>Section 230 made it possible for every major internet service to be built
Whatever your opinion on the law, this statement by Zuckerberg says all you need to know about why he would take this position. Climb the ladder, and then kick it out from under you.
Zuckerberg realizes that it is significantly cheaper to adjust to more social media regulation than it is to compete against competitors (e.g. Tok Tik). Removing or significantly reforming section 230 would ensure Facebook's position for many years to come. To paraphrase Thompson: Facebook grew virally, and so can it decline virally. Reform of 230 precludes the latter.
Regarding DuckDuckGo, my understanding is that though they have their own web crawler, most of the information is coming from Bing and Yahoo, who are the only direct competitors to Google.
This is not surprising. For a long time I've felt that the mortgage industry is ripe for consolidation. Zillow is a great candidate to do it.
Behind the customer service relationship with the broker, nearly every mortgage shop runs the same way. It's the perfect industry to consolidate and make more efficient with economies of scale.
It is a political opinion itself to think those actions are controversial. At scale, anything is political. The only solution is to keep politics out of business, and manifest our political opinions through government. Business, like economics or biology, is dismal. The most efficient and productive continue on.
Government's role is to make the ideologically agnostic machine of business align with our values. In the kind of competitive economy we have, it can only be this way. If we try to apply politics from within a business, we risk introducing instabilities and ineffeciencies, making the business less competitive–an existential threat to the values we incorporated into the business.
You do realize that it's still illegal to do all these things with Bitcoin, right? It's not that banks can't do these things; they just have no interest performing illegal activities on your behalf. Bitcoin solves nothing here.
Alternatively, data could be considered not to exist until it is collected. In this way Larry is neither stealing it nor are you giving it. I personally find this interpretation more compelling. Otherwise you'd get weird conclusions, like Darwin stealing evolution from nature, rather than being the creator of the idea and the data that supports it.
I wouldn't assume everything is doing poorly. There are big winners and big losers in this economy, and the S&P 500 happens to be constituted primarily of the winners. Almost anything digital right now is gold.
There's also the fact that many companies that are doing well right now are keeping quiet about it. I know from personal experience at the company I work for (fintech midsized startup) that executives are very careful not to be openly positive about benefiting from the pandemic. Publicly admitting that you profitted by a global pandemic and an economic recession is in poor taste, and companies are rightly tentative about doing so.
From my work I've seen anything adtech related explode. Publishers or aggregators whose primary revenue stream is online advertising income are growing at incredible rates. Assuming that everyone is hurting because physical businesses are hurting is a huge mistake.
Additionally, as many analysts have been saying, the pandemics primary effect so far has been to accelerate existing trends, not create new ones. We're seeing a fast-foward in economic transition. Companies that were well positioned before the pandemic for the economy of the future (automation, digital) are doing swimmingly.
I am uniquely qualified to respond to this, as about 6 years ago I developed a raw milk cheese that was inspired by Stilton that eventually won 1st place in its class in the World Champion Cheese Contest.
I do not feel that the original claim is overstated. Creating any novel cheese is remarkably difficult–seriously, it's really damn hard–but recreating a cheese that no longer exists and was likely made in a different location under different circumstances is effectively impossible. There are so many hidden variables involved that, even if they had access to the model cheese, a talented cheesemaker could still take years to make a good approximation. And it would only be an approximation. Even with today's advanced cheese technology you cannot recreate terrior.
Since they don't have access to the model cheese, this difficulty is compounded many times.
Edit: I want to add that even though I was at the peak of my cheese game, I was only able to do this because I had effectively unlimited money to throw at the problem and very little oversight from my investors.
My gut instinct is that Netflix can't use the personalized algorithmic approach that TikTok succeeds with because Netflix has to pay dearly for its content, where TikTok does not. Because of the cost structure of licensing, Netflix cannot afford to have the diversity of content that TikTok's user-generated approach enables. A small content library makes it impossible to build a meaningfully personalized feed.
The main way speculative investors benefit the company is that they hold stocks because they believe it will be more valuable in the future, so that they can sell it for a profit. This demand for the stock drives up the price. Since stock is essentially a portion of the company, this also drives up the valuation of the company. Since the company is more valuable, they can offer equity to investors for a higher price, allowing them to invest in their own business and grow.
It's indirect, but it's a very real benefit.
Edit: Adding to this, the company's reinvestment of funds generated by issuing stock drives demand in other places of the economy. Investing in your own business means spending money on people, infrastructure, and other goods you need to offer your company's service. This necessarily drives demand for these goods. Additionally, this creates cascading demand through the keynesian multiplier effect.
This isn't quite right. Technically it's carbon neutral, but the alternative method is carbon negative, as a larger portion of decaying matter will sequester carbon into the soil than would if you didn't burn. So the reality is that this is not carbon neutral compared to the alternative.
Of course, there could be some hidden factor I'm missing, as biological systems are complex.
I'm fairly confident that Tolkein didn't write that. It's the prologue to the Fellowship of the Ring movie, and not in the text, as far as I'm aware.
So maybe Jordan is actually the one who got ripped off. Still though, pretty cliché idea, but the formulation is too close to not be influenced one way or another.
I agree that the idea that these are necessarily individuals with military associations is incorrect, but I also feel this is a false analogy because of how different the nature of a US Gov. association with a university is compared with a Chinese Gov. association with a university.
Whatever your opinion on the law, this statement by Zuckerberg says all you need to know about why he would take this position. Climb the ladder, and then kick it out from under you.
Zuckerberg realizes that it is significantly cheaper to adjust to more social media regulation than it is to compete against competitors (e.g. Tok Tik). Removing or significantly reforming section 230 would ensure Facebook's position for many years to come. To paraphrase Thompson: Facebook grew virally, and so can it decline virally. Reform of 230 precludes the latter.