Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

I find that the headline and the article mischaracterizes what is happening. The &quot;Wild Web&quot; was reigned in long ago by commercial interests. A distributed web with many small nodes would still be hard to control and police effectively. However as much the web has been centralized by the likes of Google, Facebook, and large media conglomerates effective government censorship is once again possible.<p>This is like a wild meadow turning to a manicured lawn. The near-monoculture of the web will have a much harder time withstanding legal assault by state actors than a distributed web would have.

Facebook is most likely a net negative in this world. I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s always been true, but I think it is now. I personally didn&#x27;t realize how strong my feelings were until one of their recruiters contacted me. I&#x27;m far from a &#x27;values&#x27; driven employee, but this was by far the easiest refusal of my career.

&gt;The diplomatic game that unfolded in Vietnam has become increasingly common for Facebook.<p>Yes, At least this should ring a bell to all those who still think they can write anything on FB about a Government and get away with it. Facebook while being pushed and portrayed as your personal diary is actually your digital repository only accessible for the most elite like Government.<p>While an average FB user can easily shame anyone around him (like how frustrated boy friends shame their ex girl friends), fellow average FBians can&#x27;t do much. This reiterates the capitalist world that we live in where Democracy is just a myth.

&gt;At a White House dinner in 2015, Mr. Zuckerberg had even asked the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, whether Mr. Xi might offer a Chinese name for his soon-to-be-born first child — usually a privilege reserved for older relatives, or sometimes a fortune teller. Mr. Xi declined, according to a person briefed on the matter.<p>Laughed out loud at this. I can understand wanting access to the market but this is just embarrassingly desperate.

It is with the greatest obviousness that strategic important sectors — such as defence — can&#x27;t trade with foreign countries without specific permission from the government. The tech sector is an sector of strategic importance and it can&#x27;t both serve the Chinese communist party and the US democracy. The Chinese understands this.

There is now a history of American tech companies operating in China. The lesson is pretty clear: play politics if you want, but know that if you do (i.e. Google), you are going to lose access to the market. Thus, it comes down to a business decision and it becomes increasingly hard to argue on principles if things look so binary.

If we&#x27;re going with the wild-west analogy, what&#x27;s happening now is the transition from a Territory to a State. It was wild and ungoverned, then corporations moved in and created some order, and now governments see order and are moving in to take over management.

What a difference 20 years makes...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;cyberspace-independence" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;cyberspace-independence</a>

I actually don&#x27;t mind a little censorship of illegal-ish stuff (or at least warning, that hey, this person is trying to metaphorically sell you something illegal !), but what really bugs me is the subtle (and not so subtle), targeted manipulation I sometimes feel I experience, where there might be like many different usernames all targeting you but somehow all controlled by the same person &#x2F; interest, and you just think it&#x27;s normal conversation... (Apparently Reddit is mostly bots?) I think we saw some (heck, a lot of this) in the 2016 election, and personally I try to keep myself to a human-usable number of usernames (I think I have like 5 to hackernews as I forget passwords, but tend to use at most one, or two obviously linked ones for an extended period of time, and then switch if I say something too stupid and want to get a clean start) I don&#x27;t think something like necessitating a real id is a good idea, since then everything you say is tied to you forever (hail satan), but I&#x27;m sure some kind of manipulation detection would be possible... would be an interesting project to work on actually.

I think its perfectly fair to scrutinize and regulate a company that has such an immensely pervasive presence in the every day life of so many citizens. Yes, that applies to google to. Why should I trust them to be responsible?

Facebook and &quot;new world&quot; just sounds scary.<p>I really do not want facebook&#x27;s new world.

The Great Myth of cyberspace was that individuals in it or the servers that ran the software were not subject to the laws of the nations they existed within.<p>The cold reality is that this is <i>not true</i>. And, thus, in time, to exist within a repressive regime requires importing the repression within the software. This is the bargain Facebook wants to make.

I think its more of the opposite. Technology creates spheres of influence in the countries that they operate. Traditional governments attempt to reign it in (this is usually effective if they are a company with ad revenue or they want to follow local laws. But when you cut down one sphere another grows to replace it.

the web is still as wild as you want, if you hate facebook then write a better facebook. That use to be how it worked, not sure what changed. Maybe people just aren&#x27;t as creative as they use to be.<p>When i was single and had free time public IPs were golden because then you could run a webserver and DNS and once you&#x27;ve registered a domain name you could get whatever you wanted out on the web.<p>I can get a public IP, server, and DNS for basically free now with a few clicks. If something sucks and you think it could be better than go do it and let the world be the judge. The web is more accesible now than ever.

Seems more like FB is reeling in official policy but ok...

Please people, try to avoid facebook and they agenda much as possible.

&gt; Facebook is racing to gain the advantage in Africa over rivals like Google and Chinese players including Tencent, in a 21st century version of the “Scramble for Africa.”<p>That is a really scary thing to have read. Perhaps the New York Times is out of line in using it, but if that metaphor is even 10% accurate that would be very bad.<p>To give some background, the “Scramble for Africa” is the only time I’ve ever read the words, where the writer had a serious argument, “was worse than the holocaust”. This was in reference to the mass deaths in the Congo under King Leopold of Belgium, as documented in the book “King Leopold’s Ghost”.<p>I know a ton of people have died in history and there have been so many wars, but the Scramble for Africa was really really really bad.<p>Yeah so I guess in conclusion, NY Times shouldn’t have used that phrase, Facebook sucks, and if they (Facebook) mess up almost everywhere please please just not let them mess up the African continent.