Seriously missing the point
Tech-tyrants always see governments as the problem and corporations as the solution. Not surprising for the leaders of the movement, who work for the corporations** that will "finally solve" us. The followers really ought to be thinking more carefully.

This article from EFF shows how it works.

In a decision that has troubling implications for free expression online, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld a company’s effort to force Google to de-list entire domains and websites from its search index, effectively making them invisible to everyone using Google’s search engine.

The case itself was typical of another problem that I noted yesterday: Missing the essential business of Google. One company complained that Google was giving their competitor better placement in searches. Well duh. The competitor was paying for better placement, and Google quite properly gave them what they paid for. Google is an advertising agency running a library.

If you want a library without advertising, you can find one downtown. The Public Library has its own biases and does its own censorship, but it probably won't edit the phone books to favor one router company over another. Unless one router company is suspected of Christianity, or suspected of considering the possibility of harboring the thought that one or two Christians might be allowed to survive, in which case the Public Library will carbon-neutrally burn all books that might possibly contain the name or anything remotely resembling it.

You pays your money and you takes your tyrant.

In the Canadian case the court forced Google to alter its listings everywhere. EFF is complaining that this is globalist tyranny by the court.

No. It's globalist tyranny by Google. If Google operated strictly within one country, the court wouldn't have "global power". It would be ruling only for Canada. Stupid or not, the ruling would be legitimate. Because Google is illegitimately global, crossing all boundaries without respecting laws or taxes, the decision is leveraged up to the global level.

Back when the West was sane, Canadian laws forced US companies to build their products in Canada using Canadian labor and Canadian-sourced parts. Amazingly the US companies went along with the laws because they were operating as BUSINESSES who made PROFITS. They were not operating as SHARE-VALUE-INCREASING MACHINES like Google. They understood that paying people for labor was part of the circle of commerce. Canadian workers used their pay to buy Canadian Chevies, which added profit to GM in Detroit. If GM simply exported Chevies from Detroit, Canadian workers would have less money to buy Chevies and everything else.

The concept of paying for labor is now extinct. The concept of modularity, keeping commerce alive within each nation or province separately, is now extinct.

Local content laws helped to maintain a broad range of skills and industries in each country. GRAYBILL'S LAW. Sanity ended with a Free Trade Treaty in 1965, the first draft of NAFTA, opening the path for Canada to lose its skills and talents, and allowing US corporations to control everything.

The only solution to ALL of these problems is more modularity. I think this particular range of problems will be solved SOON without any special effort. EU is insisting on unenforceable limits, Canada is insisting on unenforceable limits, and BRICS/Silk Road is building its own independent net. Google will have to find a way to modularize. It will have to conform to local content laws in the same way that GM and Ford did before 1965. Create separate structures for each nation, with only limited coupling between them.

= = = = =

** I don't believe in trying to recover the "original" meaning of words; you have to go with current usage. Fascist and Marxist have no meaning at all except "I hate you". Nevertheless, the original meanings still apply here. EFF-style tech tyrants are exactly Fascists by the original Mussolini definition. Their utopia subsumes all life under one giant holy corporation run by a benevolent scholar-poet-king named Elon Musk. Anyone who disagrees with the benevolent scholar-poet-king is a Marxist.

Labels: skill-estate

  ¶ 2:13 AM