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Beldin | 1 year ago
I think the problem is more that the trend over the last 5-7 decades has been to privatise things. The EU (for instance) has rules forcing (e.g.,) privatisation of train companies and postal services. This has caused previously government-owned services to be privatised.
In this day and age, I'd be surprised to hear of any successful case where a non-public good was made public in a Western country. (I'll restrict my surprise to there because of insufficient familiarity with other countries to make such sweeping statements.) Whether it'd be web browsers, water treatment facilities, energy-related, healthcare-related, infrastructure-related, etc.: if it's currently privatised, it will emphatically not revert to public; if it's currently public, it might be forced to be privatised.
You might think about "privatised-but-with-strings-attached" variants, like in California with "carrier-of-last-resort", or in EU with public transport concessions requiring also services that operate at a loss to service small population centers / unpopular hours. Typically, these impose restrictions on the market parties on what they must deliver in order to be granted the concession. That seems like a way to guarantee the kind of service a government would deliver, but by market parties. And it is! But once you encode rules, you can start eroding them. Every new concession tender going out, you can try to dilute such conditions. A bit is enough - every step gained can be relied upon in future negotiations ("you're asking for more than last term"). And, of course, every small step can be argued by increasing costs - because cost will always increase anyway.
The TL;DRR (didn't read the rant): the public commons has a tendency to erode in favour of privatisation. There is pressure to do so, and no real counterpressure to reverse, only to not go too fast.
openrisk|1 year ago
The private/public border is volatile and heavily contested and by all accounts will forever be a topic of political debate.
But notice how unusual the context of web technologies: Its not that a private monopoly is controlling and selling some piece of web infrastructure (that might, instead, be opened to more competition, turned into a public good etc).
No, what is happening is that a very specific business sector (advertising) is controlling universal communications infrastructure.
A loose analogy would be if a single private oil company would manufacture and distribute all automobiles in circulation - for free, but securing that they can run on nobody else's energy.
The conjectured "public-good" browser is not crowding out any private interests as there is no market for selling browsers. There is a market for advertising but its not competing for surfaces, it owns all surfaces.
Guess what, in this terminally conflicted arrangement you would never see an electric vehicle.
The highjacking of central infrastructure to serve narrow private interests will inevitably reduce innovation and welfare and any techie that is worth their title knows thats already the case.
newaccount74|1 year ago
1) Google's model. They try to control all the ways that people discover goods and services, and then sell ads to the providers of services. Whether people are looking for electronics, flights, restaurants, contractors or nannies, they are going to use Google Search or Google Maps or another Google service to find it, and service providers need to pay Google to be discovered. Google is using ads to get a cut of every business transaction.
2) Apple's model: They try to control all the ways that people pay for things. For digital goods, that's the App Store and In-App-Purchases, for traditional things it's Apple Pay and Apple Card and Apple Cash. Apple is using payment services to get a cut of every business transaction.
organian|1 year ago
The UK is renationalising railways now.