archive/dissertation
Nick Srnicek,
Douglas Rushkoff,
Robert W. McChesney,
Christian Fuchs,
Tim O'Reilly,
Franklin Foer,
McKenzie Wark,
Mark Andrejevic,
Evgeny Morozov,
Wolfgang Streeck
possibly relevant for my dissertation
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
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.
[...] His comment is, independent contractors are what makes the wheels on the Uber go ‘round, so it’s fine. He rips into big retail companies later for using tricky scheduling algorithms to keep workers on benefits-less part-time status and goes after Walmart for relying on the welfare system to subsidize its poverty level wages. He doesn’t realize that these companies originated the playbook Uber adapted: selling a model of precarious labor based on on-demand piece-work, masked with the prestige of being a “flexible independent contractor.”
Unsurprisingly, O’Reilly believes that tech firms, particularly those led by people he knows personally, are in the best position to push society forward. [...]
lmao love it
Google’s decision to ban AdNauseum was only the latest salvo in an ongoing war over online advertising. The industry and publishers have recently been fighting back against ad blockers, for instance, by requiring visitors to disable them if they want to view a page. In August, Facebook announced it was blocking anti-ad software across its platform. And while AdNauseum is the first desktop ad blocker Google has blocked, it has previously banned mobile apps like anti-tracking tool Disconnect and ad blocker AdBlock Fast from its Android Play Store, citing a rule that says one app can’t interfere with another.
The ad industry also knows that ads can be a nuisance, and it’s taking pre-emptive measures to make them more palatable—or, in Google’s case, to block the unpalatable ones. “We feel like there are a lot of challenges in advertising. There are a lot of wrong ways,” Darin Fisher, vice president of Chrome engineering, told CNet last year. But “if publishers and advertisers do ads the right way, it can be great for the users and for the ecosystem.”
Google and its parent company, Alphabet, which dominates the market for online ads and made an estimated $79 billion from them in 2016, has taken a largely hands-off approach to the potentially existential threat of ad blockers. And, according to recent reports, it now plans to include “ad-filtering” software pre-installed in Chrome—an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach to making the web less annoying.
But AdNauseum isn’t like the other ad blockers: It takes a more activist approach. Rather than just concealing them, the app sends noise into the system by automatically clicking on ads in the background, muddling efforts by advertisers and ad networks like Google’s to determine your preferences and your identity as you browse the web. [...]
[...]
Instead, the team suspected a simpler motive behind Google’s decision: AdNauseum directly conflicts with the way that the company makes most of its money.
Google used the single-purpose policy to explain the banning
The most influential economic explanations of rising economic inequality in the past thirty years give a central role to technology, and specifically to the role of skills-biased technical change (SBTC) and the economics of superstars in winner-take-all markets. Both have functioned to naturalize and legitimate emerging patterns of inequality, and to limit the bounds of institutional discussion about the range of feasible interventions that would alleviate inequality while preserving the innovation dynamic on which contemporary rise in standards of living depends. [...]
really digging that he goes into the way these narratives are entwined with real-world effects
As David, Amy, and Jed’s manifesto at the launch of this blog captured, the theoretical premise of political economy is that “politics and the economy cannot be separated. Politics both creates and shapes the economy. In turn, politics is profoundly shaped by economic relations and economic power. Attempts to separate the economy from politics make justice harder to pursue in both domains.” The role of a political economy of technology is similarly to develop an institutional-political understanding of technology, and to recognize that arguments that treat technology as exogenous and mediated through pre-political and roughly-efficient markets are descriptively mistaken and normatively stultifying.