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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘competition law’
26.01.2023
As if to prove my point about lies, Google spammed me right after my last post. In its footer:

No, I didnât. I logged into Google to see my settings. Sure enough:

As I always say, when it comes to computers, Iâm right, theyâre wrong. I have a better memory.
I unsubscribed:

But Iâm not signed up to âNews and tipsâ. Not on any menu. Remember, Google? What’s the point of managing my preferences when you don’t know how to use them?

Basically, theyâll spam you when they want regardless of what your settings are.
Whereâs the accountability here? Or are they desperate to shore up things now that the US Department of Justice has suddenly discovered it has some balls to take them on in an antitrust case?
Tags: 2023, competition law, email, Google, law, monopoly, spam, USA Posted in business, internet, technology, USA | No Comments »
11.01.2021

I did indeed write in the wake of January 6, and the lengthy opâed appears in Lucire, quoting Emily Ratajkowski, Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden. I didnât take any pleasure in what happened Stateside and Ratajkowski actually inspired the post after a Twitter contact of mine quoted her. This was after President Donald Trump was taken off Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
The points I make there are probably familiar to any of you, my blog readers, pointing at the dangers of tech monopolies, the double standards that theyâve employed, and the likely scenario of how the pendulum could swing the other way on a whim because another group is flavour of the month. Weâve seen how the US has swung one way and the other depending on the prevailing winds, and Facebookâs and Twitterâs positions, not to mention Amazonâs and Googleâs, seem reactionary and insincere when they have had their terms and conditions in place for some time.
Today, I was interested to see Chancellor Dr Angela Merkel, referred to by not a few as the leader of the free world, concerned at the developments, as was President LĂłpez Obrador of MĂ©xico. âGerman Chancellor Angela Merkel objected to the decisions, saying on Monday that lawmakers should set the rules governing free speech and not private technology companies,â reported Bloomberg, adding, âEurope is increasingly pushing back against the growing influence of big technology companies. The EU is currently in the process of setting up regulation that could give the bloc power to split up platforms if they donât comply with rules.â
The former quotation wasnât precisely my point but the latter is certainly linked. These tech giants are the creation of the US, by both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, and their institutions, every bit as Trump was a creation of the US media, from Fox to MSNBC.
They are natural outcomes of where things wind up when monopoly power is allowed to gather and laws against it are circumvented or unenforced; and what happens when news networks sell spectacle over substance in order to hold your attention. One can only hope these are corrected for the sake of all, not just one side of the political spectrum, since freedomâactual freedomâdepends on them, at least until we gain the civility and education to regulate ourselves, the Confucian ideal. Everything about this situation suggests we are nowhere near being capable, and I wonder if homo sapiens will get there or whether weâll need to evolve into another species before we do.
Tags: 2000s, 2010s, 2020s, 2021, Amazon, Angela Merkel, antitrust, Big Tech, competition law, Confucius, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Emily Ratajkowski, EU, Facebook, free speech, Germany, Glenn Greenwald, Google, law, LĂłpez Obrador, Lucire, media, MĂ©xico, monopoly, oligopoly, philosophy, politics, Twitter, USA Posted in business, culture, internet, leadership, media, politics, technology, USA | 1 Comment »
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