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Who wants to make cooperatives out of IT giants

Earlier, we wrote about “ reverse perestroika ” - initiatives of supporters of left and left-wing radical movements aimed at making IT infrastructure and the Internet “common”.

But besides hardware, web services and the IT companies that develop them are part of the network. We are discussing who proposes to nationalize them, and why this is not such a good idea .


Photos - John T - Unsplash

It was yours - it became ours


Representatives of the left are increasingly proposing to tighten control over large IT companies. One striking example is the law of network neutrality. At the end of 2018, the California authorities, leftist, worked on it to prohibit providers from blocking access to sites and differentiate traffic, giving priority to any type of content.

Even the leaders of the businesses themselves do not stand aside. Last year, Mark Zuckerberg, noted that for the effective functioning of the world wide web, a “common global program” is needed, covering the problems of spreading malicious content and protecting user data.

This picture is complemented by the “concern” of regulators, which indicate that corporations and IT media accumulate large volumes of PD and create risks associated with leaks and the spread of fake news. But all this is only part of the trend.

Proponents of the left movement believe that such measures are insufficient and a more radical approach is needed. So, as a first step, US presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, a left-wing activist in the Democratic Party, proposed splitting up Amazon, Google, and Facebook into smaller firms to simplify the work of regulators.

Jason Prado, author of the Venture Commune newsletter and socialist campaign headquarters member Bernie Sanders , offers a close approach. He considers, - « » . .

Activists of the “cooperative platform” movement are already testing this approach in practice. The right to make managerial decisions in such organizations belongs to the company's employees or key shareholders. For example, the Green Taxi Cooperative taxi service in Denver is successfully managed by taxi drivers themselves. Despite fierce competition with Uber and Lyft, in 2016 the organization held a 37% stake in the city’s taxi market. The company continues to work today.


Photos - Kevin Laminto - Unsplash

Similar projects exist in Europe - for example, the management of the German market place Fairmondocarried out by shareholders in accordance with the principle: “one person - one vote”. The company has been operating safely for seven years and has even entered the UK market.

As an "alternative" to cooperatives, politicians propose to increase the "transparency" of internal business processes - for example, processing personal data. Representatives of the authorities of different countries adhere to this point of view, including those who are far from leftist movements. The head of the Federal Communications Commission in the United States, Ajit Pai, at the end of 2018, drew attention to the closed (in matters of processing PD) corporations like Google, Twitter and Facebook.

But not so simple


Not everyone is convinced that transferring control to the state is a good idea. As a main argument, opponents of this approach cite gloomy future scenarios described in many dystopias as an example. But if you do not take them into account, the fact remains: government organizations are at least too bureaucratic. This alone can negatively affect the business processes of new IT firms and, as a result, the quality of services.

Photo - Levon Vardanyan - Unsplash
Many of us faced difficulties that arose in the housing and communal services sector - in order to solve a problem, the management company has to fill in a lot of papers and switch from window to window several times. No one would like to encounter a similar attitude when working with an email service or Slack, not to mention some kind of Tinder.

Professor Benjamin Peters from Tulsa University, in his book How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet , notes that it was the bureaucracy that prevented the active development of Internet infrastructure in the Soviet Union.

In the USSR, it was not possible to implement large IT projects, including due to the fact that at each stage, specialists had to coordinate their actions.

In the case of nationalization, history can repeat itself if large businesses "divide" among themselves several government structures at once, whose interests, by the way, may not coincide. Industry representatives understand this, and many are against tightening regulation.

Two years ago, the UK government began to develop standards for online content and a system of penalties for offending companies. Then Richard Allan, vice president of Facebook, objectedthat services and media should be responsible for the quality of content only to the audience. On the whole, this point of view coincides with the ideas of the libertarians, who are on the other side of the political spectrum. They are convinced that the state should stay away from digital businesses and allow the market to grow naturally.

Will a compromise be found


The complete openness of the information promoted by some left-wing activists has its drawbacks. Professor of Ethics at Delft University of Technology Jeroen Van den Hoven notes that transparency and privacy are fundamental to democracy. The first helps to control the controllers, and the second - preserves the freedom of the individual. The bias in favor of transparency and company fragmentation can damage the privacy of users. According to colleague van den Hoven, Marijn Janssen, disclosure of data from the social. networks will allow you to monitor the actions of individual individuals, which will certainly take advantage of attackers.

Today, corporations are holding large amounts of personal data, which creates certain cyber risks. But the nationalization of companies and their infrastructure clearly will not become a universal solution to the problem of IT monopolies. On the other hand, a dialogue between them and representatives of various political movements could help to look at the problem from different points of view. And, in the future, to work out a compromise solution that will suit both the business and the authorities, and, most importantly, the developers of the services themselves and their users.

At 1cloud.ru , we have a corporate blog dedicated to IaaS and IS. Recently, we talked about how to remove ourselves from most popular services.
We also run a channel on Telegram , in which we publish news from the cloud industry, insights and analyze cases.

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