>Section 230 made it possible for every major internet service to be built
Whatever your opinion on the law, this statement by Zuckerberg says all you need to know about why he would take this position. Climb the ladder, and then kick it out from under you.
Zuckerberg realizes that it is significantly cheaper to adjust to more social media regulation than it is to compete against competitors (e.g. Tok Tik). Removing or significantly reforming section 230 would ensure Facebook's position for many years to come. To paraphrase Thompson: Facebook grew virally, and so can it decline virally. Reform of 230 precludes the latter.
Regarding DuckDuckGo, my understanding is that though they have their own web crawler, most of the information is coming from Bing and Yahoo, who are the only direct competitors to Google.
This is not surprising. For a long time I've felt that the mortgage industry is ripe for consolidation. Zillow is a great candidate to do it.
Behind the customer service relationship with the broker, nearly every mortgage shop runs the same way. It's the perfect industry to consolidate and make more efficient with economies of scale.
It is a political opinion itself to think those actions are controversial. At scale, anything is political. The only solution is to keep politics out of business, and manifest our political opinions through government. Business, like economics or biology, is dismal. The most efficient and productive continue on.
Government's role is to make the ideologically agnostic machine of business align with our values. In the kind of competitive economy we have, it can only be this way. If we try to apply politics from within a business, we risk introducing instabilities and ineffeciencies, making the business less competitive–an existential threat to the values we incorporated into the business.
> It is a political opinion itself to think those actions are controversial.
No, the existence of controversy over an issue is a question of empirical fact, not political opinion.
The ascription of significance to the existence of controversy may be a political opinion (and is certainly a value-based opinion), but not the question of whether controversy exists.
If it's an empirical fact, how much objection from how many (and which) people is enough to cross the line into controversial? You can always find at least one upset person about any significant decision of any company, thus it's inherently political when you decide which group of people or how big a group you have to have to merit the "controversial" badge.
Those complaining of being deplatformed would probably agree strongly with your definition, however, so I will admit the definition of this word is itself controversial. Or maybe I shouldn't, because the prior sentence feels very political to me.
> If it's an empirical fact, how much objection from how many (and which) people is enough to cross the line into controversial?
Any. Controversial is a continuous-valued, not binary, attribute.
How controversial is enough to justify a particular reaction? That's a political judgement, and in practice has as much to do with where you stand on the controversy as how much controversy there is.
You do realize that it's still illegal to do all these things with Bitcoin, right? It's not that banks can't do these things; they just have no interest performing illegal activities on your behalf. Bitcoin solves nothing here.
It's also illegal to smoke weed, drop acid, watch netflix or be gay or publish suicidal jokes in some places. Everybody draws a line for themselves in regard to which laws they have to respect or have no choice but to break today.
Alternatively, data could be considered not to exist until it is collected. In this way Larry is neither stealing it nor are you giving it. I personally find this interpretation more compelling. Otherwise you'd get weird conclusions, like Darwin stealing evolution from nature, rather than being the creator of the idea and the data that supports it.
The point here is that there was no agreement about this... or even knowledge about the collection of data. There was unilateral action on the part of Google/ Facebook to secretly create data collection points all over our lives.
The person I replied to suggested we volunteered this information to Google. Which is almost entirely untrue. Most people Google and Facebook track have zero knowledge they are being tracked.
I don't want to blame "most people". But had they read the agreements (!) and understood them (!!) they were told they were being tracked.
So I blame the people a bit, but I blame a media culture that didn't make it clear, and an educational system that prevented them from understanding what was happening.
I wouldn't assume everything is doing poorly. There are big winners and big losers in this economy, and the S&P 500 happens to be constituted primarily of the winners. Almost anything digital right now is gold.
There's also the fact that many companies that are doing well right now are keeping quiet about it. I know from personal experience at the company I work for (fintech midsized startup) that executives are very careful not to be openly positive about benefiting from the pandemic. Publicly admitting that you profitted by a global pandemic and an economic recession is in poor taste, and companies are rightly tentative about doing so.
From my work I've seen anything adtech related explode. Publishers or aggregators whose primary revenue stream is online advertising income are growing at incredible rates. Assuming that everyone is hurting because physical businesses are hurting is a huge mistake.
Additionally, as many analysts have been saying, the pandemics primary effect so far has been to accelerate existing trends, not create new ones. We're seeing a fast-foward in economic transition. Companies that were well positioned before the pandemic for the economy of the future (automation, digital) are doing swimmingly.
I am uniquely qualified to respond to this, as about 6 years ago I developed a raw milk cheese that was inspired by Stilton that eventually won 1st place in its class in the World Champion Cheese Contest.
I do not feel that the original claim is overstated. Creating any novel cheese is remarkably difficult–seriously, it's really damn hard–but recreating a cheese that no longer exists and was likely made in a different location under different circumstances is effectively impossible. There are so many hidden variables involved that, even if they had access to the model cheese, a talented cheesemaker could still take years to make a good approximation. And it would only be an approximation. Even with today's advanced cheese technology you cannot recreate terrior.
Since they don't have access to the model cheese, this difficulty is compounded many times.
Edit: I want to add that even though I was at the peak of my cheese game, I was only able to do this because I had effectively unlimited money to throw at the problem and very little oversight from my investors.
My gut instinct is that Netflix can't use the personalized algorithmic approach that TikTok succeeds with because Netflix has to pay dearly for its content, where TikTok does not. Because of the cost structure of licensing, Netflix cannot afford to have the diversity of content that TikTok's user-generated approach enables. A small content library makes it impossible to build a meaningfully personalized feed.
It's also much harder to tell why somebody liked a 2h movie, vs a 15 second clip. The 15 second clip only has so many properties, where as there's millions of reasons I might like one movie but not a similar one. Also, as far as Netflix, id rather see more diversity, and not see the same movie made over and over again. I would wager TikTok viewers are more willing to watch repetitive things play out.
This is not as difficult to understand as it might sound, Netflix can only run recommendation based on the series its audience has watched, and you can only watch so many series in a week. Whereas for 15 seconds clips, the engine get feed hundred if not thousands times more data it would on netflix data. so
The main way speculative investors benefit the company is that they hold stocks because they believe it will be more valuable in the future, so that they can sell it for a profit. This demand for the stock drives up the price. Since stock is essentially a portion of the company, this also drives up the valuation of the company. Since the company is more valuable, they can offer equity to investors for a higher price, allowing them to invest in their own business and grow.
It's indirect, but it's a very real benefit.
Edit: Adding to this, the company's reinvestment of funds generated by issuing stock drives demand in other places of the economy. Investing in your own business means spending money on people, infrastructure, and other goods you need to offer your company's service. This necessarily drives demand for these goods. Additionally, this creates cascading demand through the keynesian multiplier effect.
Do companies routinely issue new stock to raise money? I thought it was a rare occurrence, obviously the IPO, and then occasionally afterward. Your edit is clear.
Whatever your opinion on the law, this statement by Zuckerberg says all you need to know about why he would take this position. Climb the ladder, and then kick it out from under you.
Zuckerberg realizes that it is significantly cheaper to adjust to more social media regulation than it is to compete against competitors (e.g. Tok Tik). Removing or significantly reforming section 230 would ensure Facebook's position for many years to come. To paraphrase Thompson: Facebook grew virally, and so can it decline virally. Reform of 230 precludes the latter.