Fighting for net neutrality is like fighting the wind with your fists.
Mozilla does great work in raising awareness of these issues however until every Joe Bloggs and Susan Someone takes their own stand against companies, governments and other centralised organisations, then it's going to be a very hard battle.
How do we do that? Maybe start by not making it an issue that only geeks or tech savvy types are outraged about.
Working together is the only way to take back tech from the corporate overlords. We need to support Mozilla's efforts to liberate critical technologies like Voice to text via Mozilla DeepSpeech.
Building the Common Voice corpus is critical to generating highly accurate transcriptions, check it out at https://voice.mozilla.org
If we do nothing, there will be no large organization standing up to build foundational technology outside of corporate siloes.
I think a big problem in general with big corporates is that we are moving more in to the era where huge companies crush their competition just by having more data. The more data you have, the better user experience you can provide, killing competition, through which they start getting less and less data of their own, eventually dying out.
I guess in a way it's similar to having capital. If you don't have any money, it's hard to start a business. Similarly, if you have no data, maybe in the future it will be hard to start a business as well.
There's still a long way to go to reach that point, but I think we are seeing the start of it. For example, it's pretty hard to build an alternative to GMaps/Apple Maps. Even if you have a novel take on how mapping data could be used, you'd still first need the data to build the technology around it.
How do you fight that? Should it be fought? Or should we just accept it as a new requirement of building a business? In addition to starting with a good team (i.e. industry experts) and having money, you now need to immediately start building as wide of a dataset as you can.
> The more data you have, the better user experience you can provide, killing competition, through which they start getting less and less data of their own, eventually dying out.
The more data they have, the better-targeted advertising they can provide, because that data is more or less volunteered by their users even if conpanies don’t know to ask for it.
For most of the big companies, I’d say their UX is stuck in local maxima and can’t really become orders of magnitude better due to risk aversion — you’ll never collect the data that there’s a bigger maximum somewhere else that way. A smaller company willing to take risks can find those bigger maxima much more easily.
Thing is, for the particular example of Maps, data really is king, and both Apple and Google haven't figured out that whole data importation problem. Hence why Google Maps blows outside major cities (roads are missing, horribly out of date, etc) except for businesses, where Google Scouts (aka random android users) generate somewhat accurate data for Google.
Meanwhile, Apple has no scouts, a bad geocoder from OSM (compared to Google's), but notably better maps (on average) from all the footwork OSM does to import maps regularly from each of the thousanda of counties across the US.
Outside the US, countries like Germany literally use OSM as their offical map for plotting land ownership, utilities and numerous other functions.
Where Apple is dying is the lack of an Apple Scouts program and having massive teams in India essentially importing data from OSM, one other sketchy map vendor that is a decade out of date and user reports. The former should be automated, as Apple Maps India literally does not comply with the standards defined by Apple stateside, and there is no value being added in this process of manually importing map data.
> Working together is the only way to take back tech from the corporate overlords. We need to support Mozilla's efforts to liberate critical technologies like Voice to text via Mozilla DeepSpeech.
I don't think that fighting back with specific technologies and products (which all come and go) is a good solution. It needs to be encoded in law. If mozilla makes a thing that is 'free and open', and it becomes popular enough, what happens when a Google or Amazon decides to throw serious money at acquiring it (or even Mozilla) so that they can control it? Nothing would prevent that.
Can a non-profit organisation be acquired by a 'for-profit' organisation? I've no idea on laws in this area, but it seems unlikely. I can't see any of the big four trying it anyway. Even if it was legal it looks like a massive PR disaster.
Its the same core freedom issue, currently the highest quality speech to text services only exist in the hands of a few tech giants.
Just like with telecoms restricting and throttling access, these silos of technology are holding back progress in numerous fields, hurting the disabled and kneecaping upstart projects and businesses that may challege their dominance.
> Maybe start by not making it an issue that only geeks or tech savvy types are outraged about.
I also think that in order to unite the wide public for a cause, we should have a clear message about the dangers of no neutrality being explainable to a kid.
But I wonder what is the biggest danger we try to warn about?
Some people think its just about not having bandwidth to watch 4k videos. Some people think its about lack of privacy.
Others mostly disturbed by the possibility of losing our very access to information itself. That is, public knowledge being manipulated. What does that mean for society?
Mozilla does great work in raising awareness of these issues however until every Joe Bloggs and Susan Someone takes their own stand against companies, governments and other centralised organisations, then it's going to be a very hard battle.
How do we do that? Maybe start by not making it an issue that only geeks or tech savvy types are outraged about.