rottingleaf@lemmy.ziptoCanada@lemmy.ca•Canada to start taxing tech giants in 2024 despite U.S. complaints
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5 months agodespite threats from American lawmakers to carry out trade reprisals against a levy that will primarily hit U.S. firms
All while reddit and lemmy users accuse them of being right wing, neoliberal and all that.
What can be less neoliberal than mercantilism, really?
It’s not about short\long term or anything such.
It’s about oligopoly that inserted itself at the core of the society (where town squares, pubs, inns and paper media would be in “good old times”), openly abuses it and claims it’s normal. They are basically monetizing lies and distortion.
They are also very centralized and thus anti-democratic.
Taxing is not enough. I’d say making commercial social media should be illegal as a thing. Get back to newsgroups and web forums.
This doesn’t mean going back to stone age, nobody forces us to use actual Usenet. Freenet has decentralized newsgroups (Frost and FMS), it’s too slow, but P2P newsgroups are not an unsolvable task. Newsgroups don’t have to be text-only - if HTML e-mails are a thing, then so can be HTML is newsgroup posts.
Of course nobody will make them illegal, they benefit the same people who make laws.