Above: photo from “Lost Cause” – photo credit: BillieEilish.com
Music Video Vignettes Combined into Prime Day Promotion
Amazon prime is a way for the company to combine and bundle features for a yearly subscription fee. Every year, in addition to the usual subsidized shipping, prime video and the rest, there is Prime Day, which is now upon us. This year that also includes “Prime Day Show” which is a “free” offering for Prime members, basically 30 minute music video vignettes by Billie Eilish, H.E.R. and Kid Cudi.
The long form multi song productions are enjoyable enough, however, it is also true that music videos are a form of free advertising for the artists and songs that they feature. So, in this case that makes this a kind of subsidized collaboration between the artists (presumably paid to have the Amazon moniker associated with their music) and the company.
None of this makes it less enjoyable, of course, but it is interesting how it is not live (nothing like the huge live concerts put on by AliBaba and Tao Bao for “Singles Day” in China, but rather a pre-recorded, fairly standard, traditional, music video style production).
As the shopping kicks off in Ernest later, at one minute after midnight on June 21st, this show could be a way to relax ahead of the shopping frenzy.
The first episode contains several songs by H.E.R., interspersed with short drama interludes and featuring celebrity cameos. All set at Los Angeles’ Dunbar Hotel, known in the 1930s and 1940s as the hub of the city’s Black culture, and the lavish production and assist from acting talent makes for a showcase of songs from her new album, “Back of My Mind”.
Next, in the second episode Kid Cudi goes with an outer Space theme and, similarly, has scenes linking the production extravaganzas built for each song. This is all appropriate since he is presenting songs from his album “Man on the Moon III”.
A second space connection comes from the participation in collaboration from the International Space Orchestra, who happen to be the world’s first orchestra entirely consisting of space scientists from the NASA Ames Research Center, the SETI Institute and the International Space University.
The closing act, of course, is Billie Eilish, and the city of Paris (or at least a studio set of it) is the conceptual backdrop used to elevate what are otherwise live performances for the purpose of creating a video, sans audiences. The first song is set in a romantic hotel room set and features the song “My Future” as well as “Lost Cause”, “Therefore I Am” and “My Power”. As a whole the set is very “jazzy” and has an intimate feel that appears to be a project rendition original version take.
All in all, while there is respectable and well produced performances and visual enhancements, at the same time there is a lack of any event style excitement or sense of a musical live performance (which is not the point, admittedly).
Perhaps the three episodes can best be seen as a kind of chestnut to show fans of the artists that “Prime” is giving back and that the bundling extends beyond free shipping, prime video, prime music, other perks and deals and into another area, event bases collaborations for the sake of commerce.
Not only are thousands of physical products on sale for Prime Day, starting tonight at midnight, but virtual deals, such as films and shows are getting big promotional discounts also. The streaming deals are already live, so if you are inclined to watch while it’s still weekend prime time, a large assortment is available.
Some examples of films currently deeply discounted to view:
Titles that are normally priced higher for rental viewing or purchase are set for a limited time to $.99, $1.99 or $2.99 depending on the title. Naturally the newer and “hotter” the choice the less likely that it is at $.99 cents, but on the other hand, we all have different taste and perhaps you can find a film or show that you have been wanting to see but did not want to pay a higher price to watch.
For some reason, documentary films such as “Chasing Madoff” or “Good Trouble“, the excellent documentary on John Lewis, which is part of a Juneteenth special promotion, tend to show up at the rock bottom price. So perhaps, taking advantage of the promotion as a way to educate and enlighten oneself might be more economical than jumping in to the top hits and most current feature films.
If you do shop around, hovering or clicking on the deals designated with a “$” in the upper left hand corner, you will find at least a few titles here and there at the low $.99 cent watch price. Much more common are $1.99, $2.99 and even $3.99, which is a discount but does not feel like a huge one.
Also, since newer popular titles are normally priced much higher, up to $5.99 and sometimes more, even the $2.99 special price represents a bargain opportunity.
An example of a recently released, high quality film is “The Courier” which is currently available to watch for $2.99 (normally $5.99)
Above:Promotional Photo for “The Courier” courtesy of Lionsgate
An invitation to save on streaming current hot films and shows, plus $.99 teaser rates for subscriptions
Not only are thousands of physical products on sale for Prime Day, starting tonight at midnight, but virtual deals, such as films and shows are getting big promotional discounts also. The streaming deals are already live, so if you are inclined to watch while it’s still weekend prime time, a large assortment is available.
Some examples of films currently deeply discounted to view:
Titles that are normally priced higher for rental viewing or purchase are set for a limited time to $.99, $1.99 or $2.99 depending on the title. Naturally the newer and “hotter” the choice the less likely that it is at $.99 cents, but on the other hand, we all have different taste and perhaps you can find a film or show that you have been wanting to see but did not want to pay a higher price to watch.
For some reason, documentary films such as “Chasing Madoff” or “Good Trouble“, the excellent documentary on John Lewis, which is part of a Juneteenth special promotion, tend to show up at the rock bottom price. So perhaps, taking advantage of the promotion as a way to educate and enlighten oneself might be more economical than jumping in to the top hits and most current feature films.
If you do shop around, hovering or clicking on the deals designated with a “$” in the upper left hand corner, you will find at least a few titles here and there at the low $.99 cent watch price. Much more common are $1.99, $2.99 and even $3.99, which is a discount but does not feel like a huge one.
Also, since newer popular titles are normally priced much higher, up to $5.99 and sometimes more, even the $2.99 special price represents a bargain opportunity.
An example of a recently released, high quality film is “The Courier” which is currently available to watch for $2.99 (normally $5.99)
The online giant bans products related to drugs, spying and weapons, but we found plenty for sale; one of the items bought on the site left a grim trail of overdoses
By: Annie Gilbertson and Jon Keegan
Eric Falkowski said he made an easy living working a few hours a week making counterfeit prescription opioids before some two-dozen people overdosed and the authorities caught up with him.
He mixed fentanyl with active ingredients from Xanax and Tylenol and pressed the compound into pills that looked like Percocet, he said, down to the exact color and markings.
Where did he get the equipment? According to federal court records and Falkowski himself: Amazon.com.
“I purchased two pill presses on there. I also purchased the pill press dies, which are the molds to shape the pills and imprint them with whatever number they need be,” Falkowski said in a phone interview from prison, where he is serving a 22-year sentence for crimes connected to his counterfeit drug business.
“You search under the code on the pill … and it’ll just come up,” he added. “It really wasn’t that complex.”
Two people died after taking Falkowski’s pills, and another woman was found dead from an overdose on the property where he kept his makeshift lab, according to officials, law enforcement documents, and autopsy reports. More than 20 others were sickened by the pills but survived.
“Someone could wipe out a whole town” with these “poisonous pills,” said Derrick Helton, a former sheriff’s deputy for Rutherford County, Tenn., where the mass overdose took place. One of the fatalities was his sister Tiffanie Scott, a 33-year-old mother of a young daughter.
Amazon bans pill presses used to make prescription drugs. They’re included among 38 pages of third-party seller rules and prohibitions for its U.S. marketplace.
Yet an investigation by The Markup found that Amazon fails to properly enforce that list, allowing third-party sellers to put up and sell banned items.
Alongside its third-party marketplace, Amazon sells products to consumers directly, and The Markup found it was also selling banned items itself, revealing cracks in the largely automated purchasing system that feeds its massive product catalog.
We found nearly 100 listings for products that the company bans under its categories of drugs, theft, spying, weapons and other dangerous items, a virtual back alley where mostly third-party sellers peddle prohibited goods, some of which are used for illicit and potentially criminal activities.
Amazon’s Choice?
The Markup filled a shopping cart with a bounty of banned items: marijuana bongs, “dab kits” used to inhale cannabis concentrates, “crackers” that can be used to get high on nitrous oxide, and compounds that reviews showed were used as injectable drugs.
We found two pill presses and a die used to shape tablets into a Transformers logo, which is among the characters that have been found imprinted on club drugs such as ecstasy. We found listings for prohibited tools for picking locks and jimmying open car doors. And we found AR-15 gun parts and accessories that Amazon specifically bans.
Almost three dozen listings for banned items were sold by third parties but available to ship from Amazon’s own warehouses. At least four were listed as “Amazon’s Choice.”
The phrase “ships from and sold by Amazon.com” appeared beneath the buy button of five of the banned items we found, which two former employees confirmed means those products are, in fact, sold by Amazon. In addition, one of the sellers we were able to reach also confirmed it sold the items to Amazon.
Many of the items we found had been up for sale for months, some with positive reviews showing they had been sold, including some of the items sold directly by Amazon.
And Amazon led us right to the prohibited listings. When we typed “bong” into the website’s search bar, autocomplete suggestions included “bongs for smoking weed.” When we typed “pill press,” autocomplete suggested “pill press for making pills xanax.”
In a written statement to The Markup, Amazon spokesperson Patrick Graham said the company has “proactive measures in place to prevent suspicious or prohibited products from being listed,” and that the company stopped more than six billion “suspected bad listings” from posting last year, repeating the company’s remarks to Congress earlier this year.
“If products that are against our policies are found on our site, we immediately remove the listing, take action on the bad actor, and further improve our systems,” he said.
Graham did not respond directly to many of our specific questions, including how many of the banned items that The Markup found had been sold, why the company had not noticed some of them for months, why some were listed as Amazon’s Choice, and why many were stored in Amazon’s warehouses for shipment.
