Is there any hope? Or is it inevitable that big corporations will take over what started as a way to escape big corporate platforms and to focus on real communities and discussions and replace it with a toxic shithole pumped full of ads?
Is there any hope? Or is it inevitable that big corporations will take over what started as a way to escape big corporate platforms and to focus on real communities and discussions and replace it with a toxic shithole pumped full of ads?
the phrase is embrace, extend, extinguish, and Microsoft has been doing it for years
So has facebook:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Meta_Platforms
AT&T is the best known example. They supressed innovation for decades, buying up or squashing anything that posed a threat to their monopoly. A phone bought in 1920 wasn’t that different to a phone used in 1980. Judging by what happened when their monopoly was abolished, if it hadn’t been for AT&T we’d have had the internet in 1960.
People have no clue about how detrimental these (quasi-)monopolies are for technogical innovation.
Companies like facebook, microsoft and google are actively preventing innovation not furthering it. They’ve become so big, they no longer have a vested interest in things changing too much, so they squash anything new.
Corporate vampires, undermining democracy, hurting the planet, and actively hindering progress. Fuck 'em.
Embrace, extend, extinguish is a very particular kind of monopolistic behavior. you’re just listing people buying out their competitors. which to be clear, is also bad.
Embrace, extend, extinguish is when you have an open standard, which a company nominally embraces, and then adds unique features to their version that only interoperates with those using their product. Apple and SMS is a current example, since their reactions only work on iPhone. the Wikipedia article has plenty of examples from Microsoft. it’s also quite likely that it’s exactly what Facebook plans to do with activitypub.
There is no world in which the DoD declassifies packet switching, invented in the late 60s, and opens that up into the world. This work was essential to making ARPANET, which was the first interconnected network that we can call useful internet, which was only open to the few academics and military institutions that worked on what was later known as DARPA projects. There is no putting this on Ma Bell as a reason for us not having internet in the 60s.