Imagine: A World without Google, Facebook and Amazon By Brian Simpson
This is sung to the terrible communist tune of John Lennon’s Imagine:
Imagine no Google, Facebook or Amazon
I wonder if you can
A world of free speech
Free from lizard overlords
Imagine all the people living free from globalism
You may say that I am a white supremacist, blah blah
But I am not the only one
And one day the masses will be awakened
And your world will not be one
“Few people today have heard of Standard Oil, the giant petrochemical company that a century ago made its founder John Rockefeller wealthier than Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos and Google billionaires Sergey Brin and Larry Page are today – combined.
The secret of its success was control. It dominated production, ran all the refineries and pipelines, and owned all the ships, tankers and petrol stations.
It squeezed out competition with ruthless price-cutting until only it was left. Then it hiked its prices.
It took the will of the then US President, the one person more powerful than Rockefeller, to challenge and dismantle Standard Oil’s monopoly in order to promote fair competition.
Indeed, Theodore Roosevelt’s actions bravely set a precedent that led to the break-up of other monopolies, such as those in the railway and airline industries, and the stranglehold AT&T had over the telephone business.
It is a lesson today’s great monopolists – Bezos, Zuckerberg, Brin and Page – should heed.
For their businesses exert ever more control over our everyday lives. They believe their power is unlimited. And, what’s more, the authorities, in the main, are letting them get away with it.
These tech giants give the impression that democratically elected governments can be ignored, that they can use the most private information about millions of us for profit, without our knowledge and all the while treating the obligation of paying tax as optional.
Theirs is a world where they influence public opinion, taste and choice by the shadowy manipulation of their sites’ algorithms which record our every move online and then use it to make vast sums of money.
These firms assume we have become so dependent on them that they are irreplaceable, an essential part of life like the air we breathe. This is not so. It’s time to fight back.
We can replace these California-based giants if we choose. And, crucially, I believe the world would be a better place for it. The good news is that, at last, world governments have woken up to the dangers.
A series of anti-trust lawsuits has been laid against Facebook and Google in the US courts in a bid to stop their monopolistic behaviour.
The Australian government has taken up the cudgels, too, demanding tech giants pay publishers for sharing content on their sites. Here, the House of Lords Communication Committee has recommended the UK does the same.”
I hope the day of reckoning for big Tech is soon, for nobody deserves more to be put back in their place and cut down to size. Trump could have done it, but did nothing, basking in his vast ego, as Ann coulter observed. He was no theodore Roosevelt, more like his mate Bill Clinton.
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