He did not respond at all to questions about why Amazon itself had offered banned items for sale.
Most of the banned listings we reported to Amazon have been removed, although at least three have popped back up.
The company removed the six specific terms that we mentioned from autocomplete, according to Graham, who said that feature is informed by “similar searches by other customers.” He wouldn’t say whether the company also removed all other banned items from autocomplete.
Graham also declined to explain why the company chose to allow 13 listings for banned items that we reported to the company to remain for sale. These products were specifically named as banned in Amazon’s rules, met the U.S. Department of Justice’s definition of drug paraphernalia, or were confirmed by two weapons experts to be a gun part or tool. Two of them were items that Amazon sells itself.
In addition to the nearly 100 listings for banned items we found for sale in the U.S. marketplace, we found several pill presses for sale on Amazon’s Canadian marketplace that were available for shipment to the United States. Amazon took them down after we reported them to the company, including a $4,100 TDP 5 Desktop Tablet Press, one of the models Falkowski used.
“Almost dead”
Michael “Shane” Shipley, 39, a native of Rutherford County, Tenn., was one of the people who died after taking Falkowski’s fake pills. He’d worked his entire adult life operating machinery at a local factory.
“I couldn’t even tell you what my dad’s death has done to my family,” his daughter Brittany Conway said in an interview.
Within a day of her father’s death, Conway said, she woke up in a hospital bed herself. She didn’t realize her father had slipped the counterfeit pills into his prescription bottle of Percocet at home and, distraught with grief, she had taken what she thought was a safe medication to help her relax.
“I went from up, talking—to almost dead,” Conway said.
Graham said Amazon’s policies allowed pill press sales when Falkowski was making counterfeit drugs in 2016. He declined comment on the overdoses and said, speaking in general, that the company is not responsible for harm from third-party product sales.
“We are not liable for those products because we do not make, distribute, or sell those products,” he said. He said that also applies to third-party products that are fulfilled by Amazon, which charges sellers to store and ship their items.
The company has successfully shielded itself from legal liability for harm caused by third-party products sold on its website by invoking Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which states websites are not responsible for third-party content that appears on their sites.
Last year, one federal appeals court ruled that Amazon may shoulder liability for a customer’s injuries from a defective product sold on its site, in part because the company “enables third-party vendors to conceal themselves from the customer, leaving customers injured by defective products with no direct recourse to the third-party vendor.”
Three million third parties from across the globe are now selling on Amazon’s platforms, according to e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse. And third-party sellers have fueled the company’s explosive growth for years, according to a 2019 report to shareholders. Last year, Amazon third-party sales reportedly topped $200 billion—a sum that rivals the annual GDP of New Zealand.
Will It “Kill Someone?”
Multiple current and former employees, most of whom asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, said the company struggles to oversee that army of independent sellers.
“Because sellers have the ability to upload items themselves to the website, it makes it very difficult to police all of that without hindering the ability to do business,” said a former member of the product safety team who left the company in 2018. “Amazon knows there’s tons and tons and tons of stuff that shouldn’t be on the website.
“We basically would categorize risks based on their severity,” the former employee added. “Will this product injure or kill someone? Is it high legal risk?”
An Amazon executive acknowledged in the statement to Congress earlier this year that “bad listings” get through but said the company is working to shore up the slippage of “counterfeits, unsafe products, and other types of abuse” by requiring sellers of certain items to be preapproved, partnering with brands to pull counterfeits, and enhancing “proactive” tools to spot problems.
Yet Amazon’s sellers’ tools sometimes help, rather than hinder, the listing of banned items, The Markup found.
When we opened a new seller account and started listing a bong for sale, Amazon suggested we list it as a vase in home decor. We never posted it.
Last month, we successfully listed two banned items for sale: an AR-15 10-round magazine and an AR-15 armorer’s wrench. We removed them within minutes of confirming they had posted. We were able to evade detection by Amazon’s automated filters by purchasing a universal product code for the magazine and by both avoiding specific keywords and miscategorizing the items.
The listings went up even though we had no seller history and had already twice been prohibited from listing the same items using more precise descriptions.
Graham declined to comment on why we were able to post these items but said Amazon’s sellers’ tools “suggest listing categories to help sellers easily categorize their products, but sellers are responsible for choosing the correct category, as they know their products best.” He also declined to comment on why the tools suggested an incorrect product category for listing bongs.
Other media have exposed Amazon’s lax product controls, including three reports just last year: a CNN investigation that documented dangerous child car seats, a CNBC report that revealed Amazon was shipping expired food and baby formula, and a Wall Street Journal investigation that found thousands of unsafe, banned, and deceptively labeled products on the site.
Graham said Amazon investigated these “with urgency” and sought to improve systems when needed but gave no specifics.
Consumer advocates say the company isn’t doing enough to protect the public, and regulators need to step in.
“It’s clear there’s not a major prioritization or investment in resources in policing the terms of service or ensuring that prohibited products are not sold,” said Lori Wallach, a director at the nonprofit organization Public Citizen. “It may be more profitable to have the ‘wild, wild west’ of sales, but it’s also much more dangerous for consumers.”
“We categorically disagree with this claim,” Graham replied.
Automating Enforcement
When Rachel Johnson Greer joined Amazon in 2010 as a product safety program manager, she said she found many problematic products for sale, from unapproved treatments of erectile dysfunction to illegal police radar jammers.
“They were up for sale and selling happily away on Amazon,” Greer said.
She said some troubling products were sold directly by Amazon itself, which she and others said relies on a mostly automated purchasing process.
“Ships and sold by Amazon is Amazon. This is how it all started,” said Greer, who worked for the company until 2017. “They built algorithms to figure out which books they needed to buy and then how much.”
It was Greer’s job to put an end to sketchy sales, she said. Her team wrote programs to flag undesirable products and amassed a universe of terms to feed an automated policing system. She said the tool eventually could scan billions of line items in the catalog in about five minutes.
But it proved flawed, she said. The system by its nature was confined to known threats—things it had seen before. Greer said new problems emerged all the time and slipped right through initial safeguards, only to be flagged by customers after something went wrong.
“The biggest problem with Amazon’s system to begin with is that nearly everything is reactive,” she said. “The reality is when you have a system that relies on finding defects per million, that means that there will always be defects.”
She said some third-party sellers devised “clever, tricky ways to list products. And these rules couldn’t catch it because they hadn’t been written by a human who was thinking in clever, tricky ways.”
One current employee of the restricted products team wearily put it like this: “No matter how much we remove, there’s always more.”
Graham did not directly respond to these descriptions of the company’s difficulties in keeping restricted items off the site. Instead, he said more generally that Amazon strives “to make sure that all products in our store are safe” and “we continuously monitor the products sold in our stores.”
Yet we found an unproven treatment to fight cancer with electromagnetic frequencies that is banned by Amazon’s policies—a rife machine—had been on the site for five years. The listing was removed after we contacted Amazon.
While most of the specific banned listings we brought to Amazon’s attention were removed, similar items that we did not report to the company remained live, including some listings by the same third-party sellers.
Many of the sellers of the banned items that we found continued to sell banned products, including Lead and Steel, which sold gun accessories, and another company, which sold a compound that reviewers said they used as injectable drugs. When we asked Amazon about this in follow-up questions, those storefronts disappeared from Amazon.com.
Graham denied that injectable drugs were sold on its platform, saying they were not sold for that purpose but rather marketed for “research” in the listing. Of the two compounds we found, the World Anti-Doping Agency designates one, TB-500, as a “prohibited substance,” and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency warned athletes about the risks of the second one, BPC-157, as not approved for human use. Customer reviews on the listing showed people were injecting the product.
Graham said the company removed the listings and would add them to its banned product list “out of an abundance of caution.” But as of publication, both compounds could be found for sale by other sellers on Amazon.com.
Amazon isn’t the only online retailer that has had to grapple with policing the unruly world of third-party e-commerce, where just about anybody can sell just about anything. Falkowski said he bought some of his drug-making supplies on another site.
Some marketplaces are known for thoroughly reviewing products before they go up.
Apple, which offers mobile apps from third-parties, checks the code before any app or update appears in the App Store, for instance. According to its site, Apple uses a combination of automated systems and hundreds of human experts speaking a total of 81 languages to review them before posting.
“We take responsibility for ensuring that apps are held to a high standard for privacy, security, and content,” Apple’s website states, “because nothing is more important than maintaining the trust of our users.”
Amazon’s users appear to know exactly what they’re buying, even when banned products are lightly disguised.
Lead and Steel listed a gunsmithing tool for an AR-15 as a “paperweight desk organizer,” posting a photo of the vise block holding paper clips and erasers.
Customers joined in on the ruse in reviews. “Helps when you need to do a hands free clean up of your desktop,” wrote one. “Locks items solidly into place, will Load plenty of paper clips or tacks.”
Another customer retorted, “Sorry. I’m not playing along. I can buy AR-15 parts all day on Amazon.”
To go along with the vise block, Amazon’s “frequently bought together” tool suggested other gunsmithing tools, showing at least one of Amazon’s automated systems received signals that it was not an office product.
Graham, the Amazon spokesperson, declined to explain why the items were still for sale, even though the “frequently bought together” tool seemed to recognize they were related to firearms.
