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This is a thought provoking read. I, too, have been meditating over this matter a lot. Unfortunately, though, it seems to me that people generally adopt one of the 3 camps:
* Don't care (that is, most users until their internet slows)
* Business of humanity is business. Anyone disagrees with the previous sentence is socialist/communist/hippie/devil-spawn.
* "GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH." Ready to leave Google/Facebook/AWS at moment notice. I mean, it's important to know what bad large firms have brought forth with the internet. But it's equally important to acknowledge what they (and commerce in general) have enabled, as well as what advantages they possess to users in everyday life. To take a simple example: the article ends with a question: "Do we want the web to be open, accessible, empowering and collaborative? [...] Or do we want it to be just another means of endless consumption[...]?"
Look, about 80% of the time, I do want mindless consumption. Maybe a stupid sitcom on one of the streaming service; maybe some cheesy pop over YouTube. I need that. And, you know what, the current arrangement is damned good at deliver that kind of consumption. Thus, condemning the status quo wholesale is either useless or extremely risky. Look, the status quo is status quo for a reason. How did Amazon get so big? Not because they send out goons to smash windows of local bookstores! They get big because they provide genuine value (large selection, stellar customer service, fast shipping, etc.). Google got so big because they are very very good with organization of information and extremely good with matching customers and advertisement. Apple got so big because they produce(d) beautiful products. Facebook got so big because they connect people together. Uber got so big because they make taxi-ing so convenient (and cheap). These businesses got there for good reasons. Except the case where you find way to provide the same (or at the minimum almost the same) value with free and open ecosystem, status quo remains. Sure, you can host your own fonts and pictures and videos, but then they will be served from your hosts. Have you invested billions of dollars in gateway to be near your customers? Have you invested many hundreds of engineering-years to test over as many browsers as you can find? And remember, you are probably a power user of the internet. How about everyone else? Does everyone need to learn how to administrate GNU/Linux to post views of the world? Without providing the same value, revolutions tend to fall short of their promises. Take American Revolution. They proclaimed "All Men are created equal," killed a bunch of people (many innocent), then proceeded to keep slavery anyway. And that's one of the most successful revolutions. French Revolution produced an emperor to replace a king. English Revolutionary failed. Paris Commune failed. Russian and Chinese Revolutions were followed by famines. And so on. Imagine the internet without Google, Facebook, and AWS. You know what will happen next? Somebody else will become Google, Facebook, and AWS. Look at China: sure, they are independent from Google and Facebook; and they have Baidu and Weibo. Google, Facebook, Amazon, AWS serve important needs. You can't not have someone like them. In other words: all of these protests are useless and/or harmful without careful consideration of the underlining economics and usage. And I am not sure if anyone has gotten around to figure out an economic model for free web yet. |