There are two ways to do everything. Business is no different. One of them is earn money through providing a service or product there is a demand for. Income is derived through the legitimate sale of service or product, or in the case of media, the product is the medium to deliver the ad message.
Then, there is the other way of doing business. Steal it.
The latter had been easy to catch when such antics involved blatant fraud. But today, some “internet’ based businesses have adopted a means of income acquisition that does not involve the purchase of a service or product. Its ‘free’. No it isn’t. In a short bit of Internet history, the ad supported model took over and companies thrived like the media they are. Then that was not good enough, so like broadcast media, more commercials (ads) covered the browsing experience. Then it was far more lucrative to keep the ads and keep making money hand over fist with ads, but then also grab the data about the ad viewer so ad prices can be more resulting in sales for advertisers. The price for that is the arbiter of fact, the decider of relevant. Deep inside, at its core, is the basic evil needed to run a company based on deception. Let us look at the biggest evil corporation on the planet:
Google.
Google’s business model is not to sell a product (although they do create and sell products too) they give away almost everything they offer. The model is to rape everything there is to know about the user of that free product. Sure, they tell you it is possible to ‘opt out’ of their tracking but it is not. A hallmark of a scam is the initial lie establishing credibility. Google’s is: Don’t be evil. It is nothing but a lie. ‘”Don’t be evil” is the motto of Google’s corporate code of conduct, first introduced around 2000. Following Google’s corporate restructuring under the conglomerate Alphabet Inc. in October 2015, Alphabet took “Do the right thing” as its motto, also forming the opening of its corporate code of conduct.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil Both are blatant lies.
Then this year!!! https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393 The whole don’t be evil thing is GONE! Now they are free to not lie about that. And that leaves the new slogan where the ‘right thing’ is a matter of political perspective, NOT LAW. Google is a weapon controlled by the highest bidder. Do you really want your stalker to know where you are at anytime?
They want information about you. So they track you everywhere you go on the Internet as if Google’s platform ‘is’ the Internet. In some cases it is. Searching puts you through a jump script that scans everything they can find out about you without you knowing it. Then, they use that data to target the ads the first good form of business would normally just sell. Is there anything wrong with targeting an ad? Not at all. Some people see the ads in certain parts of the day. Target that. Some people search for specific terms, target those. Some people only want local, target that. But there is, in gathering that information outside of the specific consumer request, a real world; brick and mortar result. Fraud.
Google also manages to control the overwhelming amount of Internet traffic destinations, so they are able to gather everything they can about you just by your using the search service. Even when you aren’t. In a digital age where information is everything, isn’t information worth far more than a company’s plans to steal every last bit of it? Shouldn’t Google have to pay every person who has ever used their ‘service’ for the misuse and non-permitted gathering of the deepest data on you?
But… as reality has a way of stepping in and making someone act like they really are, only in secret: Google is a clearing house for governments to ban information, censor content and control the reason why you use a Google product to begin with. Most of that outside of their ‘store’. How would you handle being stalked by a cobbler because you once took a discount of a pair of shoes you bought and now that cobbler is stalking you everywhere you go? Not well I’d presume. I would confront him and make it stop.
Google’s hidden services for the powerful include censoring what a country does not want the world to see. That alone should force an anti-trust break up of Alphabet (Google’s parent cabal.) If Google is so ready to censor the world for the benefit of gathering information about the people of China so the country of China can control them better, then Google is not a business in the United States, it is a foreign agent in the United States and censoring information at the instructions of a government, country or STATE within a country violates this country’s First Amendment as far as it could ever go.
Years ago Standard Oil was broken up by the Government because it was controlling too much of the supply chain and gobbling up competition at alarming rates. But Standard Oil, and The Bell Telephone Company were never like this. Those companies earned money on product and service. They just owned most of the propduct and service available. Google doesn’t care about competition. Google earns money on theft, deception and control of the very thing the Constitution prohibits control of. FREE Speech.
Google MUST be broken up and its search services split away from all other activities. The business model of stealing information about unsuspecting users must be illegal to do. Make it happen.