Saturday, March 23, 2019

Feel Like a Serf Yet?

Good ol' Z-man analyzes the "new" economy and finds the mouldering remnants of 1300's Europe.

...The result is the new economy looks a lot like a very old economy, the one we used to call feudalism. A small number of people control vast swaths of property, forcing everyone else to accept a vassal relationship. They can effectively control entire sectors of the economy, simply by maintaining control of key points or by maintaining near monopoly status in certain areas. Google and Apple control the mobile phone market, by controlling the mobile OS. That’s why an open source alternative has never appeared....

(That key-point control is assured through patents which may be .......ahh......questionable.)

Facebook/Instagram/Twitter exercise oligopoly on 'socializing', which is really "advertisement grooming" and Privacy Invasion.

And Visa/Master are near-oligopolies on payment processing, which frankly is a helluvalot more significant "choke-point" than Faceberg, et.al. control.

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