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+<p>Recently we've begun to question the amount of power that large tech
+companies have over our lives through our data, especially as these
+companies begin to monopolize the market. Because of this, the solution
+that is provided by our legal system is to split these companies. The
+problem is, these companies are often multi-purposed and sell many
+extremely different products, and many of these products, even if the
+company were to split, would still hold a monopoly over the market. This
+is the case of the Skype video conferencing tool or the Google search
+engine. Even if you were to split a company such as Google based on its
+products, you would still have market monopolies. Even worse, how do you
+split something like Facebook which functions precisely because all your
+friends, family, and acquaintances use it? If you were to split
+Facebook, people would simply concentrate on the platform that had most
+of their contacts on it, which would recreate the initial problem.
+Simply splitting a company may have worked back when they just sold a
+specific non-social product or service, like repairs, retail, etc.
+However, with tech companies, especially those that rely on social
+networks, need a special kind of split that allows consumers to continue
+to interact with one another independently of which of the new companies
+they have their account with.</p>
+
+<p>Think about this: imagine that by contracting a given internet
+service provider (ISP) you could only communicate with people (or
+rather, computers) that were also connected to that ISP's network. That
+is the equivalent of what social networks like Facebook and Skype do.
+They make sure that if you want to communicate with someone in their
+network, you must use their product and have an account with them,
+therefore surrendering your personal data to that company. So how could
+we allow for users to communicate with one another from separate
+platforms? Well, there's already a technology that exists that shows us
+how this is done: e-mail. With e-mail, it doesn't matter what server
+hosts your mail, what client you use, what protocol you use to access
+the e-mail server itself. How can this be? Even though e-mail is so
+versatile and flexible, it uses a single protocol to send e-mails: SMTP.
+It doesn't matter what service you use, where you host your mail, it all
+uses SMTP to send e-mails. You could even host your own e-mail server if
+you wanted to avoid relying on someone else's services!</p>
+
+<p>So, how would this be applied to something like a social network such
+as Facebook? For this we have many examples, but the one I'm most
+familiar with is <a href="https://diasporafoundation.org/"
+target="_blank" >Diaspora*</a> (the asterisk is actually part of the
+name). When you setup an account on the Diaspora* network, you don't
+register your account on any central server like you would on Facebook,
+but instead you register your account on a <i>node</i>, like if you were
+to register an e-mail at GMail, Yahoo!, ProtonMail, or even your own
+server. Then, all your data is hosted on that node, and that node only,
+but it can be shared with the friends you have on other nodes; similar
+to how all your e-mails are only on the server you're registered on, but
+you can send and receive e-mails from any other server. All that's
+needed is for there to be a common protocol between the servers (which
+Diaspora* has).</p>
+
+<p>What about video conferencing tools, like Skype? Exact same
+principle, and there's even an example: <a href="https://tox.chat/"
+target="_blank" >Tox</a>. Tox isn't a program you install on your
+computer, it's a network that can be accessed by <a
+href="https://tox.chat/clients.html" target="_blank" >a variety of
+programs</a>. Don't like how one of them works? Use a different one!
+You'll still have access to all your friends because no matter the
+program you choose to use, it's all connecting to the same network.</p
+
+<p>Now you may be asking, "if this is such a wonderful idea, why haven't
+companies been doing this from the start?". Put quite simply, they have
+an incentive to lock users to their products, and their products alone.
+Competition is great for consumers, but bad for companies since it means
+they actually have to make an effort to provide a better
+product/service, rather than being the only viable option around. If
+there is no comparable product/service to the one provided by a single
+company, then there is nowhere else for the consumer to turn, and the
+company doesn't need to put any effort into swaying the consumer's
+opinion with good business practices. In this sense, tech companies have
+taken advantage of how social networks work (i.e. people will tend
+towards the network where they know the most people) and absorbed you
+into it.</p>
+
+<p>Now, is it likely that such a solution will be implemented? No. The
+most likely scenario is that these companies will not even be split, but
+instead pay a (relatively very small) fine, and then continue on their
+merry way abusing people's data. But there's still something you can do
+about this. If you are truly worried about how your data is being used
+by these massive companies, look into decentralized alternatives. I have
+mentioned a few on the <a
+href="https://themusicinnoise.net/decentralized.html"
+>Decentralized page</a> of my website, but you can find a much more
+complete list on <a href="https://prism-break.org/en/" target="_blank"
+>Prism-Break</a> (although not all are decentralized... but most are).
+Then, convince your friends and family to use these technologies and put
+the social network effect into practice. The more people you convince to
+use these technologies, the more will join, and the less power large
+corporations will have over your data.</p>