Alt-Tech Opinion for BlockTV Government vs Big Tech

This was my first Alt-Tech Opinion for BlockTV News.

Welcome back to BlockTV. I’m Brian of London and this is my alt-tech opinion for BlockTV on the 3rd of February 2020.

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that the big tech giants, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple have too much power and control. Whether that’s a problem or not seems to be related to the size of your slice of their massive lobbying budgets.

The Antitrust Subcommittee of the US House Judiciary Committee is currently working on an investigation and a couple of weeks ago the committee took time out from impeaching Trump to continue doing something useful, perhaps. They held a field hearing about the power of online platforms and spoke to witnesses specifically about Facebook, Google Amazon and Apple.

This was part of their investigation into the competitiveness of digital markets: this is a bipartisan investigation which will generate a report and recommendations for new laws and regulations seeking to govern how big tech platforms work.

This meeting took testimony, under oath, from four witnesses⁠1. All four told compelling stories of how difficult it is to innovate in a market dominated by companies which have grown so huge. Throughout I heard a clear tension between business people who want government to get out of the way and let them innovate, against a recognition that Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon have grown unnaturally large and are now a threat to innovation.

This is David Heinemeier Hansson, the CTO of software service provider Basecamp.

[Video]

It was very clear in all of those tests that Facebook was by far and away the most effective way to market because of the immense amount of personal data that they have so we could target our apps to just an astonishing degree and no other advertising platform was able to compete and this is why Google who also has the same sort of capabilities of charging and Facebook is able to capture 99% of all growth in Internet advertisement as was stated in that report from 2016 because they simply have devastatingly effective machinery.

He’s arguing, and I’m in complete agreement, Facebook and Google managed to collect and gather a trove of personal information in an early gold rush. Most people had no idea they were handing over something this valuable in aggregate because individually they either thought it a fair exchange for free email, photo sharing with grandma and some shiny beads or they simply never thought of it. Apple and Amazon are sitting on similar power.

As these giants grew quickly, the incumbents in the advertising market, whose business they were eating, didn’t see it coming. Back in 2010 now prominent crypto invester, Lou Kerner, made what seemed like a wild prediction for Facebook advertising revenue in 2015 and that Facebook would come to dominate online advertising and how online advertising would dominate advertising in general.

[Video 48s]

Facebook hit his prediction about 18 months after his prediction but this was still wild growth.

I have worked on and run many websites since before Facebook started up until today:  especially in news and opinion, Facebook can easily send 70% of a site’s traffic. Whether you’re buying adverts using their astonishingly intrusive targeting data, or just trying to have your thoughts heard, Facebook is the giant you can’t ignore. 

For the crypto world, we can’t ignore Facebook’s January 2018 ban on crypto advertising and their casting of cryptocurrencies as a “frequently associated with misleading or deceptive practices”.

[Read]

Ads must not promote financial products and services that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices, such as binary options, initial coin offerings, or cryptocurrency.

Google and Twitter copied this weeks later. This attack on an entire industry that may one day compete with these incumbent giants doesn’t appear to have been illegal in America (though it may have broken Australia’s anti-cartel laws).

America doesn’t really have the same anti-trust regulations as Australia which is a pity. Even now the politicians don’t seem to know what to do next. Toward the end of the hearing the politicians ask the panel what they suggest: the short version is they really don’t know what to do about it.

Speaking in a separate interview to the Verge⁠2, committee chairman David Cicilline said this:

[Audio 36s]

This is not an investigation that results in an enforcement action investigation.

Congress is the only place that has the ability to actually change the statutes and update the laws and put proposed regulations in place that actually fix this marketplace. So unlike an enforcement action that focuses on the behavior — a single company gets directed to do a single thing — our work is much broader. And it is actually more significant because if we do it right, we can get this digital marketplace working properly. And that will benefit consumers. It will benefit the next great company that’s going to come down the pike because competition was possible.

The US Government is slowly coming to terms with the dramatic concentration of power which has happened to social media, online advertising, local, national and international news, retail sales and the distribution of apps on our phones, the most important communication devices in the world. It didn’t happen overnight, but it happened to fast than for governments.

But for those of us with the ear to the ground in the crypto world, where suspicion of big government and their regulations is real and well founded, how do we feel about whatever this committee will propose? Does anyone think US authorities have done a great job regulating crypto? Can we place most of their efforts in the category of mostly harmful?