Lead and Steel, which declined to be interviewed for this story, had sold at least four dozen vise blocks from that posting since it went up in December, according to reviews, until we reported it to Amazon, which pulled the listing.
On the Hunt for Honey Oil Equipment
Vic Massenkoff, a retired fire investigator from Contra Costa County, Calif. said he tried years ago to get Amazon to take down dangerous equipment—but said he was frustrated by what he sees as the company’s inaction.
He said he’d seen too many fires caused by the process of extracting highly potent hash oil, or “honey oil,” from marijuana using butane and in 2013 decided to investigate where the equipment could be found for sale. He said he found it on Amazon.com.
“There it was lined up, everything from the extraction tubes, to the grams digital scales, to the silicone pads, the silicone containers, to the digital thermometers,” Massenkoff said. “Everything you would need to set up shop.”
When he clicked on a listing for the glass tubes, Amazon’s recommendation engine suggested he buy the other items needed to make and use hash oil. He kept screenshots of the suggestions.
“There is no safe way to make butane honey oil,” he said in an interview.
He said he emailed Amazon from his work email to alert the company to the danger. He still remembers the reply: “Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We have assigned it to someone on our staff to research this.”
He said he got one other email from Amazon and then heard nothing.
Graham, the Amazon spokesperson, declined to say how the company handled Massenkoff’s complaint, for which he said The Markup had provided no “evidence.”
Amazon’s current rules ban the sale of equipment to make hash oil; we were able to find it on the site.
There’s a joke somewhere in here but it’s hard to see it through the tears
Woody Allen’s onscreen counterpart, Alvy Singer, complaining about Hollywood Award Shows in “Annie Hall” remarked that a category of award for “Greatest Fascist Dictator” would not surprise him, and that Adolf Hitler would probably win.
Amazon, viewed from some neutral future date or by aliens from another planet would surely win the award for “Greatest Company to Amass Wealth & Power by Intentionally Losing Money” award. Or maybe just “World’s Biggest Ponzi Scheme”.
For now the fawning books and articles on the greatness of “Bezos’ Behmouth” continue to pile up.
An exception to the fawning fan fiction is “Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power” by David Dayen. The author also commented cogently on the current situation with Amazon and MGM. His thoughts shed much needed light on the simple and yet sadly overlooked truth about Amazon: its core mission is to monopolize not just online sales but all transactions that take place in the economy where a “cut” of those transactions can be extracted.
What’s with all these awards? They’re always giving out awards. Best Fascist Dictator: Adolf Hitler. — Alvy Singer
This viewpoint, it would seem, can be traced back to a rare case where Jeff Bezos let his guard down and accidentally explained a core concept of the Amazon business model.
He said, simply: “Your margin is my opportunity”.
With this seemingly innocuous and widely misinterpreted phrase he unleashed the dogs of hell on the world of commerce. The MGM deal, according to Dayen, who is also editor of The American Prospect, is yet another attempt to gut an industry with techniques designed to use predatory pricing strategies to crush all rivals.
The sub-head from his article states: “The company wants to control pricing on everything, and funnel as many transactions to itself as possible.”
Meanwhile, somehow, this statement is finally being generally understood in its real context.
Yet what is astounding is that this is not a supposition or an accusation, but rather is a stated fact, and how this company has behaved and operated for decades.
Putting 2+2 together, the common interpretation that there is an “innocent” pro-customer meaning possible, is finally being seen for the absurdity that it is.
Simple, Effective and Disgusting: Selling below cost or at a loss to harm competition
We’ve seen how that goes. In this case, since Amazon does not make any data available on the profitability of various business segments, using nearly $9 billion to enhance its “free with Prime” business creates yet another loss-leader opportunity to destroy the margins of all other streaming platforms, who, like other businesses actually have to make a profit or at least break even, unlike Amazon due to its cross-subsidization of products and services.
Amazon wants to control all economic activity in the United States and the world. It wants a cut of every transaction. — D. Dayen
Amazon as “cross-subsidized content devourer” is how Dayen described the inevitable outcome of the deal in his article.
He also succinctly argues that by using its virtually unlimited power and resources to devour an ever larger share of the market, ultimately the result will be to drive up costs for competitors (for I.P., production and star power) and achieve the goal of squeezing the already slim margins for those poor schmucks (or rich schmucks like Disney, HBO, Netflix, etc.) that don’t have an unlimited budget for intentional losses.
The playbook is so obvious and familiar that it’s almost laughable. That is, if not for the death and destruction that always follow in the next chapters of this plot schema.
They pick on an established industry where no one will have sympathy for the rich victims – did anyone feel sorry for Borders or other large book retailers? Does anyone cry over the loss of Diapers.com or Quidisi? When Birkenstock complains does anyone listen?
How can gutting the streaming industry or unassailable giants like Disney and HBO be bad? Isn’t it just capitalism at its finest? Should we start preparing the award now for “Greatest Consolidator of Content in History”?
But what about the “loss leader” system? What about the ultimate outcome of less competition and higher prices overall, an obvious harm to consumers, regardless of how stupid and convoluted the route is to get there?
By moving the market in a way that will make streaming a terrible business for any company that has to compete with this, “oughta be illegal” script, margins will, if the gambit succeeds, face a similar fate to the one that anyone who used to be in the retail book industry, or any of the other entire industries that Amazon has received kudos for destroying, knows all too well.
Dayen also makes the point that, once this thinly veiled ploy is seen for what it is, the harm, not only to Amazon’s competitors but to the general public, should be obvious and impossible to ignore.
Citing the similarities with the recently brought antitrust action by the Washington, DC attorney general, it is exactly this kind of pernicious practice, that Amazon has not only gotten away with for decades, but Bezos has been lionized for “inventing”.
That lawsuit, which deals with an Amazon clause in 3rd party marketplace terms and conditions (since altered to disguise its true intent) that 3rd party sellers must sell anywhere outside Amazon’s marketplace at the same or higher price that they have listed on Amazon, is a sign of a gradual shift toward seeing the real meaning of Amazon’s behavior.
Since there are massive, exorbitant fees added to every transaction for all 3rd party sellers, the only way for them to make any profit at all is to tack on the cost of those fees, meaning artificially higher prices.
Amazon has ways to retaliate through “dark patterns” of its own special stripe, by manipulating buyers behaviors on its web site, making sure that sellers that don’t toe the line will get, essentially, zero sales.
For Amazon this kind of bullying and blackmail is a “win-win-win”. They see and have tattooed into their DNA all pain, suffering and loss for anyone other than the company (AMZN) as a gain for them.
3rd party sellers caught in hell trying to survive while paying fees up to 43% or more without recourse to try and recoup by selling anywhere else at lower prices?
Amazon congratulates themselves. Sellers undercutting each other, in spite of those fees in an effort to behave like a “mini-Amazon” and getting into a race to the bottom death match with each other? Yippee! Great for Amazon, when they are dead, there are always new victims waiting in line to enter the cage.
How about sellers that obtain goods illegally, counterfeit, illegal imports, stolen products, remainders and aftermarket overstock? They are GREAT for Amazon because they put even more pressure on the individual, honest sellers to immolate themselves trying to survive (and eventually die via pricing suicide) while Amazon can claim to be offering lower prices!
Oh, and when they “do their best” to stop all those illegal sellers, albeit at a snails pace, they are bailed out by section 230 and can point to their “partners in crime”, the counterfeiters, the knockoffs from China, the illegal imports and the stolen and aftermarket goods and say: “We tried our best, these are just a few bad apples” laughing all the way through every board meeting.
“Your margin is my opportunity”, indeed.
Above: Photo Collage by Lynxotic
There are no mitigating factors here. There is no “good guy” or customer obsessed hero. Just evil and the dead or dying. Wake the fuck up, America.
The praise and adulation continues, even as the $400 million yacht is being prepared for its maiden voyage
It’s as if Bezos is given award after award for the “genius” of selling 1$ bills for .75 cents. Championed for using a strategy that masquerades short term margin destruction as “customer obsession”, pretending that the dumping levels of pricing won’t in the long run flip into price gouging and the destruction of competition.
Somehow the massive detriment to consumers and the society at large is overlooked amid all the parties celebrating the “genius”.
But have the chickens finally come home to roost? Is anyone seeing a pattern of systematic use of the same tactics over and over, applied to each and every sector that Amazon chooses to “disrupt”? They didn’t get the nickname “grim reaper” for nothing. The problem is that it was meant as a compliment.
It is a sea change in the antitrust orientation, a sea change that is desperately needed, and with Lina Kahn and Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu, it might be just over the horizon. Could even have a chance to come about.
That change, so long overdue, could finally begin the process of dismantling the damage wrought and and still to come, if there is no interdiction.
The worm will eventually turn. When? After decades of obvious abuse and criminal behavior, completely and willfully ignored (too complicated to see).
Will there eventually be so many victims that they will outnumber the duped and the sycophants? Stay tuned.
This is a world where four major banks control most of our money, four airlines shuttle most of us around the country, and four major cell phone providers connect most of our communications. If you are sick you can go to one of three main pharmacies to fill your prescription, and if you end up in a hospital almost every accessory to heal you comes from one of a handful of large medical suppliers.
Over the last forty years our choices have narrowed, our opportunities have shrunk, and our lives have become governed by a handful of very large and very powerful corporations.
Today, practically everything we buy, everywhere we shop, and every service we secure comes from a heavily concentrated market.
