Last year, the tech giants made almost a trillion dollars in revenues. Put a different way: a thousand billion.
It’s little wonder that governments starved by the pandemic are screaming “Share us the money!” Or that news organizations, whose fall is a direct function of social media’s rise, are looking to their captors to be their saviours.
In Canada, this takes the form of girding the governments of France, Finland, Germany and Austria, to regulate Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft whose sheer globalness allows them to avoid taxes and sanctions for smothering the arts and creativity in each of the home and native lands they profit from.
For our own news organizations, as the Globe and Mail reported: “Canada’s news industry lobby group is pressuring the federal government to force Google and Facebook to pay for content from all domestic media platforms, rather than allowing the digital giants to “divide and conquer” by cutting a series of deals with news organizations.”
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