> From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.

> We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time.

There are already groups for these things (W3C, ICANN, IEEE, etc.), so how I interpret what you’re saying is that we need to abandon large corporations and go with... what exactly?

I’m not going rally behind a government administration that seeks dictatorial power over everything. That’s much worse than power spread over FAANG.

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alecco 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Most of those groups were co-opted by Big Tech. I can tell from personal experience 20 years ago. In my case Microsoft and Cisco put people dedicated to the standard and we actual coders lost just out of ballooning time required for meetings and pointless complexity.

You can probably say the same for most of STEM academia. That's why I respect the Berkeley people. They are often insane far-far-left zealots, but they are the least corrupted by corporations. That's why you can see great open things like RISC-V come out of "The People's Republic of Berkeley".

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abc123abc123 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Yep. For instance, the linux foundation is just a shadow of its former self, full of CV-stuffing people from global corporations.

Look no further than to corona times, when the LF wanted to develop a global digital vaccine passport. That's basically helping authoritarians, and completely against the open source and decentralization spirit.

A new foudation needs to be laid, banning global corporations from participating. If not, after a few years, due to their power, money and influence, they will have taken over (again).

	▲	goku12 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> A new foudation needs to be laid, banning global corporations from participating. If not, after a few years, due to their power, money and influence, they will have taken over No amount of ban or rules will prevent those corporations from carrying out a coup on any foundation or even the society itself. They have enough power, money and influence to find loopholes around them and exploit them. The only way to stop them is to be eternally vigilant, actively recognize their sleazy tactics and push back together as a determined team. That can be achieved only by a smart population whose basic instincts cannot be easily predicted and manipulated by those corporations. Take the example of the web. When the bigtech hijacked it and went on their bloat-up rampage, the rest of the community should have just forked the standards, cut out the excess fat and extended it with sane, light and orthogonal designs. Instead, we foolishly let chrome extend their monopoly in web development, market share and future designs of the web. But the rot extends much deeper. Modern educational system teaches us just enough values and advanced knowledge to be the obedient and productive slaves to these corporations, but never enough to question their motives. It misleads us into believing that we and the world economy owe them our survival. It glorifies personal achievements and hyper-individualism to the extend that we suffer major emotional trauma as a result. Yet, are we even compensated appropriately in return for prioritizing our careers? They programmed us to sacrifice our happiness and relationships to enrich some remorseless and obscenely wealthy strangers.

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FatherOfCurses 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How passionately do you feel about that position every time AWS us-east-1 goes down?