It’s the monopolistic companies aka mega corps that really restrict individuals and stifle innovation.
In the small-mid sized space, there are shitty actors but they’re easier to avoid, and don’t require resorting to living in a cave. They are competing with each other in the traditional sense of the word. They’re not on a mission to extinguish.
This is not unique to tech, it’s everywhere. Private actors that become the size of countries switch to playing zero-sum games, by acquiring and consolidating. It’s always bad for the consumer.
In what way do they stifle people? I had the impression that for the most part they just ignored small fry. If you want to boot up a server and point a DNS address at it, knock yourself out.
You can't "innovate" on Facebook's site, but why would you want to? People go there to do Facebook things. Your own web site is limited primarily by your imagination. (And occasionally the law, but that requires some pretty extreme stuff.)
> You can't "innovate" on Facebook's site, but why would you want to? People go there to do Facebook things.
Parents use Facebook to schedule activities for kids. Governments and companies use Twitter to announce things to citizens and customers. So they are, as they claim, in a sense a digital townhall. But with arbitrary restrictions on access, both in terms of opinions and expressions and in terms of clients they don’t want you to use, or APIs they don’t want you to call.
> for the most part they just ignored small fry
Very small, yes. But as soon as you’re bigger, they’re gonna want to eliminate you, peacefully of course. Acquisitions are probably the first tool, then it’s get uglier if that doesn’t work out.
Anyway, details in all its glory, but the trend as you grow larger is to play dominance games, which is another term for zero-sum. That’s not the only thing they do of course, but the trend is overwhelming.
In the small-mid sized space, there are shitty actors but they’re easier to avoid, and don’t require resorting to living in a cave. They are competing with each other in the traditional sense of the word. They’re not on a mission to extinguish.
This is not unique to tech, it’s everywhere. Private actors that become the size of countries switch to playing zero-sum games, by acquiring and consolidating. It’s always bad for the consumer.