How is "break everyone's ridiculous dependency on a handful of platforms" meaningfully different from GPs version, "take power back from big tech"?

Doesn't big tech have power because so many people depend on this small set of platforms?

What prevents presidents and other officials from holding "old-fashioned" press conferences, like they used to do just a few years ago? Has big tech supplanted the media?

Any government official can hold press conferences and make press releases just like they used to. However in practical terms the reach of those messages is severely limited. Did you know the President has a weekly radio address?

Besides inauguration day, do you remember reading official documents on the whitehouse.gov website? I never have. Nor have I ever gone to AOC's official house.gov site to read her messages. But I do know what she's saying on Twitter.

Not to belabor the point but where the message is delivered is a huge factor in whether or not the message will even be noticed.

> Has big tech supplanted the media?

Yes. Traditional media is struggling greatly because of tech in general and big tech in particular. The profitability has been squeezed out and what remains of media is less trustworthy because of that.

“Traditional media”, sure, but the question as posed was about the media.

Craigslist and the New York Times website probably did more to harm the profitability of newspapers around the country than any FAANG company, and there’s no shortage of new websites claiming to report the news.

Tech is the media’s biggest supporter, but maybe not the media that you grew up with. What’s driving down the price of news isn’t tech, but the new forms of competition tech—big, small, medium, XL, etc.— enables.

> Has big tech supplanted the media?

No.

I think big tech has all of the power because they have all of the platforms, and if any platform attempts to take some of that power, the big technology companies shut them down. I’m not making an excuse or an apology for a service like Parler, but eventually the deck becomes so stacked against us where we are damned if we do damned if we don’t.

The phrase "take back power", especially when it comes in the context of "they're blocking people and must be stopped!", seems to boil down to not letting tech companies block who they want to block. I just want competition.

> seems to boil down to not letting tech companies block who they want to block. I just want competition.

The problem is that when the market is already consolidated, you need one to get the other.

Suppose you want to compete with the major phone platforms. Your biggest problem is apps. No apps, no users; no users, no app developers.

A way to fix this is to create a cross-platform app development framework. Developers would love that -- write your app once and it runs on both the existing major platforms and any new ones? Great!

Except that the incumbents block it. You can't create a competing app store for the existing platforms, which means you can't leverage that into a competing platform.

But without competition there, they can also do this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304275

So there goes your competition for Twitter and Facebook.

Constrain them from limiting competing app stores. Works a lot better than doing nothing.

App store policy is rather different from content moderation. I still don't like it, but I'd be a lot more comfortable with forcing Apple to allow cross-platform apps than forcing Twitter to accept Trump.

Ok, I see. That makes sense.

It seems there are perhaps three(?) options that come up:

1) Constrain big tech via regulation (thereby in some sense transferring the power to regulators/government, with the hope that it would in turn be influenced by democratic processes)

2) Or, directly influence big tech behaviour through boycotts and other consumer action.

3) Or, break up big tech forcibly or again through consumer action to switch to alternatives, thereby diffusing this power.

And you prefer 3. I think I do too.

Eh, 3 is the closest, but I can't say I like anything that involves directly mucking with existing companies. In my dream world, the government funds federated software to the point that it can compete with twitter for most people. It's unclear how realistic that is, I'm just very confident that government dictating moderation policy will go horribly wrong.

#3 Force federation gets my vote

The means are vastly different? Use the power of government to force private companies into some strange, complex, government-backed content policy, or let people realize they need a variety of trusted media in their diet and don't use one platform for all comms.