[manfredo]

Calling this blackmail seems hyperbolic. Australia is imposing a tax on serving links to Australians, so Facebook is no longer serving those links. If the US imposes a tariff on BMWs and BMW stops selling cars in the US is it blackmail? This is the same deal with Google News in Spain. Spain imposed a tax, so Google stopped doing business there (at least insofar as Google News is concerned).

This isn't blackmail any more than I'm blackmailing my local coffee shop when I go elsewhere when they jack up the prices. Increase the cost of doing business and people are less likely to want to do business. What is surprising or nefarious about this?

[hilbert42]

"Calling this blackmail seems hyperbolic."

It's interesting to note that none of the key points I made about these corporations' very dubious place in history penetrated. Therefore I'll have to assume their behavior is acceptable with you.

It seems you also missed the point that Australian users like everyone else were cajoled from an open web to a closed system. The fact is they had no choice whatsoever and that Facebook knows it. If it's not blackmail then perhaps extortion is a better word.

To say users were not cajoled when they had no other choice, I suggest you refer to my point in the nearby post about the fact that everyone's telephone, like it or not, went from an inviolable private service on a government utility to 'ownership' by Facebook and Google. If you say this never happened then I've nothing more to say to you.

[manfredo]

What is their dubious place in history? Google created the first effective programmatically curated search engine. Facebook created en extremely popular social network. These companies were founded when the internet was still relatively nascent, and norms over privacy were yet to be established and that led to subsequent controversy. But to compare these to the Dutch and British East India Companies is laughable. Those companies literally had standing armies and conducted colonial wars. Some even go as far as to say that they perpetrated genocide. The British East India company starved 2-10 million Bengalis. Facebook chat was used to coordinate the killing of 25,000 to 100,000 Rohyngi, by virtue of ineffectual moderation and lack of tooling and personnel to police Burmese language content. The notion that this has any level of equivalency of a company that actually had soldiers shooting people is absurd.

And users do indeed have a choice. I don't use Facebook, and I use duck duck go for search (and Bing for video search). These are not utilities. Alternatives exist, and the use of these services aren't even necessary in the first place.

I'm really not seeing justification for your characterization of the situation. A website is being charged for links to news articles. They don't want to pay for this content, so they aren't going to host this content.

[hilbert42]

The comparison with those trading companies was not initially done by me, it's been around the net for a while now.

The comparison is obvious but if you want it spelled out then that is the trading companies were the richest and most profitable companies in history and their money was made by nefarious means. The Big Tech companies are the closest thing that rivals them in 350+ years - the math alone tells you that.

The values of Big Tech companies are a matter of public record so are the values of those trading companies. The records show that Big Tech's exponential growth is the closest in this 350+ year period. You may not like your favorite company being equated with the these traders but the stats alone show that there are remarkable parallels between them.

If you cannot draw a comparison between them then I can't help you. Others before me have pointed out that there is a parallel between the obscene and outrageous profits of Big Tech companies and the various exploitation done by the trading companies. For starters, Big Tech pays stuff-all tax anywhere, second, and as has been pointed out often, their rise in profits outstrips any known method of legitimate trading over this 350+ timeframe.

Re privacy, clearly you are not old enough to remember the laws that governed the POTS phone system. They were essentially almost uniform worldwide, the law was phones were strictly private and severe penalties - with long jail terms for anyone who violated privacy.

Moreover, there were extremely strict rules about third parties listening in without the full permission of both parties - for instance, if I were talking to you and someone at either my place or yours secretly listened to our conversation on an extension without explicit permission from both of us then technically that was unlawful and a long jail sentence could be imposed.

What Google did was to penetrate the telephone networks of the world in multiple ways, the most obvious one was to embed its spyware, Android OS, directly into the phone itself - the fucking unmitigated hide of them to do that.

If you don't understand the true significance of that and what has actually happened then it's perhaps because you don't want to. Right, I know it hurts when one's told your favorite thing - whatever that may be - actually stinks.

You may never feel violated by what has happened but many millions actually do so. And, unfortunately, there are millions still unaware that Google is snooping on them and stealing their data. The fact that governments haven't advised them of the threat is simply atrocious.

Anyone with a modicum of respect should accept the fact that many, many people feel genuinely violated and uneasy by what's happened, They should also accept the fact that smartphones are ubiquitous and people feel trapped, as they cannot avoid them. In practice, they've precious little alternative, either because they can't get Google-free phones, or they're forced to use them because they have family members who use Google or Facebook apps (this is perhaps the most nasty and insidious thing Big Tech has done - forcing users to use Google apps against their will in this way is about as bad and ethically low as it can get. Many now feel annoyed and letdown by the fact that their governments have left them stranded. No wonder there's rage over Facebook, Google and the other Big Techs.

Hovever, the fact is that this is now changing, it's the start of a new beginning. We're on a roll to eventually straightjacket them whether they like it or not, tough regulation is starting afoot everywhere across the world and it's not before time.

The question many ask is what is the motive for supporting shonky exploitive mobs like Google and Facebook when there's overwhelming evidence of their wrongdoing.

Of course, seeing justification or otherwise for such action depends on which quadrant of the political compass one's in. And most very large US companies are inevatibly in the top right hand quadrant. People like me who believe in the need for a much fairer and more equitable world will have an almost diametrically opposite political philosophy.

BTW, there were excellent search engines around before Google's monopolistic practices put them out of business. I know, I lost my favorite one, Northern Lights search engine, that way.