Dayen, the editor of the American Prospect and author of the acclaimed Chain of Title, provides a riveting account of what it means to live in this new age of monopoly and how we might resist this corporate hegemony.
Through vignettes and vivid case studies Dayen shows how these monopolies have transformed us, inverted us, and truly changed our lives, at the same time providing readers with the raw material to make monopoly a consequential issue in American life and revive a long-dormant antitrust movement.
Possible Pro Display XDR-like Screen Real estate up to 32”
Well known and previously credible Apple leak-meister l0vetodream added credence to the wildly rumored concept that a high-end newly designed iMac will feature a “really big” screen, larger than the current max for iMac of 27 inches (5k).
With the iMac Pro already out of production and only the “standard” 21.5 inch and 27 inch models remaining an update, definitely this year, is an obvious prediction.
However, since the iMac Pro itself never had an option for a larger higher resolution screen, and in the mean time the $5 to $6 thousand 32 inch 6k Pro Display XDR setting the standard for ultra large high quality screen design it is also not unlikely that some of the technology of that product could trickle down into a high end iMac without adding the cost of such a colossus.
Above: 6k Pro Display XDR Credit: Apple
Further, there’s a slightly less credible but interesting rumor out regarding a new iPhone design based on the “cheese grater” style of the new Mac Pro and Pro Display. Though a bit mind-blowing to imagine, a matching set of gear with cheese grater styling for my iPhone 13 Pro, and a new high end iMac is a bizarre pleasant (but perhaps a bit macho) daydream.
It’s not likely that this new machine would surface as soon as WWDC 2021 but, it is not entirely off the table either (nothing is out of the question with Apple’s secrecy history)
Since the iMac outward design has not had a total makeover since 2012 (!) the possibility (probability?) of a new, higher end, iMac with new styling (perhaps with bezels and edge styling like the iPad pro of late), faster, upgraded performance (M2?) and a bigger and better screen than the current 27 inch model would be just fine, thank you.
Founder and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos has announced he will step down and become executive chairman. Andy Jassy, the current cloud computing chief, will become the next CEO stated for the third quarter.
Based on a memo posted for Amazon employees, Bezos noted: “As Exec Chair I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives but also have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions.”
–0 to $1.5t (nobody in history); –Turned biggest cost centers into profit centers (nobody in history); –Established recurring revenue relationship w/82% of US households (nobody in history); and –Hired 500k+ people in 12 months (nobody in history)#Bezos
Though his Exec Chair position may mean that very little changes going forward, based on the challenging prospects for the huge and much criticized firm it may indeed signal the end of an era.
Bezos knocked from #1 slot that he has held since 2017
According to Bloomberg, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX just passed up Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest person. While this, in and of itself is a fact that many will likely fetishize, the real story here is why and how.
There could not, IMHO, be two people more diametrically opposed in terms of motivation, inspiration and method. Both obscenely rich now? Of course. In each case because of stock holdings in companies they founded? Right again.
After that it is all a study in contrasts and contradictions. For example, as recently as Christmas eve 20o8 Elon Musk was nearly bankrupt and was on the verge of losing both SpaceX and Tesla. Later as recently as 2019, Tesla was in a deep financial hole.
Was this a case of bad management? Apparently not. What it was related to was the prime difference between Bezos and Musk. Musk has always only had one mission. Was it having the world’s most dominant eCommerce company? (or any other kind). One that would destroy entire business categories and be called the “grim reaper” due to it’s destruction of markets and competitors?
No – Musk has always wanted to save the world from itself. Tesla’s stated official mission is:
Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. … Teslabelieves the faster the world stops relying on fossil fuels and moves towards a zero-emission future, the better.
Tesla / Elon Musk
Perhaps the cynical would say this is just some kind of veil hiding a capitalist and monopolist hunger a la Bezos. But they’d be wrong. Musk has openly stated that he is willing to share various proprietary technical information with his competitors if it would help the world’s transition to sustainable energy succeed faster. Would Bezos give away Amazon’s secrets. Take a guess.
Another interesting tidbit – Both SpaceX and Tesla have publicly disavowed all copyright claims to their photos, videos or other marketing assets. They also do zero paid advertising. This is brilliant and has made them money in the end, but more importantly it is additional proof that it is the success of the mission, a mission that ultimately benefits all humanity more than any singe individual, that is paramount in his thinking.
Though Musk may not realize it, he and Steve Jobs are kindred spirits
The only other highly successful tech visionary that had this kind of focus on the real success, which can by definition only ever be success for all, if Steve Jobs. With so much misinformation and focus on meaningless stats, like whose stock is worth the most paper dollars (printed at will by the Fed) at any given moment, it is often misunderstood that the mission and the sincerity and effectiveness of the mission that will always matter in the end.
Probably the greatest gift Bezos ever has or ever will give to humanity was via his divorce. Any other “charitable” act he will ever commit will be, first and foremost, have the goal of improving his image and stroking his massive ego.
Therein lies the difference.
Early Thursday Tesla shares (TSLA) rose by 6%, and further lifting the CEO’s stock holdings and options by $10 billion, resulting in the net worth of approximately $191 billion.
Musk edged past the Amazon founder who is currently has the net worth of around $187 billion.
Musk, who pinned the following past tweet from 2018 explained his intentions and how he will use money from his success, “You should ask why I would want money. The reason is not what you think. Very little time for recreation. Don’t have vacation homes or yachts or anything like that.”
About half my money is intended to help problems on Earth & half to help establish a self-sustaining city on Mars to ensure continuation of life (of all species) in case Earth gets hit by a meteor like the dinosaurs or WW3 happens & we destroy ourselves
It has been well over 30 years since the original 1988 classic “Coming to America” first hit the big screen. In the anticipated sequel, we’ll see some of the same actors reprise their role, especially stars Eddie Murphy as Akeem, Arsenio Hall as Semmi and James Earl Jones as King Jaffe.
Fans of the original will be happy to see familiar faces for the 80’s movie, as well as see some newcomers for the sequel, including: Wesley Snipes, Tracy Morgan, Leslie Jones, and Teyana Taylor.
At the wish of his dying father, King Jaffe, Prince Akeem of Zamunda who will soon take over the thrown needs a male heir. However new information arises about the prince’s past that he already has a son back in the United States, so as the trailer teases:
“Prepare the royal jet. We are going back to America.”
“Oh hell no, your majesty!”.
-Eddie Murphy as Akeem, Arsenio Hall as Semmi
“Coming 2 America ” was written by creator of “Black-ish” Kenya Barris. This film was originally slated to be released late 2020, but has now been scheduled for release on March 5, 2021 on Amazon Prime Video.
The battle is getting very public and will get louder and nastier
The full page newspaper ads taken out by Facebook, where they proclaim themselves the champion of small business and attack Apple directly are interesting and curious on many levels.
It will take a series of articles to attempt to untangle the confusions and endless, often intentionally fostered, misconceptions that will most certainly arise in this battle of titans.
At the heart of the matter is, however, the largest misconception humanly possible, the idea that these monstrously huge companies, and how they operate, are anything at all related to “normal”.
The fact that all of us have seen the role of the internet in general increase over the last 20+ years, and have therefore had to deal with, and in some cases, go through and cooperate with these behemoths, may be the status quo that has developed, particularly in the last decade, but it is without precedent on many levels.
The size, power and influence is beyond comprehension and this clouds every issue
Before even beginning to contrast one giant against another one must first confront the very existence of entities of this magnitude. It’s fair to say that never in history has such a tiny group of companies, and by extension, individual humans, controlled so much of the economy and so much of that impacts the society and our experiences.
This chart is not current. If it were the disparity would be far larger and even more astounding:
This information, for a human, is so out of whack that you would have to stare at this chart for days before it could even sink in. And, as it it only a chart of size, built on company market capitalization, the power and influence, which represents and ever larger disparity, is not represented.
The dominance overall is so extreme as to be humanly incomprehensible. And by all measures the disparity between the big tech firms and “everybody else” grows literally by the second.
If you are afraid of A.I., you’re too late, the world is already controlled by computers and software via these companies
Facebook is probably the best example to illustrate the problem of market power and dominance on a level that is so far beyond traditional methods of measurement that even government antitrust investigations are barely able to begin to access the potential violations.
“The questions below might seem odd, or even absurd. But what is really absurd is that they are, for the most part, never asked. “
The questions below might seem odd, or even absurd. But what is really absurd is that they are, for the most part, never asked. Since the iPhone and later Samsung / Android revolutionized information and photo sharing, it has been accepted as a simple reality that Facebook controls nearly all the “social networking” that is done with that data. Why?
What is Facebook? Most would say they are a “social media company” but that can mean anything you want it to mean. They claim they are in the business of “connecting people” yet they derive massive wealth and profit from advertising, and “monetizing” their network, the largest network of “social users”, by far.
And if they are interested in connecting people, then what do those people own of the network that they themselves comprise? That would be nothing.
What say do they have in how they are used to “monetize” the network that they literally “are”? None.
What trust do they have to surrender to the company, which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and more (all controlled 100% by a guy named Zuckerberg)? 100%
“What ‘say’ do they have in how they are used to “monetize” the network that they literally ‘are’? None.”
— D.L.
Who authorized Facebook (or Google) to amass vast databanks of private personal information from a huge chunk of the world’s population, and use that data to amass fortunes of unheard of size using secret proprietary algorithms that they have zero requirement to disclose? Well, technically, users, inadvertently and without understanding, did. Otherwise: No-one.
