Yes, everything online sucks now–but it doesn't have to

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/yes-everything-online-sucks-now-but-it-doesnt-have-to/

by danaris • 9 months ago

4 1 9 months ago

danaris• 9 months ago

Personally, I would say that his first horseman—competition, or lack thereof—is likely at the root of all four of the major problems.

With more competition—with dozens or hundreds of companies competing on an even footing in a given space, rather than the handful of behemoths and scattering of also-rans we have today,

- No one or small group of them would have the money and clout needed to engage in regulatory capture the way the current big players have; at best they'd have to form a sector-wide lobbying organization, and then they'd need to all agree on priorities for it.

- There would be much more of a need for interoperability than today; imagine if there were 10 different mobile operating systems at roughly equal levels of market penetration, but 6 of them all used a common binary format, so apps were cross-compatible for them. Those 6 would get many more developers interested in making apps for them, since you'd only have to build once. That would translate into more users interested in those phones, etc, etc. Similarly, if there were 20 competing social networks, but 2/3 of them were all using something like atproto—you'd be able to sign up to one of those services, and still subscribe to updates from people on all the others, while the people on the non-interoperable services would only get to see posts from people on the same service.

- A larger number of companies in the space means that workers have more options, too, even apart from the extra (relative) power offered by the lack of regulatory capture. They're much more likely to be able to vote with their feet, and with companies competing for the best workers, wages and benefits would be better and union suppression would be much less common.

Naturally, there are other factors that affect all of these, but I've come to the conclusion over the past few years that the single change that would make the most difference in the world of work in this country would be real, robust, aggressive antitrust, with a goal of returning the balance of corporate vs labor power to something much closer to what it was in the years following WWII. (Not, of course, most other aspects of society—just that balance of power!)

Yes, everything online sucks now–but it doesn't have to

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