You could kind of be free and expressive but you already knew when you joined the internet, you knew that you should not be a troll. You began to experience the internet through platforms that were themselves controlled by specific companies, technical instruments of those companies, like search and retrieval and ordering and classification.
Ramesh SrinivasanWe are getting close to the point where as every platform of tech that has any level of scale gets bought by either Google or Facebook or sometimes Microsoft. We are getting to the point where we see some oligopoly in terms of behavior online, and that it's really problematic because the oligopolies are completely non transparent, they are terrible in terms of labor and economic equality and they support systems of surveillance. It can create a world where we are all placed in bubbles, where the systems themselves can be manipulated by people who don't have our best interests in mind.
Ramesh SrinivasanIf you create networks that allow people in their own local systems to have power and agency and sovereignty in their own systems. The idea that people could just know what's happening with their data. You could work with the platform, in communication with it, more than "I'm just like experiencing as a blind person in a black box".
Ramesh SrinivasanYou could kind of be free and expressive but you already knew when you joined the internet, you knew that you should not be a troll. You began to experience the internet through platforms that were themselves controlled by specific companies, technical instruments of those companies, like search and retrieval and ordering and classification.
Ramesh SrinivasanI'm really interested not just in privacy for the individual but respect for the local communities. And I think we have a problem with both and whenever industries kind of become almost monopolistic they have to be challenged to be more responsible. We can challenge them in the press, in the courts and in regulation.
Ramesh SrinivasanI think the governments need to encourage internet companies and convince them that they can be extremely profitable without necessarily spiraling out of control. Without becoming monopolist.
Ramesh SrinivasanWe are at a moment that some of the Silicon Valley companies are feeling the pressure. These days the founder of Twitter apologized that his company promoted some of the things that elected Donald Trump. You don't see that much of these apologizing from Google. From Mark Zuckerberg you are hearing a little bit more of it, but he is a little more "Oh, well, this is what happens because the internet scaled up and everybody has fake news; oh, we are gonna build a better technology".
Ramesh Srinivasan