Comment by deerpig | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deerpig | Hacker News Reader

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The breakup of Ma Bell required a regulatory breakup. Bell Telephone was just too entrenched to break up on decentralize on it's own, short of a collapse.

No amount of innovation outside of Bell Telephone could have broken it up. TBL might be correct that we are near that point today with the Internet. The big players either buy you our or copy your innovation and crush you.

In fact it's worse than that. Look at all the advise given to startups. Create something that one of the big players will need and get bought out -- that's been the dream for most startups for a long time now. This is reinforced and required by VC investors. The whole idea of building an small or medium sized Internet company that intends to become profitable and remain in business is now the exception rather than the rule.

Everything in the Silicon Valley ecosystem is designed to reinforce the big players.

TBL might be right that it could take a Ma Bell breakup kind of intervention to space where innovation outside of the big companies can have a chance. It's not that there isn't a level playing field. There isn't a playing field left at all -- it's branded multi-billion dollar stadiums all the way down.

That's a valid comparison but not relevant to this particular case IMO.

The phone network was completely and physically owned by Bell.

This is different from the Internet. Bell had the absolute infrastructure advantage and no new entry could compete with them because of the existing infrastructure, because competing would mean investing in infrastructure and that was near impossible.

That is different from how the Internet works. It is true that the WWW layer became centralized but the lower level stack already has all the ingredients we need to realize a revolution. There is no physical and absolute monopoly or oligopoly on the low level Internet protocol.

My point is, trying to fix this with regulation is superficial because all they're trying to do is solve it on the application layer instead of trying to fix it fundamentally from a lower level.

Regulation may help a bit in the short term, but as I mentioned, in the long term it doesn't help because it will only slow down true innovation because people won't suffer enough. All revolutions naturally occur when people start suffering and the suffering crosses certain threshold.

I wouldn't say this if it was physically impossible to disrupt the status quo, but I do believe it's possible without any government intervention and in fact will be more effective if governments don't intervene and let the market take care of it eventually.

You can already see the sentiment moving towards this direction and I think it's a matter of time that there will be enough critical mass to shift away from these centralized "big players".

How confident are you that the Internet's infrastructure at the lower level isn't well centrally controlled? A handful of companies own most of the Internet backbone. All of them are optimized to working with Google and Amazon traffic (aka, most of their traffic). Datacenters also make up a pretty big portion of the Internet's physical network, and a handful of companies also own most of that as well. Even though there's a number of companies involved, they all benefit from the status quo.

How is your little startup going to compete with the economies of scale Amazon or Google can leverage? They can't, which is why a lot of startups build right on top of Google or Amazon's infrastructure.

There are a lot of researches being done and products being created in areas where you don't need to rely on those centralized entities.

Decentralized technologies have very shitty UI, and no one would ever adopt them at its current state, but with a combination of the recent hype around them plus the societal change that will frustrate people enough to jump ship regardless of the relatively shittier user experience, it is very possible to change.

And once that starts happening, more talent will flow into this area and innovation will accelerate. This was never possible until now because the society was relatively stable and nobody needed these solutions. Not so anymore.

I'm a big fan of decentralization, but most decentralized technologies still rely on that infrastructure to get around. I haven't seen a long-distance project that can effectively use mesh networking.

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