Starve the Beast: Monopoly Power and Political Corruption

eff.org

31 points·thread_id··2 comments

A reason for telecom Monopoly not mentioned in the article is the overuse of cloud infrastructure to achieve "service locked-in" and "user commodity" business models. I think the HN community would do well to think more about whether their tech needs to feed this beast.

For example: I would love a digital assistant that lived in my home network, not on Google servers, and it's technologically quite feasible. I can even run GPT-J in my home lab and it's much better than Google assistant , but I can't buy that as a product. Google/openAI would rather I depend on communication with their servers.

We are moving towards a future where most things scarcely turn on without checking certs with a full internet, and thats not an ideal tech stack, imo.

> I can even run GPT-J in my home lab and it's much better than Google assistant , but I can't buy that as a product.

And how much you would pay for that service? $5/mo? How many people need it? Almost nobody? Now you see where the problem is.

From TFA:

> Profits are power. Concentration is power. Concentration is profitable. Profits let merging companies run roughshod over the FTC and become more concentrated.

Poor Cory, he just doesn't get it, no matter how easy and obvious it is...

Does anyone think we'd have free market if there were no profits to be made? Of course not, it'd be even worse! The problem is the FTC (concentrated power of the State), not profits.

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