How and why? I’ll explain why below but to put it succinctly – it is in their best interest to do so. Once complete they will have succeeded in creating a platform-based internet, keeping you in their walled garden and removing your freedom of choice. You will see whatever they want you to see. Adios free will.
This is tearing at the fabric of our society. They create filter bubbles, fuel hate, and narrow our worldview. They are invading our privacy. Have you ever talked about something and then seen an ad for it? Yes, they’re listening in on every device.
They are doing all of this while also crushing free enterprise on the internet. Which brings us to this post today.
You see, when you harm publishers, you also harm the end user, and that’s you. You are collateral damage in the biggest landgrab in the history of modern society.
At the same time the government launched their probe, the top publishers in the country had gathered for an emergency summit in New York. Advertising dollars from 2015-2018 were slowly declining. 2019 trends were showing an alarming trend with programmatic revenues in freefall industry-wide. Ad revenue across publishing was down over 50%??? There’s gotta be an explanation for this?
Google and Facebook are ad-supported businesses. They want to get you on their pages and keep you there at all costs. This puts them at odds with the publishing community, much of which is ad supported. Google. Facebook, and Amazon control 70% of all online ad dollars spent. The rest of the publishing world fights for scraps of the other 30%. But Google and Facebook got together last year and colluded with each other, asking a simple, shocking question, a question that prompted the anti-trust probe:
“What if we took it all?”
And these clowns actually agreed they should fuckin’ do it. Holy smokes.
Fewer publishers, and the ones left must worship a new god. Sound familiar?
By taking it all, the Duopoly actually wins twice. Not only do they kill publishers and take their money, what’s left of the publishers who hang on will have no choice but to attach their skeleton crew to Facebook and Google for life support. Facebook will actually have the balls to play savior by creating, say, a ‘preferred publisher program’, anointing a handful of publishers as partners who will get traffic from FB and just enough ad revenue to survive. Then Facebook’s algorithm will only show you articles from those publishers that their algorithm thinks you want to see. Your entire internet consumption, as well as how you think and feel, will be dictated to you.........MUCH MORE
I'm not sure if the facts of the story live up to the headline but on September 20 RT said:
"Not a free speech platform: Facebook declares it’s a ‘publisher’ & can censor whomever it wants, walking into legal trap"For years the companies have had it both ways, platform when that furthered their goals, publisher when that suited their rapacious lust for money and power.
Of course in 2018 The Guardian reported the same thing in a different lawsuit:
Is Facebook a publisher? In public it says no, but in court it says yesBut now it seems people are taking notice of the duplicity these companies are founded on.
