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That incessant competition occurs when you treat your self as a product whose value you seek to invest in or maximise. Brown writes that this state turns workers into capital, and “when everything is capital, labour disappears as a category, as does its collective form, class.” [...]
Under this arrangement, which as far as we know is still in place, it is Google Ireland Limited that actually licenses the tech of Google’s main business to all the Google affiliates in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. (Google has a similar offshoot in Singapore that covers business in Asia).
[...]
See where this is going? In 2015, $15.5 billion in profits made their way to Google Ireland Holdings in Bermuda even though Google employs only a handful of people there. It’s as if each inhabitant of the island nation had made the company $240,000.
In doing this, Google didn’t break the law. Corporations like Google are simply shifting profits to places where corporate taxes are low. It’s not just Internet companies with valuable intellectual property that do this. A car manufacturer, for instance, might shift profits by manipulating export and import prices – exporting car components from America to Ireland at artificially low prices, and importing them back at prices that are artificially high.
A potential fix would be to allocate the taxable profits made by multinationals proportionally to the amount of sales they make in each country.
Say Google’s parent company Alphabet makes $100 billion in profits globally, and 50 percent of its sales in the United States (a relatively similar scenario to the first quarter of this year, in which that figure was 48 percent). In that case, $50 billion would be taxable in the United States, irrespective of where Google’s intangible assets are or where its workers are employed. A system similar to this already governs state corporate taxes in America.
so reactionary tho
[...] that the use of ad-blocking software grew 41 percent last year, with 198 million active users worldwide, according to a study conducted by Adobe and PageFair. This represents an existential threat to the $50 billion online advertising industry and has ignited a bitter feud between advertisers and developers of ad-blocking apps. On the sidelines, privacy advocates are pumping their fists for consumer choice while web publishers wring their hands over lost revenue.
Moreover, when Apple made ad blockers available in its App Store last fall, they quickly became among the most downloaded apps. And later this year, Microsoft is reportedly going to allow an extension to its Edge browser that supports the most popular blocker, Adblock Plus. Read what you will into the fact that Apple and Microsoft’s business models aren’t overly reliant on advertising, unlike their rivals Google and Facebook.
doesn't quite pick up on the "platform wars" angle but close
[...] In his youth he was both a captain and a loudmouth, he was also employed in civilian business, he was a master at giving a good flogging, he was both quick and efficient, and a dandy, and stupid; but in his old age he had merged all these vivid peculiarities within himself into a kind of dim indefiniteness. He was already a widower, already retired; he no longer played the dandy, or boasted, or got into fights; he only loved to drink tea and chatter all kinds of nonsense while drinking it; he would walk around his room and trim the tallow candle-end; precisely at the end of each month he would call on his tenants for the rent; he would go out into the street with a key in his hand in order to look at the roof of his building; he would chase the yard sweeper several times out of his kennel, where he would hide in order to sleep—in short, he was a retired person who, after a wild life and a bumpy ride with post-horses, has nothing left but banal habits.
The artist wordlessly saw his guests out and was left in unpleasant reflections. In his cramped garret no one had interrupted him when he sat at his work, commissioned by no one. With vexation he set aside the portrait he had begun and wanted to take up his other unfinished works. But how could it be possible to replace thoughts and feelings that have penetrated to the soul with new ones that the imagination has not yet managed to fall in love with? Throwing his brush aside, he left the house.
Quickly he dressed his Psyche in the clothing of the nineteenth century; he slightly touched the eyes and lips, made the hair somewhat lighter, and gave the portrait to his visitors. He was rewarded with a bundle of banknotes and an affectionate smile of gratitude.
But the artist stood as if rooted to the spot. His conscience was tormenting him; he was overcome by that fastidious, mistrustful fear for his unsullied name that is felt by a youth who carries in his soul the nobility of talent, a fear that forces him, if not to destroy, then at least to hide from the world those works in which he himself sees imperfection, a fear that forces him to prefer enduring the contempt of the whole crowd rather than the contempt of a true connoisseur. It seemed to him that a terrible judge was standing before his painting and, shaking his head, reproaching him for shamelessness and lack of talent. What wouldn’t he give to get it back! He wanted to run after the lady, tear the portrait from her hands, rip it up and stomp on it, but how could he do it? Where should he go? He didn’t even know his visitor’s name.
But from that time a happy change took place in his life. He expected his name to be covered in infamy, but it turned out quite the contrary. The lady who had commissioned the portrait went into raptures about this extraordinary artist, and our Chertkov’s studio filled with visitors wishing to double, and if possible increase tenfold, their own images. But the fresh, still innocent Chertkov, who felt in his soul that he was unworthy of taking on such an extraordinary task, in order to somewhat make amends and atone for his crime, decided to take up his work with all possible diligence, to double the exertion of his powers, which was the only thing that would produce miracles. But his intentions met with unforeseen obstacles. The visitors whose portraits he was painting were for the most part impatient, busy people in a hurry, and therefore, as soon as his brush began to create something a bit out of the ordinary, a new visitor would burst in and display his head in a most pompous way, burning with the desire to see it on canvas as soon as possible, and the artist would hurry to finish his work quickly.
His time was finally so filled up that he could not spend a single minute in reflection; and inspiration, continually destroyed at its very birth, finally got out of the habit of visiting him. Finally, in order to make his work go faster, he began to confine himself to well-known, defined, monotonous, long worn-out forms. Soon his portraits resembled those family depictions by the old artists, which are so often encountered in all the lands of Europe and in all corners of the world, where the ladies are depicted with their arms folded on their breasts and holding flowers in their hands, and the cavaliers in uniform with one hand tucked inside their jackets. Sometimes he wished to offer a new, not yet hackneyed posture that would be distinguished by originality and lack of constraint, but, alas! All that is unconstrained and easy is obtained by the poet and artist only in a most constrained way, and is the fruit of great exertions. In order to offer a new, bold expression, to grasp a new secret in painting, he would have to think for a long time, turning his eyes away from everything that surrounded him, flying away from everything worldly and from life. But he didn’t have time for this, and besides he was too exhausted by his daily work to be ready to receive inspiration; and the world he was using as a model to paint his works was too ordinary and monotonous to stimulate and stir his imagination. The deeply pondering and at the same time motionless face of the director of a department; the face of an Uhlan cavalry captain, handsome but always of the same type; the pale face of a St. Petersburg beauty with its forced smile; and many others that were just too ordinary—that is what appeared in turn every day before our painter. It seemed that his very brush had finally taken on the insipidity and lack of energy that marked his originals.
The banknotes and gold that constantly flashed before him finally put the virginal impulses of his soul to sleep. He shamelessly profited by the weakness of people who, in exchange for an extra feature of beauty added by the artist to their images, were ready to forgive him all his deficiencies, even if that beauty damaged the resemblance itself.