If you’ve got an opinion, look me up on twitter @brianoflondon or @brianoflondon on Steemit. Tell me know what you think.

For now, that’s Brian’s Alt-tech opinion.

1 https://judiciary.house.gov/calendar/eventsingle.aspx?EventID=2386

2 https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/23/21078903/podcast-house-antitrust-chairman-cicilline-tech-monopoly-vergecast

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You can join the fight against the Tech Goliaths in two ways, you have a no win no fee claim or you wish to help finance the case.

⭐️ Please join the case if you held crypto and have a claim.

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Podcast talks Israel Deal of the Century, Brexit and Impeachment

BrianofLondon's Forest Talks
BrianofLondon's Forest Talks
Podcast talks Israel Deal of the Century, Brexit and Impeachment
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First up it’s Trump and Jared Kushner’s Deal of the Century for Israel and the Palestinians. I started a long thread about this which you can find here. The very first page gave me this post about the understanding of Islamic Jihad that is missing from this plan. The deal isn’t really a deal, as Melanie Phillips points out, it’s an ultimatum.

After that I talk a bit about Brexit day as the UK formerly left he EU at 11pm UK time on 31st of January 2020.

For other good reading on Trump’s Deal, I recommend this piece by Melanie Phillips:

But the plan states the all-important historical truth denied by the Palestinians because it vitiates their entire claim to the land — that Jerusalem was the political center of the Jewish people under King David, and has remained their spiritual center and the focus of their religious beliefs for nearly 3,000 years.

The Trump plan won’t bring peace; however, it restores the truth and justice that are essential prerequisites of peace. Crushing the lethal and poisonous fantasies about Israel and the Jewish people, as well as taking a hard-headed approach to Palestinian intentions, it replaces illusions by reality.

If you want a tremendous (but long) read on something that could actually work I suggest you study this plan: The Two-STAGE Solution to the Arab-Israel Conflict. I’m going to have more to say about this in future videos.

“Antisemitism is a chronic illness that, when it flares up, eats away at the mind of those it infects, and destroys the hater more thoroughly than the hated. It can be cured, or at least controlled. The [Christian] Germans, Austrians, Italians, French, Romanians… today are largely cured of genocidal antisemitism [the underlying philosophical ideology of World War II], but the Arab nations are not, and, alarmingly, we see much evidence now of cross-infection back to Europe.”

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Deconstructing The Deal of the Century from Trump to Israel and the Palestinians

My opening opinion on the plan as a whole: this is a great deal and Israel will accept it in a way that is more unified than I have ever seen from Jews before. And you can even include many Israeli Arabs who will quietly go along with this. The Palestinian leadership, tied as it is to enriching itself from perpetual war and keeping their people back, will reject this. They have no interest in a state or good conditions for their people.

I was intending to read the whole thing but I stopped at the last paragraph on the 2nd page when I read a very important section which demonstrates exactly how Jared Kushner thinks (I know it is his point of view because of the interview he gave CNN included below).

The conflict between the State of Israel and the Palestinians has kept other Arab countries from normalizing their relationships and jointly pursuing a stable, secure, and prosperous region. One reason for the intractability of this problem is the conflation of two separate conflicts: a territorial, security and refugee dispute between Israel and the Palestinians and a religious dispute between Israel and the Muslim world regarding control over places of religious significance. The absence of formal relations between Israel and most Muslim and Arab countries has only exacerbated the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. We believe that if more Muslim and Arab countries normalize relations with Israel it will help advance a just and fair resolution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and prevent radicals from using this conflict to destabilize the region.

Page 2

This is the last paragraph on the first substantive page and the point at which I decided I couldn’t do this commentary on Twitter and where I can’t go through this whole document and tweet about it before I explain something. I can also match this up with an interview that Jared Kushner gave to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour last night and I’m highlighting this section:

Once I understood how Jared sees the religious dispute between the Muslim world and Israel as relating primarily to “places of religious significance” and therefore, in this case, the Jewish Temple Mount, I know that he hasn’t reached a useful understanding of how Jihad drives this conflict.

The building of a mausoleum and a Mosque on top of the ruins of the Jewish Temples which they call Haram al-Sharif, on Mount Moriah where Abraham was set to sacrifice his son Issac, was obviously an act of Islamic colonialism and a mark of conquest. The history of Islamic imperialism is littered with such actions. The destruction of the religious and cultural symbol of conquered civilisations is fundamental to Islamic colonisation. Replacing them with new Islamic symbols and buildings is very important.

