This is the reality of how these companies operate and why laws need to be changed on how they’re viewed.
About 95% of traffic from Australia goes through Google.
Most small businesses use their ad features for their livelihood.
This ridiculous idea that you can “just make your own” needs to stop being thrown around unless people temper that huge idea with reality.
You could make your own Google. If you had Elon Musk’s wealth, a giant team of software engineers, and a decade of your life to spare.
It’s unrealistic. On top of that we know that these battles have already been waged and won.
There were other search engines, Google pretty much beat them all.
Then Google tied all sorts of things to it’s services like gmail and youtube.
And that’s the crux of the issue. Google actually does provide a good product for ‘free’.
But they sell your data and use your info.
That’s the key issue here. Google was using articles from news outlets in Australia to generate wealth.
The Australian govt said that Google should pay more since it’s making an insane amount of money off of Australians.
And because they dared to ask for more than 1%, Google threatened to remove their services.
First off look at how much Google makes off of ads and taking people’s data. 3.7B in Australia alone.
They only paid about 1.2% of that back to the govt.
To them, any more than that is a no go.
These tech giants can hold govt’s and businesses hostage while paying almost nothing in taxes.
We need new laws to reclassify these megacorporations to be something between a private company and a utility.
Too much of our societies are dependent on them for them to just be able to use tax codes to hold countries hostage or conduct digital book burnings that make no sense.
They’ll ban some idiot who believes in some dumb idea but let gang members and terror groups to continue to use their services.
There’s a serious issue here
Disclaimer: This content does not necessarily represent the views of IWB.