‘And that leaves society massively vulnerable to these companies.’
So Murph agrees that the UK should frack everything within sight or hearing so its gas and oil supplies won’t be strangled by those wicked foreign capitalists. Or doesn’t this apply when you sanction them?
This is such a laughably bad argument I don’t even know where to begin.
Has capitalism enclosed and made much worse what used to be fun, free, and uncensored?
Yet we know perfectly well that Google is the effective gatekeeper on knowledge via the interwebs, and it censors fairly hard when its political interests and friends are threatened. A very unsafe pair of hands that. Twitter will at least (or rather hopes it will) provide a more open forum where competing views vie for supremacy because of the underlying facts, not the desired political narrative.
It is perhaps a sort of upside to the whole Covid “thing” that the machinations and censorship of the intrenched elite became so much more evident.
We need known abusers to protect us from potential abuse.
We need known incompetents to protect us from possible incompetence.
We need the known corrupt to protect us from conceivable corruption.
But only if they’re in government. Because if they’re in government, corrupt incompetent abusers have power, so power-worshipping solanums know they have become sanctified by their positions.
DDG is powered by Bing, written by Microsoft. Yes, that Microsoft – the company that has dominated the market for operating systems and office software for decades.
Bing is toe-clenchingly shite; it never fails to produce page upon page of irrelevant content while omitting the very page I was actually looking for.
If even Microsoft can’t crack internet search, what hope is there for Spud and his wall of printed money?
I’m pleased with the Brave browser (good at eliminating unwanted ads) & they have their own search engine. I have also used DDG search, mainly to avoid using any Google products. It’s easy to change browser & search engines…
Applying the same logic…cars are also a technology that society depends on and we shouldn’t allow the big companies to control that.
State car manufacturing…that’s always worked well, hasn’t it?
@Andrew C – November 5, 2022 at 9:03 pm
Where do the police mention “right wing”?
They don’t need to… Anything the BBC or other bits of the MSM don’t like is automatically attributed to “the far right”.
@Geoffers…
Indeed it has… Summed up in one word – “Trabant”. 🙂
I work in paid search advertising, where I work in Google Ads everyday. Unless Google drastically changes their business practices, someone else will be overtaking them within the next ten years. I’ve been saying that since Twitter ownership was only a twinkle in Elon’s eye.
No company is infallible. At the very least, they can be met with stiff competition, like IBM when Apple and Dell came along.
I also tell all startup founders I meet to either not trust advertisers, or to at least not use them for a large percentage of their revenue stream. Google now has to give in to ESG and China-influenced companies and their woke agendas, because they didn’t foresee in 1998 that thousands of advertisers might pull out of contracts if the search engine didn’t throttle certain search results and censor others.
Elon, at least going by what he says, is experimenting with a different approach. Charge the blue checks $8/month, increase Free Speech, and depend less on advertisers. I’m willing to bet this will work more efficiently. And it’s perfectly legal to do all of this.
You can tell the critics are not to be taken seriously, because millionaires are telling Elon that $8/month for premium features is “charging for free speech.” Ron Perlman, who previously said he was leaving Twitter, “popped” back on to put in his two cents. The UN is dictating “responsibilities” that Elon has with his company, as though they understand what responsibilities are. They claimed that it’s somehow inhumane to lay off employees without advanced notice, although that’s how I’ve always been let go from corporations myself.
It’s just a bunch of overly-privileged douchebags finally being told “no.” It’s no more complex than that. These Twitter employees complaining about what amounts to a mundane acquisition, are like teenagers who cry at high school graduation and run over to hug the retiring principal. They’re fucking pathetic weaklings.
https://www.searchenginemap.com/
Brave, not included in that graphic, is independent, having acquired Tailcat in 2020. And yeah, it shows. A bit. It reminds me of DDG a decade ago. Most of the time it’s fine.