Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by alexnking 4426 days ago
I'm more and more concerned that the legal and cultural environment for web scraping would make it hard for a company like Google or Yahoo to be founded today.

The internet isn't about "don't take my stuff", it's about spreading that stuff around. I'm confused by people who want to make their data public, but want to control exactly how people access it.
3 comments
TheLoneWolfling 4426 days ago
Agreed.

I talked about this a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572937

Someone decided to ban all bots from accessing their site except for Google and Bing. So much for "if you're so worried about Google just use another search engine".

link
hnal943 4426 days ago
I'm confused by people who want to make their data public, but want to control exactly how people access it.

You mean like TV? or Radio? or print....

link
johnward 4425 days ago
To be fair those mediums all kind of suck in their own way.
link
ksk 4426 days ago
>make it hard for a company like Google or Yahoo to be founded today.

Is that a bad thing?

>The internet isn't about "don't take my stuff", it's about spreading that stuff around.

Try asking Google if they want to "share" their database of crawled data.

>I'm confused by people who want to make their data public, but want to control exactly how people access it.

Me too.

link
newaccountfool 4426 days ago
>Is that a bad thing? Yes, no question about it. More players in the market means more competition and more competition means a better service.
link
ksk 4426 days ago
>More players in the market means more competition and more competition means a better service

I'm not sure if this is a joke. So, I'll refrain from replying.

link
parktheredcar 4425 days ago
Could you explain your point of view? I'd like to understand both sides here and I think I understand why more competition would be good, but now why it wouldn't be.
link
ksk 4425 days ago
>I think I understand why more competition would be good, but now why it wouldn't be.

That is not what I said at all. I don't believe that more competition necessarily leads to better product/service. In fact I believe that in most cases it does not. In capitalist economies, companies try their hardest to avoid competing. Competition forces companies to reduce costs, and not necessarily increase quality. The quality of a product is not some number that people can read and go "oh yeah this product is better". Marketing people try hard to invent such pointless numbers (e.g. Megapixels in cameras.. horsepower in cars , etc etc). Also many CEOs don't have the first clue on how the product is actually made, much less increase its quality. They rely on these same 'marketing numbers' that their underlings serve them with. So, they too can go "oh yeah this number is increasing so our product is getting better".

It seems like a lot of people are brainwashed into believing this free market utopia where things just automatically get better because everyone is competing and the customer is this genius who can figure out which company is delivering a better product.

Its sort of like thinking "Well if I'm nice to everyone, everyone will be nice to me.". And then you realize that the real world is a dark place filled with assholes, where slavery is still rampant and many of the goods and services we consume are dependent on the exploitation of natural resources or other fellow humans.

Sorry if reading all that bummed you out. I'm really a quite a cheerful person :P

link