Well, technically all of this was “allowed” via Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, and states that an “interactive computer service” can’t be treated as the publisher or speaker of third-party content. This, effectively, protects websites and “platforms” such as Facebook, from lawsuits in the case that a “user” posts something illegal. There are exceptions, for example, for copyright violations, sex work-related material, and violations of federal criminal law.
This fact does not remove responsibility for building a system that gives massive financial benefit to Facebook, Google, etc and very little, in reality, by way of return or influence to the “user”.
It’s as if a man figured out a way to use mental-telepathy to rob banks and could never be caught or prosecuted due to the fact that no one had ever robbed a bank that way before. And then he claimed that he should be allowed to continue doing it forever, with impunity.
What would Facebook and Zuckerberg have if the billions of “users” stopped using its network? Nothing.
How little sense this makes just goes on and on. There could be 100s of pages of similar questions and answers and the end result would be a slightly better understanding of the absurdity of the very existence of such a “service” or company or whatever this is.
Why absurd? In a nutshell, Facebook controls private networks that exist “inside” a more public network called, for lack of a better term, “the internet”. And, because of what could be termed a mistake of history they represent a dominant, near monopoly, in the “space” which in this case is currently called “social networks”.
The dominance and the definition of monopoly can be argued endlessly (and likely will be in the coming antitrust cases) but, in the end, the numbers don’t lie. Only one person benefits, in direct payments of trillions of dollars, from a near monopoly in social networks. The billions of people, the very people who are the network, do not.
A bleak analysis, perhaps, but is there any light at the end of this tunnel?
The current increase in antitrust cases, both in the US and Europe, is a canary-in the-coal-mine moment and the wars over all the arising issues has begun and will go on for years.
The fact that Facebook is heavily advertising that they are the “good guy” while Amazon and Google do the same, is both ridiculous and sad, since “good guys” don’t have to buy ads to draw attention to that fact.
And the fact that these companies have already started, both in word and deed, to attack each other directly, is an indication of just how serious and all pervasive these mega-wars will be. This is just the beginning.
While none of the companies depicted on the chart above can be said to be without blame for the world of injustice and malfunction that is the internet, and by extension, our world, there is one company that stands apart from the others in so many ways and for so many reasons that they, amazingly, represent some hope within the madness.
And, not coincidently, they are the one that is already being attacked, in print and software, as the wars begin: Apple.
How Apple actually represents hope to clean up the tech universe that, arguably, they are most responsible for having created, is likely a hard sell with those that want to lump all these huge companies together. Because, after all, they are all huge.
However, nothing could be further from the truth. More on this and other burning questions in our next episode, so stay tuned.
The opinions expressed “pro” or “con” regarding big tech abuses of power are both overlooking far more serious issues that lie beneath
After years of public and insider opinion gradually shifting from a state of wonder, awe and hero worship of tech giants and their founders and CEOs, toward a more skeptical stance, and now, finally, government action begins; the fundamental issues that lie beneath are still barely mentioned, let alone widely understood.
In a filing at the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C., on December 9th, 2020, the Federal Trade Commission, together with 46 states, plus the District of Columbia and Guam, alleged that Facebook employed anticompetitive tactics, allowing it to bully and bury its rivals. In a strongly worded brief it recommends that the massive company be broken up, specifically by divesting itself of Instagram and WhatsApp.
While past antitrust cases were complex and difficult to understand fully, particularly for the general public, from the little known A & P case in the 30s and 40s to Standard Oil and Ma Bell / AT&T, in each case there were complex issues to address.
However, one simple thing tied them together that could be understood by virtually anyone: businesses that have a win-at-all-costs approach to business tactics and then achieve monopoly power almost always use that power to fulfill ambitions based on self-perpetuating greed at the expense of society as a whole.
Many, from all walks of life, particularly in the U.S., worship the ethos of “winner take all” and even if they are at the lowest levels of the economic ladder still cheer on the most ruthless and morally bankrupt “winners” as heroes, using a bizarre logic, that somehow they might one day see themselves in the winners circle.
This perspective is similar to societies where dictators, such as Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, or emperors are worshiped fervently by the very people that are most exploited and downtrodden under their regimes. Perhaps this is a hardwired genetic human trait, impossible to alter.
In the case of tech giants of the internet era, beginning with Microsoft and its antitrust case, a similar dynamic is no less present, and, no different from the steps that dictators take to encourage obedience and worship from their subjects. In this case it’s massive amounts of money and power used for required self-serving PR and the brutal economic repression of any dissenting voices.
Try to find a book on Amazon’s Jeff Bezos that is not a hero-worship nonsense-title purporting to offer you a way to become a “business genius” like him. You will find a few exceptions, of course, these purporting to offer “hard-hitting” investigative journalism and a sober look at the “real facts”.
These will be watered down, meekly subservient, weak and impotent tombs barely scratching the surface of any negative perspectives on the real problems Amazon and its founder have created, not only for millions of people around the world but for society as a whole.
Even among those that are the most incisive and have a real desire to “dig-deep” and reach the roots of the real problems, there is often still the a priori assumption that somehow, the 26 year evolution of business models that could “succeed” in internet and software based business are to be measured on a scale that presumes that the business models themselves are basically valid, simply because they were able to survive and create massive, nearly immeasurable, wealth for a tiny handful of individuals. .
Taking into account the pervasive pro-big-business bias, it is a miracle in a sense, that the public opinion has shifted so far, to the point where antitrust actions can be seen as valid, by enough of the public at large, that these giant monopolistic tech companies are called into question at all.
The miracle, if we call it that, is only a reflection of just how purely evil and out of control the situation has become, and how many people have been harmed, and in how many different ways this harm has occurred.
From teen suicides to thousands of bankrupt and struggling small businesses to privacy rights trampled in the dirt, the list of abuses and harm, if it were ever brought to light, could fill a thousand page treatise and would read like a recounting of the atrocities of war.
And then there’s the fact that the war is fought with computer code and over territory that has no physical address
Much as collateralized debt obligations and other arcane “synthetic” financial products nearly collapsed the entire world economy in 2008, partially due to the intentional complexity, which served only to hide the stupidity, complex computer algorithms are now at the heart of an ever larger and even more dangerous economic debacle that continues to unfold.
And much of the lack of any pushback against this is the simple ability to hide behind the complex computer methods and concepts that have allowed tech giants to build an even bigger and more dangerous kind of monopolistic behavior than even the so called “Robber Barons” of the Gilded Age.
Even those, in government or in the press, who are pushing back are doing so with, apparently, little understanding of the real dangers that are buried in the code and in the tricks used by very sophisticated, technologically educated people in control of these trillion dollar behemoths.
For example, Facebook is already claiming that the government should not be able to question the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp because they already approved the mergers at the time they happened.
In his excellent article published on medium.com , Will Oremus points out:
But I looked up the FTC’s public statements following those reviews, and it states explicitly that the matter should not be considered permanently settled.
“This action is not to be construed as a determination that a violation may not have occurred,” the FTC’s closing letter said. It added, “The Commission reserves the right to take such further action as the public interest may require.” Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Also in that article, titled; ‘Competition Is for Losers’: How Peter Thiel Helped Facebook Embrace Monopoly the idea succinctly embodied in the title which refers to a Wall Street Journal piece on Thiel’s book “Zero to One” which he describes as having been “embraced as a business bible in Silicon Valley and beyond” and quotes from including this characterization:
(Thiel) made the case for monopoly as the ultimate goal of capitalism. Indeed, “monopoly is the condition of every successful business,” he asserted. With it, you’re free to set your own prices, think long-term, innovate, and pursue goals other than mere survival. Without it, you’re replaceable, and your profits will eventually converge on zero.
And this provides the context within which the current struggle unfolds. To understand the real dangers of the total domination of the internet, which has become the vital lifeline of our economy and social existence, by a handful of trillion dollar companies, that not only embrace limitless greed and dictatorial status within their industry, but see it as the divine right that they hold, and believe they are entitled to aspire toward without interference.
And in another context such behavior would be known as immoral, destructive to society and social justice, and if the laws are adequate to apply; criminal.
And there’s the rub. The antitrust statutes, possibly already inadequate to take on this new kind of robber, have also been weakened since the 80s. Add to that how the pre-existing biases are heavily slanted toward minimizing any accountability for such behavior and is follows that any real reform must rise from the public at large.
The birth of the internet was anything but immaculate
The tragi-comic farce of the story, when seen through the lens of internet history, is how Facebook, Google and Amazon all followed the same absurd arc.
From “underdogs” with massive losses and no income to ridiculously “valuable” “FANG” members championed from the rooftops as heroic winners of darwinian battles to build out the internet for profit. And, finally, after decades of unfettered expansion, being seen more and more for what they are: profit-seeking scams using each a different method to restrain competition and destroy the most valuable asset humanity has ever built: the internet itself.
The complexity of the scams is still the most useful cloak for them to hide behind, each with a different insanely complicated way to force what is a public asset, the internet, into a tool for private greed, at the expense of any real innovation. And the victims are not the competitor firms that they might have destroyed (or bought), but rather the entire population of any territory that they control, with North America being the center of the empire.
The question asked for example of Google or Facebook should not be, “do they provide any services from the public can benefit, in exchange for their obscenely privileged monopoly control over “search” and “social networking”, respectively. The question should be “are they the best possible solution, from the perspective of what is in the best interest of society, for those extremely important functions in our new digital world.