Today’s dispute between the Islamic world and Jewish Israel isn’t about a few hundred square meters and some buildings, it’s about the very existence of non-subjugated Jews, living in a land of their own. Islam wants Jews to be Dhimmis again. Jews (and this now seems to be the majority of Israeli Jews, even the ones who aren’t descended from populations which historically lived as subservient Dhimmis in Islamic lands.

In 2010 I wrote on Israellycool that Jews Must Never be Dhimmis Again. I’m repeating that post here because it captures everything that is missing from Jared’s understanding of why there is no peace between Islam and Israel.

Jews must never be Dhimmis again and it would be nice if a leader of Israel would actually speak the true reason why we’re not going to be a minority in a Muslim country again. What have we got to lose, the whole Muslim world hates us anyway*?

We face a few big lies:

Big LIE 1: Israel is not Jewish. This comes from Islam which is a replacement theology. Moses was a Muslim who led all the Children of Israel (including the good ones who were Muslim) to the Promised Land (for the good Israelites who were Muslims). I’m really not joking and when it’s not late on a Saturday I can provide references. Anytime a lying Imam trots out the verse that promises Israel to the Jews, he’s not mentioning this little gem.

Big LIE 2: Jews and Christians were treated better in places like Muslim Spain and the Ottoman Empire than by Christians. This is another big lie and comes from the total ignorance of the history of Dhimmi peoples and the lack of understanding that Dhimmis are not second class citizens, they are not CITIZENS. They have no rights, especially not the right to life, as all rights granted them can be revoked in an instant at the whim of a Muslim ruler.

Big LIE 3: Abrahamic faiths. I’m sorry this is the biggest and possibly the most dangerous lie. The relative suicide bomber scores of Islam, Christianity and Judaism should be enough to realise that the Jewish and Christian vision of God is nothing like our Muslim brothers’. That’s just the start: so Mohammad copied down some stories from Jews badly, every other aspect of Islam runs contrary to the message of freedom of thought and spirit in the Torah.

Are we seeing a common problem here? It really is not Arabs and Jews. Sure the Dhimmi Arab Christians usually fall into line with the Muslims because that’s a survival tactic that Dhimmitude creates: divide and conquer playing one Dhimmi group against another. We could probably live OK ruled by Arab Christians but not by Muslims.

Jews must never be Dhimmis again and it would be nice if a leader of Israel would actually speak the true reason why we’re not going to be a minority in a Muslim country again. What have we got to lose, the whole Muslim world hates us anyway*?

* I know that what little drive there is in the Muslim world to wrestle their lives back from the mad totalitarian theocrats that increasingly run the show nowadays probably rests on the West supporting them. Well if the West doesn’t acknowledge that both Jews and true reformers of Islam face the same problems, can we ever give them real support? We don’t need to be loved, that’s a Christian desire. We need our strength to be respected.

Update 17 May 2016: This post has been up for a long time, but a conversation with an expert has led me to reconsider some wording. The following original wording:

Moses was a Muslim who led all the Children of Israel (who were all Muslim) to the Promised Land (for the Muslims).

I am changing this to:

Moses was a Muslim who led all the Children of Israel (including the good ones who were Muslim) to the Promised Land (for the good Israelites who were Muslims).

The verses of the Quran 5:32 and 5:33 (the first of which is quoted often and is actually a piece of Jewish law taken out of context) make specific mention of the Children of Israel but go on to qualify WHICH Children of Israel are to be regarded as good. The ones who don’t do “corruption in the land”.

5:32 – Because of that, We decreed upon the Children of Israel that whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption [done] in the land – it is as if he had slain mankind entirely. And whoever saves one – it is as if he had saved mankind entirely. And our messengers had certainly come to them with clear proofs. Then indeed many of them, [even] after that, throughout the land, were transgressors.

5:33 – Indeed, the penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] corruption is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land. That is for them a disgrace in this world; and for them in the Hereafter is a great punishment,

Tommy Robinson receives the prestigious Sappho Award from the Free Press Society in Denmark

This morning I tweeted that all the attempts to wipe Tommy Robinson off the internet may appear to have worked but its probably only the quisling elites who are fooling themselves into thinking Tommy went away.

Just because there isn’t one central place to see news of Tommy (beyond his website TR.News and the Telegram feed he controls himself), that doesn’t mean he isn’t reaching a large audience.

