Algorithmic advertising big tech companies (Meta, Google, Amazon, etc) generate profit at the expense of society. They blindly follow short term algorithms with no regard for their impact on society. We obviously should tax them but we should also make sure our laws enable us to prosecute people who profit by destroying society. Hold them accountable
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.
A class action lawsuit of several billion people would be kind of cool. Award everyone with $1000 minimum for the last decade+ of damages and see what happens 🤗
The tax would be a three per cent levy on the digital services revenue a company makes from Canadian users above $20 million in a calendar year. It would apply only to companies with annual worldwide revenue of more than about $1.1 billion. Alphabet Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. are among those set to be impacted.
The government points out in the budget that at least seven other countries, including the U.K., France, Italy and Spain, already have similar taxes in place.
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