alt Hacker NewsOnly competition can provide a solution. We have lost sight of this principle even though all Western democracies are built on the idea of separation of powers, and making it hard for any one faction of elites to gain full control and ruin things for everyone else. Make them fight with each other, let them get a piece of the pie, but never all of it. That's why we have multiple branches of government, multiple parties etc. That's why we have markets with many firms instead of monopolies.
There has never been a utopian past and there will never be a utopian future. The past was riddled with despotism and many things that the average man or woman today would consider horrific. The basic principle of democratic society is to prevent those things from recurring by pitting elite factions against each other. Similarly business elites who wield high technology to gain their wealth must also compete and if there is any sign of them cooperating too closely for too long, we need to break them up or shut them down.
When Apple and Google agree, cooperate, and adopt the same policies - we are all doomed. It must never happen and we must furthermore break them up if they try, which they are now doing.
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In fact true competition is only possible via open standards, protocols and technology stacks.
We need agreement to ensure the large corporations adhere to these.
I wish this was a higher up comment because it's such an important point, and it's totally an achievable thing.
Governments should be supporting this competition, or at the very least not encouraging monopolies/duopolies. Give loads of support/help to startups, small businesses. Let the large corps fund themselves.
But instead, we end up giving them huge tax breaks, anti-competitive legislation and even give them a voice in government.
in the face of large monopolies such as today's platforms, to keep competition you must regulate with laws that stop consumer abuse
This doesnt work if the market incentives themselves encourage these rent seeking actions.
We have given capitalists more and more power pver the last few decades and instead making things better, its just allowed them to nueter the government regulations that would have prevented them from fucking common people over. The market can not solve for this the same way it cant solve for education or the military. This needs laws
>There has never been a utopian past and there will never be a utopian future.
I wouldn't call it utopian, but I'd say we are way past "peak democracy" at this point.
There was a time in which corporations did get broken up when too large, when we did understand that it's about serving the population first and accumulating wealth after that, when corporations influencing politics was widely seen as a negative. It does seem to me we are now way past that.