RE: Corporate Online Censorship: Invisible Rules

I didn't say the freemarket doesn't seem to work. It's just that monopolies need to be regulated. Here's an anecdote from my own country. My government sold 40% of shares of the national telecom to Orange in 2000. We started getting ADSL but at a very expensive price compared to other countries in the world.

There were competitors trying to compete, but they all died off because the telecom controlled the only undersea cable to the other places and any other company which wanted to use it had to pay a fee to them.

For more than a decade, I had to suffer hrough crappy ADSL with constant cuts with me usually calling their services several times. Not to mention what they offered wasn't cheap, but I had no other choice. The other competitors seemed to have an even worse service.

As the years went by, the government implemented price cuts to the internet packages in an effort to give internet access to everyone, as the problems with their internet service also became less frequent. But still to this day, what I'm paying is still more expensive than if I was to pay it in some other country.

So now remove the government in the equation. Let's say they didn't own any part of the Telecom. Honestly, we would all be fucked by Orange hard. Sure, they did innovate, but their premium pricing kept the lower class off the internet as long as they could. In 2004, no one I knew had ADSL. I was one of the few that did, and the reason why they didn't get it was the exorbitant pricing that Orange had at the time.

Now you think Google will fall? That's very unlikely, and even if they did, another monopoly will soon take over.

And this is why I will never ascribe to the no government idea. They aren't there to stifle innovation, because if they are, then they're doing a terrible job. They're here to improve the lives of the populace, and if they can do it without having to stifle innovation and competition, which they didn't in my case, then it is the realistic, and smart solution.

Unfortunately, because the US is so much in bed with corporations, Google, Facebook and Twitter will be the defacto social media for a very long time.