Rising Tide Rents and Robber Baron Rents – O’Reilly
Why is it that Google, a company once known for its distinctive “Do no evil” guideline, is now facing the same charges of “surveillance capitalism” as Facebook, a company that never made such claims? Why is it now subject to the same kind of antitrust complaints once faced by Microsoft, the “evil empire” of the previous generation of computing? Why is it that Amazon, which has positioned itself as “the most customer-centric company on the planet,” now lards its search results with advertisements, placing them ahead of the customer-centric results chosen by the company’s organic search algorithms, which prioritize a combination of low price, high customer ratings, and other similar factors?
Tim O’Reilly, champion of technology companies and the internet economy for decades. So when someone like he joins the chorus of criticism of the rent seeking behaviour of major tech platforms, well, something really is in the water.
