Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

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Companies are way faster, focussed and efficient than any form of non-profit or governmental organization in building infrastructure that supports their cause.

I'm eternally grateful to Google for HTTP/2, Chrome, Web Vitals, Angular and so many other puzzle pieces without which the whole Internet wouldn't be what it is today. It showed foresight, wisdom, excellence, responsibility and stewardship.

The problem starts where growth ends, and all growth needs to end somewhere. There are only so many people on the planet with 24h a day to spend.

When that problem starts, a corporation still has to maximize shareholder value, and that's where the formally great stewardship gets endangered.

And then Google used its web browser, standards and search monopoly in order to

- shove the open-but-really-not-open AMP "standard" down everybody's throat

- eat up any kinds of comparison competitors by stealing their content into the featured snippets

- ...

So going back to your question, I'd still mostly trust in the benevolence of AWS — but I have zero doubts this benevolence will go away as soon as there is an opportunity to crush a competitor by ignoring that benevolence.

To quote Jeff Bezos here: "Your margin is my opportunity".

> Google for HTTP/2, Chrome, Web Vitals, Angular and so many other puzzle pieces without which the whole Internet wouldn't be what it is today. It showed foresight, wisdom, excellence, responsibility and stewardship.

That is a very creative way to describe forcing one-side standards via monopolies. By your logic, you also love IE4, HTTPxml, flashcookies, etc.

And you call microsoft business tactics in the 90s as "foresight, wisdom, excellence, responsibility and stewardship" because that is the text book those companies are following to push those "technologies" that are completely self-serving to show rich ads to you and control which video your browser can play or not.

IE gave us XHRs, which are kind of important to the modern web.

Monopolies have agency to remake the world; ecosystems have competition over a relatively fixed landscape. Each has their pros and cons, but to build a radically new social structure, nothing beats a monopoly.

> in building infrastructure that supports their cause.

Emphasis on this part.

To fully spell it out, the causes of a company don't always align with those of everyone else. Profit motive alone is not sufficient to adequately align companies with the interests of broader society.

Which is why a market that is completely "free", where actors are not beholden to any laws or regulations, is not a good idea.

> Companies are way faster, focussed and efficient than any form of non-profit or governmental organization in building infrastructure that supports their cause.

So what? What does that have to do with anything? I would disagree with this statement wholeheartedly. Private enterprise did not save the midwest from the dust storms, government did. Private enterprise did not save the world from the Nazi's, government did. Private enterprise will not save us from global warming, government will. Indeed, all of these problems are generally started by private monied interest.

Without the government, those companies can't even operate, so your entire premise is totally backwards.

Only technology can save us from global warming and only private enterprises like Tesla and others can develop and - more importantly - cheaply scale that technology. There are billions of Chinese and Indians who will become the equivalent of American middle class in the coming decade and no amount of conservation or carbon tax is going to prevent the acceleration of global temperatures that would cause.

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