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The great Internet monopolies of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google (Alphabet), and Microsoft are different. They are global firms and do not depend upon government licenses for the market power. At the same time, they have extremely close relations with the US government and much of their work relies…

[...] here was a technology that conceivably could give corporations infinitely more power over consumers, not simply to advertise products, but to make sales. But that required wrestling away people’s ability to maintain their privacy, and doing so without their awareness of what was being done to…

Most of the people who designed the internet didn’t want it to be a commercial medium, and that’s why they made it that way. The problem with that for capitalism was that it didn’t make for a very successful commercial model. In the 1990s, there was endless talk of locating the “killer app,” the di…

[...] It demonstrates how deeply entrenched the largest internet companies and their surveillance model is with the profit system. They’re just in the bone marrow of modern capitalism — of our modern political economy. To go after that is basically going after the whole system, in a way. It would r…