Welcome back to BlockTV. I’m Brian of London and this is my alt-tech opinion for BlockTV on the 3^rd 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 witnesses^⁠1. 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 Verge^⁠2, 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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Which is to say I don’t trust Facebook with anything.

The conclusion of this post is join our law suit in Australia either helping to fund the legal fees (with a chance of a return on your donation) or sign up as a no-win no-fee class member in line for cash when we beat Facebook in court!

Facebook went full facist this week banning more overwhelmingly conservative voices. I lost my account back in the Tommy Robinson purge over a month ago. My Brian of London Page was deleted while I was in London last week. I don’t want Facebook controlled or regulated, I want Facebook destroyed. I don’t believe regulation, even along the lines Will Chamberlain eloquently lays out, within the framework of the USA’s 1st Amendment, will work.

I want Facebook destroyed. Raheem Kassam gets it, also at Human Events:

This is a civil rights issue, and I do not say it with a semblance of hyperbole.

What is happening to conservatives or nationalists is as important as what happened to Soviet-era dissidents.

Book ‘burning’ is already a thing.

The gulags do not follow far behind.

Bret Stephens in the New York Times (in a condescending piece as usual making clear to denounce those whose free speech he’s begrudgingly defending) has one bright paragraph:

The deeper problem is the overwhelming concentration of technical, financial and moral power in the hands of people who lack the training, experience, wisdom, trustworthiness, humility and incentives to exercise that power responsibly.

Put simply Facebook and Google are individually and jointly too powerful to be run by those accidentally chosen to be running them. Arguably there isn’t a method of governance known to man which could safely control such power.

There are now a number of very credible reports that Facebook is gearing up to launch its own crypto currency for people to use within Facebook’s walled garden. You’ll be able to “buy” into Facebook’s own currency then send and receive crypto money with friends and, I’m sure, buy goods and services from hungry vendors.

A Wall Street Journal report says Facebook is recruiting dozens of financial firms and online merchants to help launch a cryptocurrency-based payments system with each staking up to US$1B. If the company can convince five partners to join them that would make Facebook’s coin one of the five most valuable coins by market capitalisation instantly based on current valuations.

Facebook has a team of about 50 boffins working on the project which is housed in a secured wing at Facebook HQ according to reports.

All the while, Facebook will take a cut of all transactions: 1% 2% or more. We don’t know their fee structure: they’ll be competing with the entire global credit card and payment processing industry and cracking the legs out from under giants like PayPal and their younger competitors. They’ll enter the field with gigantic scale. And I and many other wrong thinking people are ideologically banned from this field of commerce before it even exists.

But what’s really interesting is only one year ago, Facebook declared almost any business considering using the same technology that underlies their crypto-currency (the “blockchain”) is likely to be a scam business and too dangerous to be allowed to advertise on Facebook. Google imposed an identical ban at roughly the same time.

Just so you understand the difference though, I can send and receive Steem to anyone for FREE. No FEES. Facebook will be charging fees somewhere for sure. That’s a feature of crypto currencies but it’s the one Facebook will exploit to make money from you. They’ve already had years selling your private information and your posts, now they want real cash from you.

Facebook is too dangerous to exist: it is the culmination of a century of dreams by totalitarian dictator musing on how to better spy on and control their populations. That so many willingly submit their most private thoughts to this monster in return for its “features” is a shame of our civilisation.

Help us take down Facebook. Join our law suit in Australia either helping to fund the legal fees (with a chance of a return on your donation) or sign up as a no-win no-fee class member in line for cash when we beat Facebook in court!.

If you derive value from my work, please consider donating some value my way. You can find all the details on the donation page.