{"id":25960,"date":"2021-02-04T08:46:05","date_gmt":"2021-02-04T08:46:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=158319"},"modified":"2021-02-04T08:46:05","modified_gmt":"2021-02-04T08:46:05","slug":"big-techs-playing-monopoly-its-going-to-lose-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/04\/big-techs-playing-monopoly-its-going-to-lose-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Tech\u2019s Playing Monopoly. It\u2019s Going to Lose."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Over the years, I\u2019ve written many columns concerning the war on Internet freedom. My usual targets are the politicians and government agencies who serve as shock troops for the Dark Side across fronts ranging from encryption to sex worker advertisements to darknet marketplaces.<\/p>\n

On the \u201cprivate sector\u201d side of things, I\u2019ve generally just noted that anti-freedom business practices are bad business practices, that bad business practices tend to be self-punishing, and that none of the Big Actors in Big Tech are, strictly speaking, monopolies.<\/p>\n

Now the war\u2019s been tuning up into its next phase, and Big Tech is finally taking an open stand against, rather than for, freedom. Facebook and Twitter are cracking down on speech (of both \u201cright\u201d and \u201cleft\u201d varieties). Google, Amazon, Apple et al. are trying to take down sites and apps on which speech can\u2019t be easily regulated.<\/p>\n

Why is Big Tech finally showing us an anti-freedom face?<\/p>\n

If you have to ask why, the answer is almost always \u201cmoney.\u201d That\u2019s certainly true in this case. Most of the firms in question enjoy substantial revenue from government contracts. They want to keep their single biggest customer happy both to preserve those revenue streams and to avoid the imposition of regulations that might cut into their profit margins.<\/p>\n

But at this point, it\u2019s also safe to say that they\u2019re looking for \u201cregulatory capture.\u201d<\/p>\n

They see the handwriting on the wall. Regulation is coming whether they like it or not, but they\u2019re big players with plenty of lobbying money. They expect to influence the coming regulation to their own advantage.<\/p>\n

They don\u2019t want to be big fish in a small pond. They want to be the ONLY fish in a big pond. They don\u2019t want to beat new competitors on the merits of their product and services. They want to use government regulation to make it impossible for those new competitors to put up any competition at all.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re not monopolies yet, but they want to be. And they\u2019re making their play right now.<\/p>\n

But unlike previous instances of regulatory capture \u2014 such as that of electric power, which after a century of government-imposed \u201cnatural\u201d monopolies imposed for the express purpose of benefiting Big Business, still has us over-paying to keep our lights on \u2014 this one isn\u2019t going to work.<\/p>\n

Short of government simply cutting the Internet off entirely,  there\u2019s only one way this ends. If the Internet is allowed to survive at all, the would-be monopolies are going to come to grief. Even China\u2019s Communist regime and its quarter-century-old \u201cGreat Firewall\u201d have proven inadequate to the task of separating users from the content and applications they seek.<\/p>\n

The long-term result of American Big Tech allying itself with the state to suppress Internet freedom will be its withering as users desert it for offshore hosting and unstoppable peer-to-peer and distributed applications.<\/p>\n

Yes, things are bad. They\u2019re going to get worse. But the outcome isn\u2019t in doubt. Big Tech can switch to the users\u2019 side, or it can go extinct.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the years, I\u2019ve written many columns concerning the war on Internet freedom. My usual targets are the politicians and government agencies who serve as shock troops for\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":160,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25960"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/160"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25960"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25960\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25961,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25960\/revisions\/25961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}