It is not enough to say that “consumers have chosen” each as their go-to tool. If any company or group of companies could do a better job of enabling humanity to communicate, interact and become educated via the internet, why should those other solutions be buried forever under a mountain of greed and self-interest?
This is the infinitely elusive point: No different than Bernie Madoff, the damage they have wrought, by destroying what could have been, will only be understood once they are either gone or forced to cease what they depend on for domination, which would lead to their ultimate demise over time, just as Peter Thiel himself stated:
Without (a monoply), you’re replaceable, and your profits will eventually converge on zero.
Or as Jeff Bezos explained, in what his become his predatory raison d’être: The competition is always one-click-away. This makes every other online seller, in his view, an enemy that must be destroyed at all costs, no matter how small, no matter how weak.
In this sick paranoid view of the world it is truly an all or nothing struggle for survival, with death of all competitors, literally and figuratively, the only acceptable outcome.
With this mindset at the heart of these companies, and with the government and most of the press taking a milk-toast submissive approach (in contrast) the struggle to rein in these monstrous, utterly corrupt empires, will take years if not decades.
However, 2020 will always be seen as the beginning of the end the the gruesome mistake of history that these companies represent.
Companies that achieved dominance and monopoly control of a system meant for public benefit, through the most destructive methods they were able to devise, and then redoubled efforts infinitely to expand using those same destructive and corrupt methods.
In the end there is only one power large enough to intervene, as already at their current size, and while, like a virus, they double in power and economic domination almost annually, and that is the power of the billions that use their platforms everyday. Change will arise when they have damaged themselves by damaging the very societies they prey on, and once damaged, those societies will have no choice but to shed them like the murderous parasites that they are.
That will not happen anytime soon. The general view of these companies, is still very mild and forgiving. And it’s important to note that each case is different and this article applies only to Facebook, Google and Amazon.
Just as most have either forgiven or forgotten the massive bailouts that criminal companies were gifted during the 2008 financial crisis, the perception that these massive tech companies are at worst mildly anti-competitive and at best harmless and just practicing good, successful capitalism, will not be changed overnight.
It can only come after much more pain at the hands of this corrupt system that currently controls the internet, and therefore, our digital lives.
As antitrust suits loom, a digital tax appears as additional government option
Related to French “digital tax” hopes, and which may have future repercussions for other tech related regulation attempts, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have” signs on for the “Tech for Good Call”. Amazon has declined which Apple continues to negotiate, according to reports.
A list was released by the French government with signatures of 75 executives of tech companies who have signed up to the initiative so far. Notably, the list included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft President Brad Smith. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Apple’s Tim Cook were absent, however.
For nearly three years President Emmanuel Macron of France has attempted to convince tech giants to begin collaborating with governments to seek remedies for a list of global challenges. Examples are; fighting hate speech online, preserving privacy or paying a so-called “digital-tax”, presumably to offset negative economic effects of the overwhelming dominance of big tech.
Reuters reports that Macron’s advisers said on Monday that the president had asked tech companies to sign up to a new initiative called “Tech for Good Call” underlining principles for the post-COVID world. This development comes as “anti-big-tech” sentiment is increasing, particularly during the massive profit spike the giants are enjoying due to a devastating world-wide pandemic.
A general publicity based initiative could be leverage for negotiations to rein in tech giants
Also, according to Reuters, the “Tech for Good Call” includes a non-binding pledge to “contribute fairly to the taxes in countries where (they) operate”; refrain & prevent the dissemination of “child sexual abuse material, terrorist or extreme violence online contents”; and “support the ecological transition”, in addition to other things.
Though not legally binding, it is expected that the French will use this tentative agreement to in negotiations during upcoming global forums on regulating Big Tech.
In addition to antitrust suits underway in the US and Europe, the idea of a “digital tax” is being explored and attempted with France and Australia leading the way.
The building chorus for regulation against Google and Facebook stem from the extremely dominant position each holds online, with Google having near total control of search traffic and advertising, while Facebooks monopoly in social media concerns its use of that position to monetize private data through advertising.
Also, according to Reuters, the “Tech for Good Call” includes a non-binding pledge to “contribute fairly to the taxes in countries where (they) operate”; refrain & prevent the dissemination of “child sexual abuse material, terrorist or extreme violence online contents”; and “support the ecological transition”, in addition to other things.
Though not legally binding, it is expected that the French will use this tentative agreement to in negotiations during upcoming global forums on regulating Big Tech.
In addition to antitrust suits underway in the US and Europe, the idea of a “digital tax” is being explored and attempted with France and Australia leading the way.
The building chorus for regulation against Google and Facebook stem from the extremely dominant position each holds online, with Google having near total control of search traffic and advertising, while Facebooks monopoly in social media concerns its use of that position to monetize private data through advertising.
“The supportive chorus of elected officials is giving assurance to [the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)] and the [Federal Trade Commission (FTC)] that they have the political support they need to blunt [the companies’] efforts … to pressure the agencies to back off or water down their cases,” former FTC Chairman William Kovacic told WSJ.
Amazon is constantly changing and adding new deals – sometimes with big new discounts. These are some current examples and there are many, many more in all categories.
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Instant Clarity: Get an ultra-sharp, rectangular image from almost any angle in under a second with Capsule Max mini projector’s autofocus and keystoning technology
Ideal in the Home: Stay entertained at home with Capsule Max’s 100-inch image. Watch movies, take online classes, or keep the kids entertained with hours of cartoons and educational videos. The possibilities are endless
Above:Content Discovery App – River video Clip Introduction
An Unlikely Holy Grail: User Sophistication and the Will to Exist Online
In late 2018 a small firm was looking into opportunities in organizing an online co-op for small businesses (CSSinc), similar to the co-ops created by farmers during the great depression. Where else to start than a trade show of more than 1000 small businesses in Las Vegas. In an informal test, they checked all the web sites listed in the show directory as an indicator of the state of web sophistication among the participants.
Naturally the 10% that were functioning, a few of which at a high level, were all the largest companies attending the show. With costs to set up, and even designing a company web site, at an all time low, why would so many pass up the opportunity to make use of this powerful tool?
‘This is Water’ and the internet dilemma that has swallowed the world
In 2005, David Foster Wallace addressed the graduating class at Kenyon College with a speech that is now one of his most read pieces.
In it, he argues, gorgeously, against “unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.” He begins with a parable:
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
This oft quoted passage is about how the world around us can be easily misunderstood by lack of awareness. And, maybe, by the lack of any perceived need to notice what’s really going on.
The two most shocking things about the anecdote above, regarding 90% of small businesses lack of internet presence (or sophistication), are how this could be the case after more than 20 years of the internet being at the center of commerce and, well, life, and what it says about the “water” we are all swimming in.
2020 is the year that the internet became even more important for all our lives. Less obvious is that it is also the year that the problems and obstacles are more important than ever to overcome, and that starts with seeing the water we are all swimming in.
In this acclaimed documentary (available on Netflix) a lot of both problems and solutions focus on the dangers of the current giant-tech dominated internet environment on the “end-user” and the general public.
While that sphere of influence is a serious and growing problem, it is the control and domination by a few massive companies, to the virtual exclusion of smaller businesses, that, to a large degree caused the sick, twisted inequitable and unfair system in the first place.
The relative size imbalance is literally so massive that it is rendered incomprehensible, and, like water to the fish mentioned above, invisible.
A happy shiny logo of, say, coca-cola, looks just as harmless (or menacing, depending on the perspective) as that of Amazon or Facebook, who may be hundreds of times larger in market-cap than the soft-drink giant with long history as a “big” American company. Size of this magnitude is impossible to conceive of by most of us.
But the perception of the giants that control the internet as harmless, or even beneficial and to be admired, is rapidly changing. Therein also lies the potential for probably the only hope of positive change for small business and for society in the US and across the globe.
A Revolution of Perception is Required and already Underway
Part of the problem, one that is growing, admittedly, every day, is the sheer scale of the inequity and corruption. Why even try, as a small business, to go up against the giants that “own” the water we swim in?
Ultimately what is necessary is a sea-change (forgive the continued metaphor) within overall population, both consumers and small businesses. And that starts with the perception that it is the “people” that decide how and what the internet will be who will be “permitted” to interact. An Algorithm own as proprietary secret software by an internet behemoth? Or a decentralized more kaleidoscopic solution that was an inherent promise from the initial days of the internet’s creation?
The signs of change are all around. The “direct to consumer” trend that has produced massive success stories also paved the way for the emerging system of smaller companies being able to reach out directly and actually do business with customers with, sometimes, minimal involvement of the giants.
The signs that this can work are gradually being seen – shopify’s success in offering software and services to businesses wanting to establish a direct connection to buyers is a growing trend. There are many other companies that have recognized the trend and are trying to ride this wave toward a different method of communication between businesses and so-called consumers.
Here are some examples of companies that are taking a new approach to the way we communicate and interact online:
However, the ultimate driver of positive change in the internet will be the increased sophistication of users, both professional and at the individual level.
User Sophistication and Trust: an unlikely but all-important Grail
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, TikTok and more have all embraced direct in-app-shopping as a way to expand beyond content. Even Google has started a program to allow buyers to purchase from search results without leaving the platform. While these initiatives are all coming from the giant tech firms themselves, they are, ultimately, sowing the seeds of their own demise.