News Reports

Ruptly News report

This is the description RUPTLY put on their video, recording it here in case their video disappears (as these things have a habit of doing)

Former leader of the English Defence League (EDL), Tommy Robinson, was awarded a freedom of speech award by the Free Press Society of 2004 in Copenhagen on Saturday, as protesters demonstrated outside the venue.

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, received the ‘Sappho Award,’ a prize that according to the Free Press Society of 2004’s website is “awarded to a person who has shown uncompromising courage in the struggle for the free word.”

While accepting his prize, Robinson said “Silicon Valley, the alliance of globalists, Islamists and the far-left, are taking away our free speech.”

“The British establishment, I believe, they looked and saw the power that we had through Facebook, through social media,” Robinson said. “This level of censorship terrifies me, the control that Silicon Valley now has in controlling how people think.”

Protesters were seen gathered outside the venue where the award was given, holding flags and chanting slogans against racism and hate.

The Free Press Society, or Trykkefrihedsselskabet in Danish, believes “the biggest threat against freedom of speech currently comes from Islam” according to their website. The organisation gives its yearly Sappho award to prominent critics of Islam including author Douglas Murray, conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, whose drawing of the prophet Muhammad drew international controversy in 2005, and Flemming Rose, who was responsible for the cartoon’s publication while editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

Videos of the speech

Free Press Society’s original link (won’t embed) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMFWbJ9yuiw&feature=youtu.be.

Tommy’s original YouTube channel version is here, again this won’t embed.

3speak version on Tommy’s channel

TR.News YouTube Channel (new channel)

Ezra Levant’s livestream version from Rebel

This version is low quality but included here because it gained over 60,000 views before the high quality version was released.

Bitchute Version on Tommy’s channel.

LBRY version on Tommy’s channel.

Interviews

Danish TV Show with Subtitles

Tommy’s backup recording of interview with print journalist

This was an interview with Denmark’s second largest newspaper, Berlingske which Tommy recorded.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1219518959168389121.html

Facebook and Google are the corrupt oligarchs of data

Last week the US House Judiciary Committee took time out from their busy schedule of impeaching Donald Trump to actually do something useful. They held a field hearing about the power of online platforms and spoke to witnesses specifically about Facebook, Google and Amazon. This was the title of the hearing:

Field Hearing: Online Platforms and Market Power, Part 5: Competitors in the Digital Economy

Date: Friday, January 17, 2020 – 10:00am
Location: 01/17/2020 10:00 AM MST
Tags: Antitrust

If you want to watch the whole thing, you can here (link). Fox had a good write up. All of the witnesses told compelling stories of how difficult it is to innovate in a market dominated by companies that have grown so huge. Throughout I heard a clear tension between business people who clearly want government to get out of the way and let them innovate, but a recognition that Google, Facebook and Amazon (in particular) have grown unnaturally large and are now a threat to innovation.

I pulled out the following clip by the CTO of software service provider Basecamp, David Heinemeier Hansson. He has decided not to use Facebook for advertising and he explains how that is so difficult to do. It is entirely analogous to a news site or prominent individual who choses not to be active on Facebook or is banned from it for whatever reason.

He’s arguing, and I completely agree with him, Facebook and Google managed to collect and gather a trove of personal information in an early gold rush. Most people had no idea they were handing over something this valuable in aggregate because individually they thought it a fair exchange for shiny beads and services. Amazon is also sitting on a similar power.

I no longer have access to Facebook and I absolutely know that for the kind of blog posts I write, I would receive something like 70% of my traffic from there if I merely had a Facebook mirror of my blog posts. Whether you’re buying adverts using their astonishingly intrusive targeting data, or just trying to have your thoughts heard, Facebook is the giant you can’t ignore. That’s one of the reasons why their ban on crypto advertising had such a devastating effect.

America doesn’t really have the same anti-trust regulations we’re using in Australia for our suit. Which is a pity, they don’t seem to know what to do. Toward the end of the hearing the politicians ask the panel what they suggest: the short version is they really don’t know what to do about it!

You can join the fight against the Tech Goliaths in two ways, you have a no win no fee claim or you wish to help finance the case.

⭐️ Please join the case if you held crypto and have a claim.

🏅 You can directly contribute crypto on Fundition. To send fiat currency via PayPal click here. If you want to talk about a large donation, Telegram or email me.