Amazon's history should teach us to beware 'friendly' internet giants
Source: The Observer
... Like the other titans of the online world – Google, Facebook, Yahoo and to a lesser extent, Microsoft – Amazon is driven by data and algorithms. But not entirely. What many of its customers may not realise is that the results generated by Amazon's search engine are partly determined by promotional fees extracted from publishers.
... That's a revealing metaphor: capitalism red in tooth and claw. And it's a useful antidote to the soothing PR of the corporations that now dominate our networked world. Up to now, they have succeeded in branding themselves as different in important ways from the bad old industrial behemoths of the past. Google has its much-vaunted "don't be evil" slogan, for example. Facebook just wants to help everyone to hook up to "share" and "like" stuff. (Strangely, there is no "dislike" button on Planet Facebook.) Amazon is fanatically committed to the philosophy that you – the customer – are always right. And so on.
As a public relations posture this branding strategy has been a brilliant success. We loathe, fear or suspect many of the companies that dominate the offline world – energy utilities, oil companies and banks, to name just three sectors. Yet the giants of cyberspace seem to escape such opprobrium. Instead, it seems that we cannot get enough of the "free" services that they offer.
Yet in Darwinian terms these new corporate giants are just the latest stage in the evolution of the public corporation. They exist to create wealth – vast quantities of it – for their founders and shareholders. Their imperative is to grow and achieve dominance in their chosen markets – as well as in others which they now deem to be within their reach. They are as hostile to trade unions, taxation and regulation as John D Rockefeller, JP Morgan and Andrew Carnegie ever were in their day. The only differences are that the new titans employ far fewer people, enjoy higher margins and are less harassed by governments than their predecessors.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/22/amazon-beware-friendly-internet-giants-google-facebook
= new reply since forum marked as read