They are, in essence, teaching buyers to forego the now standard system of choosing between Amazon and “the rest” in online shopping. This choice, helped along by billions in losses to subsidize “impossibly low” prices plus free shipping paid for by Amazon’s loss-leader strategies, was never a fair or realistic one and created the massive, unsustainable imbalances in online commerce we see today.
The massive and very real paranoia of the giant companies is based on the clear and deep understanding that the competition is always “1-click-away”, which is the unfulfilled promise of the internet in the first place.
D.L.
The greatest obstacle has never been the massive price-dumping schemes or even the sell-at-a-loss free shipping concept that kept buyers from having a second choice in e-commerce. It has been the lack of user sophistication of the sellers and the buyers in the online forum which prevented easier movement from one online option to another.
The massive and very real paranoia of the giant companies is based on the clear and deep understanding that the competition is always “1 click away”, which is the unfulfilled promise of the internet in the first place.
So called “moats” and systems to block users from initiating and exercising choice are built-up and keep getting deeper and more complex. But sophisticated users can, and eventually will, easily just opt-out at any time, when alternatives that they prefer begin to proliferate.
And there is a growing and invisible ocean that already exists all around us. As far-fetched as it may seem “the ocean we swim in” will one day be in no way similar to the deeply problematic one we swim in today and a thorough a change from the bottom up as well as the top down will, finally, bring about a new era in online communication and commerce.
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Black Friday sales for 2020 have already started, with so many great deals popping up online, it can be hard to know where to turn to first. Luckily, Amazon in particular has put out huge savings on many electronics including Apple product headphones, its Echo products, Fire TV, cell phones and much for for the cyber event. Below we’ve collected the best deals ready to buy in the Electronics category.
Unfortunately it is not likely the new iPhone 12 will have any sales since the launch was pretty recent, however there are many other bargains on older models of smartphones that Amazon is providing this Black Friday. Check out below.
Black Friday sales for 2020 have already started, with so many great deals popping up online, it can be hard to know where to turn to first. Luckily, Amazon in particular has put out huge savings on many electronics including Apple product headphones, its Echo products, Fire TV, cell phones and much for for the cyber event. Below we’ve collected the best deals ready to buy in the Electronics category.
Best Deals for Headphones this Black Friday Week on Amazon
Best Deals on Smartphones this Black Friday on Amazon.
Unfortunately it is not likely the new iPhone 12 will have any sales since the launch was pretty recent, however there are many other bargains on older models of smartphones that Amazon is providing this Black Friday. Check out below.
Search Battle Lynxotic Predicted is about to Breakout Big time
In a year that has already offered AppleOne, 5G, and perpetual AirTag teases, Apple Inc might have yet another major project hidden up its sleeve. According to a report from the Financial Times, the tech company has recently partaken in research and development indicative of creating a new original search engine.
For years, Google has been the default search engine on Apple devices. This is part of an ongoing deal between the two companies where Google pays Apple a pretty penny to foreground their services. Now, however, Google is facing an antitrust suit from the Department of Justice. This case claims that Google has a monopoly over search and directly sites its relationship with Apple as evidence.
If the DOJ manages to win against Google, it could be the end of its search engine arriving pre-encrypted in all iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Thus, an in-house Apple search engine comes at an opportune time. Not only will it provide Apple with a new default search platform, but it will also muster some competition against Google— one of the things that the antitrust case desperately calls for.
Any Engine at All by Apple is Earth-shattering to the Status Quo of Big Tech
Nothing is set in concrete about this speculative Apple search engine yet. All we know for sure is that the latest version of iOS 14 shows signs of increased search technology. Under the upgraded operating system, iPhone users can type in questions directly on their devices’ home screens and arrive at Internet results without any middleman. This has also led to an uptick in Apple’s spidering tools, which comb and datafy the web for a smoother search experience.
These changes in iOS 14 are subtle, but given the context, they could be laying the seeds for something much larger. Tellingly, former Google head of search John Geannandrea also oversees these recent Apple advancements. Geannandrea joined Apple three years ago, and while his main focus at the company has been Siri thus far, he obviously has the expertise and experience for helming a Google-like project.
Some believe that Siri is the base of Apple’s increased search interests. Perhaps the new technologies are simply working to refine the voice assistant rather than setting up a wholly alternative Google competitor. At the same time, though, with the proper expansion, Siri could very well evolve into a worthy Google rival, especially if it becomes the one-stop search engine on all Apple devices.For now, users will just have to wait while events unfold. Experts say that the antitrust case against Google will go on for years, and if Apple is indeed developing its own search engine alternative, it will likely take just as long.
New Reports call for laws to rein in giant monopolies
Amid a zany week of political theater and election drama, the federal government has actually managed to make quiet, nonpartisan progress on an important issue. On Tuesday, October 7th, Democratic members of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust finally released a long-awaited report concerning the dominant technological companies in America and their legally dubious corporate power.
The report comes at the end of a sixteen-month investigation into the tech giants, arriving to the conclusion that America’s four biggest tech companies—Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple— all partake in anti-competitive practices that could be reprehensible by law.
Essentially, with the exception of Apple, these four conglomerates have created near-monopolies in their respective fields. Amazon controls 40% of e-commerce in America, and endorses business models that squander the competition and abuse third-party sellers through data mining. Apple has argued that they do not have a monopoly stake in phones, Android (google) and Samsung, have a larger worldwide base, and in other areas Apple has an even less dominant position. Only in dollar denominated success do they hold the absolute top spot.
Google has an even larger monopoly on Internet searches, also utilizing data to bind users to their content and prioritize their services over all other websites.
Facebook, meanwhile, is a hegemonic vacuum for social media outlets, endorsing a “copy, acquire, and then kill” technique according to the report. Essentially, rather than compete with other platforms, Facebook sucks them into inescapable, self-serving positions.
Apple is not in quite as much hot water as the other three companies. The report mainly accuses Apple of binding its users to the Apple Store, which creates an extra, sometimes expensive, hurdle for App developers to get over if they want their product widely available. The report accuses Google of doing something similar with Android, saying that the software forces people to use Google on their devices.
Of course, all of these companies have denied any illegality in their actions— each citing the free market and defending their business practices as entirely fair when responding to the report.
Generally in gridlock and inept, this is one area where Government must act decisively
However, Congress does not seem to agree. In light of the recent report, many Democrats are in favor of rewriting the U.S. Antitrust Laws to better protect a fair, competitive economy. Traditionally, the Antitrust Laws keep businesses in check on behalf of consumers, but they have not been touched in decades, and capitalism has developed immensely since then.
The amount of power that these three companies have garnered demonstrates that the laws now need to consider affairs between businesses as well, lest a handful of power-hungry entities override the market.
Some Republicans, however, have pushed back against the idea of rewriting the Antitrust Laws. Notably, Representative Kelly Armstrong from North Dakota did not sign the committee’s report on Tuesday. While he agrees that something nefarious is at hand with these tech companies, his remedy focuses on greater oversight from the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, upping the enforcement rather than adjusting the laws itself.
Even if certain politicians disagree on how to address the issue, the nonpartisan support for cracking down on big-tech in America is nevertheless a milestone, and it comes at a crucial time. While thousands of Americans are facing economic strife due to the COVID-19 pandemic, billionaires (especially tech moguls) are seeing their stocks skyrocket.
According to a financial study covered in USA Today, billionaires now hold more of the world’s wealth than ever before— $10.8 trillion. Tech billionaires in particular hold $1.8 trillion of that, a whopping 42.5% increase from just a year and a half ago.
The bulk of American Antitrust Laws were written at the turn of the twentieth century. Since then, the state of the world has changed. The state of the economy has changed. And perhaps most immensely, the state of technology has changed. Algorithmic dictatorships are growing almost as quickly as class divides in America. So perhaps it is time for the law to change as well.
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“The Social Dilemma” a documentary now available to watch on Netflix, exposes some hard truths and dangers of social networking. Former employees from juggernaut tech companies including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and many others are interviewed, many of whom co-invented and developed the very structures and business models that are creating major problems as broken-down and discussed in the docu-drama.
Not much of a spoiler alert, but social media companies not only sell our user data, but in conjunction use all that data to create an ultra-sophisticated psychological profile, ultimately to have the powerful ability to manipulate us. Your privacy, surveillance capitalism, positive intermittent reinforcement, artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, dopamine hits, are just some of the terms used within the film and very much prevalent in social media.
There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software”
Edward Tufte
We’ve curated a list of books written by the former tech employees that appeared in the documentary, as well as provided some additional information from the publisher. Click to see more book information, we’ve provided links for purchase that if interested that helps out independent books stores.
We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives–where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance–are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules.
But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination–propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process. Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER – A former Wall Street quant sounds the alarm on Big Data and the mathematical models that threaten to rip apart our social fabric–with a new afterword. “A manual for the twenty-first-century citizen . . . relevant and urgent.”–Financial Times. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST – NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review – Boston Globe – Wired – Fortune – Kirkus Reviews – The Guardian – Nature – On Point
Automating Humanity is an insider’s perspective on everything Big Tech doesn’t want the public to know–or think about–from the addictions installed on a global scale to the profits being driven by fake news and disinformation, to the way they’re manipulating the world for profit and using our data to train systems that will automate jobs at an explosive, unprecedented scale.
