He didn't really propose a publicly-funded alternative to Facebook though, at least not in the sense people seem to be inferring. He threw out some vague ideas to create a digitally focused sister organization to the BBC, which "could develop new technology for online decision making and audience-led commissioning of programmes and even a public social media platform".
That is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard in my life. It's like saying "Hey, NSA and GCHQ are tired of having to copy your data from Facebook's servers, so let's cut out the middle-man".<p>Thanks, but NO thanks.
While I don't use FB, I absolutely, 100% would not use any government social networks, out of both principal and pragmatism, period.<p>Money would be better spent on building statues of Ed Miliband. And that's saying something.
I wouldn't expect anything else from him. The man despises private enterprise and had the urge to nationalise everything.<p>I'd think it would be really funny to see this being attempted, where it not for the huge amount of money that would be wasted.
He causes so little outrage because his ideas are mostly from cloud cuckoo land. It's hard to muster a response for something so pathetic. Oh, he also wants Google and others to bankroll investigative journalism or face a hefty tax.
This is absolutely ridiculous and I must say I cannot be surprised coming from Labour.<p>What escapes the left completely, is that there is a free market. Which can and always does a better job than central planning.<p>Nothing is stopping anyone from buying a cheap laptop, an external webcam if need be and a decent microphone and then to start streaming to youTube and other decentralised platforms if they want to do vlogging. Hell, nowadays even a cheap android phone will do to stream live to YouTube to get the message out.<p>There are also cheaper solutions if they want to startup a blog and then syndicate via medium, wordpress, ghost, tumblr, guest blogs and rss channels.<p>Bottom line, there is nothing. Absolutely nothing stopping anyone from providing their voice to the internet and crafting an audience. The government doesn't need to be involved and those who value a free press should tell him to butt out in the strongest terms.<p>Except however and this is what we must be careful of. Is that Labour will want to impose restrictions on what is acceptable. There is a UK firewall coming and I'm sure some Labour and Conservative MPs are licking their lips for the day this comes.<p>I'm too busy to provide citations but links are out there, go do your own research.<p>Now there is a ray of hope. It's coming in the form of decentralised networks and also Elon Musk's global satellite network. In fact, I will go so far as to say. In the very near future, space-intranets will come into play. Where crowd-funded projects will elect to launch satellites that are outside of government control and mobile phones will have dual capabilities. The first to connect to the internet and the second to be on the space-internet with no government oversight.
Don't trust politicians.<p>He's taking advantage of the public's frustrations with their privacy being invaded by FB to propose a tool that would ultimately be made in his image.<p>The only way a political leader or party should get involved is by popularising existing open and ideally decentralised platforms and suggesting laws where non-governmental semi-randomised working groups review source code to check that privacy and security are being maintained and not coerced.<p>but of course, its not about democracy it's about rightthink
Wasn't there a country that ran an XMPP chat server or similar for it's citizens? I'm trying to find the details but failing. I'm sure I read about it in the last couple of years.
I wonder if he realizes he's actually proposing a government funded global CDN - or that for it to have a usable low-latency and storage capacity for billions of users would cost billions of pounds in infrastructure cost if it were to actually be at the scale and level of success of Facebook...<p>Nah... of course not! These are the same idiots who think leaving the EU is a great idea!