Bonum Certa Men Certa

Big Telecom, Big Tech and Big Business (Harmful and Collusive Not Unlike Big Tobacco and Big Oil)

Video download link



Summary: Monopolies in one domain (or oligopolies of convenience, whose lobbying overlaps and price-fixing agenda is symbiotic) also protect one another on the Web and the Internet at large

I've never experienced (for a certainty) Internet throttling until I operated my own IPFS node. It doesn't infringe copyright or anything; it only serves or disseminates my own work (strictly) and it was working fine, without throttling, for a number of months.



"That so-called 'Big Telecom' or 'Big Tech' seek to protect Big Business or Big Pharma from scrutiny is highly expected/predictable and hardly surprising."Earlier this morning we pointed out how corruption (corporate crimes) is generally considered OK, whereas raising inconvenient questions about such corruption is just "toxic" and mostly impermissible (they would go to great lengths to censor such views, almost as if the problem is people who highlight abuse rather than the abuse itself). At the EPO, for example, Benoît Battistelli threatened litigation against published works that exposed EPO corruption and António Campinos still blocks access to Techrights as if mere information about the EPO is a hazard.

In this censorious climate, where those who break the law seek to muzzle their critics and exposers, it's essential to pursue or resort to censorship-resistant means of communication (or medium that makes it abundantly hard to accomplish complete elimination of certain voices). Publishers need true platform autonomy. That so-called 'Big Telecom' or 'Big Tech' seek to protect Big Business or Big Pharma from scrutiny is highly expected/predictable and hardly surprising. There are many overlaps and they share many of the same interests. Peer to peer is the real 'populism' in that sort of context; it decentralises power and eliminates monopoly on control.

In the case of the EPO, it has always been all about monopoly, but nowadays it is a lot more grotesque, with totally inadequate and unqualified managers who get the job (flown over, not even promoted) just because they're like little fish swimming around the big shark. No, not Campinos or Battistelli but super-rich people and corporations that amass many tens of thousands of patents for no reason other than protectionism, in effect building some "legal barbwire" around their 'franchising' territory, ensuring competition is absent and thus prices remain artificially high, sometimes colluding with an illusion of competitors for price-fixing purposes. Of course this contributes to growing inequality and lowers the number of jobs available.

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