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Markets are political structures. We’ve designed our markets to prioritize the power of Google, Facebook, and Amazon instead of enabling a free press and shielding that press from govt influence through advertising. Bad choice. Reversible!
The FTC is totally useless. It's time for Congress to act, and just draw lines in legislation. No targeted ad business if you are an essential communications facility. Google would divest its adtech business lines. Explosion in creativity, entrepreneurship and journalism.
I don't think people get how insane it is that everyone has a supercomputer with an insanely powerful camera in their pocket connected to a worldwide information grid, and yet somehow no one can figure out how to build a sustainable media business.
Every ad-based model has failed because Google, Facebook, and Amazon are stealing all the ad money. The entrepreneurial model with talented creative executives and journalists failed. Local newspapers with legacies failed. Deep-pocked Verizon with a mobile network sites failed.
American politics has *always* been based on the ease of starting a newspaper financed by advertising and subsidized by the Post Office's open network structure, from the early 1800s onwards. We created the Post Office in 1775 as part of a national security crisis! This is weird!
It's also important to note that there is no ethical way to run a search engine that has advertising on it. This isn't just what I think. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin made this point ***when they set up Google.***
Conservatives should be freaking out over these tech monopolies. Politicians will easily weaponize Facebook, Google, and Amazon as private governing forces. This is an unimaginable level of power when you fuse corporate information monopolies and state apparatus.
We are going to have to choose between democracy and the current business model of Google, Facebook and Amazon.
The self-dealing of the tech monopolists is rampant, it all comes from the basic misaligned incentive of pairing targeted advertising with control of an essential communications service.