Toscano provides a critique of modern regulation, including parts of the new European Union’s General Data Proctection Regulation (GDPR) suggesting how we can create proactive, adaptable regulation that satisfies both the needs of consumer safety and commercial success in the international economy. The content touches on everything from technology, economics, and public policy to psychology, history, and ethics, and is written in a way that is accessible to everyone from the average reader to the technical expert. Click Here to See “Automating Humanity” and help Independent Bookstores. Also Available on Amazon.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.
Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification.”
The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit–at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. Click Here to See “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” and help Independent Bookstores. Also Available on Amazon.
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier
You might have trouble imagining life without your social media accounts, but virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier insists that we’re better off without them. In Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Lanier, who participates in no social media, offers powerful and personal reasons for all of us to leave these dangerous online platforms.
Lanier’s reasons for freeing ourselves from social media’s poisonous grip include its tendency to bring out the worst in us, to make politics terrifying, to trick us with illusions of popularity and success, to twist our relationship with the truth, to disconnect us from other people even as we are more “connected” than ever, to rob us of our free will with relentless targeted ads. How can we remain autonomous in a world where we are under continual surveillance and are constantly being prodded by algorithms run by some of the richest corporations in history that have no way of making money other than being paid to manipulate our behavior? How could the benefits of social media possibly outweigh the catastrophic losses to our personal dignity, happiness, and freedom? Lanier remains a tech optimist, so while demonstrating the evil that rules social media business models today, he also envisions a humanistic setting for social networking that can direct us toward a richer and fuller way of living and connecting with our world. Click Here to See “Ten Argument for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts” and help Independent Bookstores. Also Available on Amazon.
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
Click Here to See “The Righteous Mind“ and help Independent Bookstores. Also Available on Amazon.
Drawing on his twenty five years of groundbreaking research on moral psychology, Haidt shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns. In this subtle yet accessible book, Haidt gives you the key to understanding the miracle of human cooperation, as well as the curse of our eternal divisions and conflicts. If you’re ready to trade in anger for understanding, read The Righteous Mind.
In this “landmark contribution to humanity’s understanding of itself” (The New York Times Book Review) social psychologist Jonathan Haidt challenges conventional thinking about morality, politics, and religion in a way that speaks to conservatives and liberals alike. Click Here to See “The Righteous Mind” and help Independent Bookstores. Also Available on Amazon.
We all constantly interact with our iPhone in a myriad of ways. We use our phones for directions, searching for information, snapping a photo, communicating with work-family-friends-lovers, buying (drunk-dailing), accessing our financial data, enter and compiling health data…. the list goes on and on!
Apple’s newest ad highlights how important our privacy really is. Although funny, the ad also depicts what the worst case scenario could look like.
Privacy is extremely high on Apple’s list
No one would knowingly would scream out their password, but through this clever comedic device the video spotlights the scary truth that if your valuable information were to be shared continuously, the situation would be grave, indeed. Apple wants to make it clear that privacy should be a “given” and that they have taken extra steps to ensure users information will be safe.
Each of the big four have new strategies to diversify into each other’s garden
‘This is the beginning of the end of Big Tech as we know it’ according to professor Scott Galloway and the Big Tech giants are well aware of this fact. Unsurprisingly, they are already at work to undermine one another and find ways to grab pieces of each other’s pies.
Where one has a stranglehold, such as Amazon does based on the sheer size and breath of its 3rd party marketplace, another, such as Google, will look for a way to gain a foothold, no matter how small, as the winds of change rise in Washington and among the public.
Amazon’s dominance is based on its virtual monopoly in eCommerce transactions, which is itself, a result of “bribing” customers with below wholesale prices on hot items, giving the customer the illusion of an unbeatable deal site.
The strategy is powerful for obvious reasons (unless you are a foreign exporter to the US, then it is illegal). Who doesn’t like to pay below wholesale prices with “free” shipping (if you pay for Prime)? A second benefit of this strategy (also potentially against antitrust laws) is that no competitor can afford to use a similar strategy unless they want to go bankrupt in short order.
Enter another untouchable giant: Google. Since it’s Google Shopping and other eCommerce search features struggle based on the unbeatable system Amazon has devised (even as Google commands 91.75% of search traffic), the only way to get a jump on the game is to fight back in kind. Bribe somebody. Fortunately for the US economy, truth and justice, this time the parties to be enticed are the 3rd party sellers.
With fees for 3rd party sales on Amazon rising as high as 30% in some cases, even as Amazon competes directly against those small businesses (“internal competitors” in Amazonian parlance), Google’s new idea of a zero commission structure just might gain some traction.
Already under fire for rigging search results to favor itself, Google is doubling down, in a sense, via drastically lowering fees for 3rd party sellers to use Google Shopping to get direct sales from Shopify or other non-Amazon sources.
Since Amazon’s fees can approach 30% for some lower cost items (such as books) this will be a powerful incentive for sellers to shift focus away from Amazon’s predatoryfee structure and to a platform that potentially could bring in sales with less cost to the seller (and therefore a better end value to the buyer).
Change is welcome, especially at zero percent
Google is offering zero commission listing and, in a big announcement, also currently charging zero, in the US, for the “buy on google” checkout system. This is in the process of expanding and rolling out, and, potentially, by the fall and holiday season, could provide an interesting shift in how small business can operate online.
Walmart started allowing 3rd party sellers onto its online store several years ago but, recently, kicked that process into overdrive with a new system that allows all Shopifyaccounts the choice to sell on Walmart.com via a direct link between the two.
Bookshop.org, with whom Lynxotic is affiliated via our sister site Cherrybooks.org, is also a company that is attempting to break the stranglehold Amazon has had on online book sales. Surprisingly successful already, its B Corp non-profit-like structure and alliances with independent bookstores has exploded. Affiliate advertising from huge media companies such as the New York Times have climbed on board and the largest book distributor in the US is a partner for fulfillment. Bookshop.Org has been able to put a tiny dent in the largest, most powerful competitor imaginable, showing, perhaps, that there are cracks emerging in the corrupt business models of these giants and they are not 100% invulnerable after all.
Apple will expose the worst of predatory surveillance by Facebook, Amazon and Google with new privacy features
While wrong is wrong regardless of the perpetrator, when it comes to gargantuan tech behemoths, a company with a clearly defined mission such as Apple or Tesla are in a different category than Amazon, Facebook and Google.
While Tesla’s stated mission is to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy” and Apple’s original mission statement, written by Steve Jobs was “to make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind”, predatory vultures hide behind ridiculous slogans like “aim to be Earth’s most customer centric company” (while decimating partners and competitors by any means necessary) and “don’t be evil” (don’t get caught) and “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” (…all while stealing data for profit from every person on earth).
Click to See “Steve Jobs“ and to help Lynxotic and Independent Bookstores. Also Available on Amazon.
It’s just not the same – particularly as Steve Jobs, while at Apple, pushed himself and his company to invent and build many powerful examples of “tools for the mind” and Elon Musk’s Tesla brought the electric car back from the dead (after it was nearly snuffed out by big oil) and is making incredible headway in revolutionizing battery and solar technology, all with a view to literally save the planet from a climate catastrophe.
Bezos? Became the richest living human via the destruction of millions of small business and jobs all while undercutting competitors by selling virtually anything he got his hands on at a significant loss; simply to cause the demise of any competitor or partner that might threaten his rise to idiotically massive personal wealth.
Zuckerberg? Pioneered ways to suck data from virtually every human with a view to monetizing every living soul exclusively for himself and his company. Illustration? Dividing Facebook’s market cap by the number of employees it has yields the sum of $14,906,500.00 per employee. Macy’s? That’d be $16,829. (Thanks to Scott Galloway for the numbers)
Google merely owns (91.75% as of June 2020) the search entryway to all web sites. It decides if you should or should not find them. If it can boost profits by hiding one and featuring another, either through “paid search” or by pointing you toward its own properties while hiding competitors from you, it will do exactly that. Ask the European Union’s anti-trust investigators. For them, this company is a convicted law breaker.
Announced at WWDC 2020, Apple is adding serious features to its various new operating systems. One big feature in Safari is the ability to track, and block as desired, all manner of data intrusions. These are not only identified, but shown and tracked and analyzed with a kind of professional dashboard, showing just how invasive and persistent these invisible spies are.
Apple is big, with more than 1.4 billion devices. Starting in around 2021 they will all be able to identify and block data surveillance by Amazon (the largest of all spies), Google and Facebook, among others. Thanks that’s not a big deal? Think again.
…the overall stance being taken regarding online tracking and surveillance should be seen for what it is: the first step to correcting the mistake of history that allowed the internet to be kidnapped and held hostage by a handful of companies that pretend to be “free” or “customer obsessed” while they are, in fact, Robber Barons that make the Standard Oil monopoly look like Santa Claus.
– D.L.
Tracking the Trackers will Change Your Life
Tracking the trackers is a clear and aggressive privacy stance, taken by the one company among the big four, that does not have a huge stake in you being the victim of online surveillance and tracking.
Not to say that Apple is blameless. Many are complaining about its fee structure for software sold by third parties via the app stores. While this issue is certainly a valid one, the overall stance being taken regarding online tracking and surveillance should be seen for what it is: the first step to correcting the mistake of history that allowed the internet to be kidnapped and held hostage by a handful of companies that pretend to be “free” or “customer obsessed” while they are, in fact, Robber Barons that make the Standard Oil monopoly look like Santa Claus.
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