“The speed of digital change has been higher than we expected and by now the Net has penetrated every corner of our lives: work, leisure, the organization of political debate and social protest, even our social relationships and our affections. But the master network has thrown the mask and the daily reality of her is very different from the visions of libertarian idealists who planned a new world of knowledge and opportunities within everyone's reach. The new Masters of the Universe are called Apple and Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter”.
What emerges from the pages of the latest book by Federico Rampini, essayist and correspondent of "Republic" from New York, which is not by chance entitled "Network owner - Amazon, Apple, Google & co., the dark face of the digital revolution” (Feltrinelli, 278 pages, 18 euros). A process that in some ways echoes the indictment – the first to appear in Italy – conducted two years ago by the then president of Telecom Italia, Franco Bernabè against the over the top in his “Supervised freedom. Privacy, security and the market on the web”, Laterza editore.
Rampini does not at all despise the changes, in many cases positive, that the digital revolution has ensured to the daily life of all of us but he warns that all that glitters is not gold and that the sins of the Internet giants are impressive. And it is better to know them to regulate. But what sins would Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon have committed? The main ones are the lack of transparency on balance sheets and tax evasion in the countries where they make profits, monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior on the markets and the intrusion into everyone's private life with a consequent violation of privacy bordering on espionage.
“Google – writes Rampini – initially has revolutionary, progressive, even anti-capitalist movements. His motto is 'Do n't be evil', that is, don't be evil, try to do good”. And in fact at its origins Google “excludes any advertising from the results of its search engine. Except for renegade when the search engine becomes world number one and crushes the competition" which makes Google "the most gigantic advertising machine on the planet and the logic of marketing for profit creeps into the results of our searches and distorts them without our knowledge ”.
Even Steve Jobs does not come off well from the sharp pen of Rampini who accuses him of having pushed his Apple down the slope of an involution that changed its nature and made it betray its initial promises by channeling it "into a closed and impenetrable system" and becoming "the author of an ignoble exploitation of Chinese labor, in those Foxcomm factories that Jobs himself refused even to visit".
In turn, Facebook and Twitter were born "as toys for kids, to make us all closer to each other, more friends and more communicative" but "they quickly transform into machines for destroying our privacy, they spy on us to sell information about our tastes and our consumption to the best buyer”.
What about Amazon? “An American publisher compares it to the Godfather. A major newspaper calls it the Octopus” but the truth is that “twenty years after its foundation, it is a real challenge to shed light on such a mysterious company (like Amazon) that, by comparison, the Apple of Steve Jobs' times was almost transparent” and it is not surprising that “the creature that Jeff Bezos began to build in 1994 is held up as an unstoppable Moloch, capable of devouring sectors, crushing the competition. And not just in books. Indeed, warns Rampini, "those who still identify Amazon with the sale of books are many chapters behind" because this business today represents only 7% of Amazon's turnover, which is now an online supermarket that "sells just about everything: iPods or lawn mowers , toys and works of art, diapers or shoes, 3D printers, firearms, even vibrators” and is the true competitor of Walmart, the number one large-scale retailer, unlike which it does not just sell but can also rent and produce.
But where will Amazon's relentless growth go? He will end up bringing "a book to my house before I've even ordered it (because) Amazon's latest gimmick is 'unsolicited advance reservations', i.e. books ordered before they're even out and before we even know any the existence (as) Amazon is convinced that it knows our tastes to the point of anticipating what we would like to fill our shopping cart just like we would do”. With all due respect to our freedom of choice.
In just ten years since its birth, Facebook can also boast of having changed many aspects of our lives and of having freed us "from the prison of the email which presupposed a response while Facebook didn't because its messages are spread universally" even if a study of Princeton University argues that Facebook will reach its peak and then rapidly collapse until it loses 80% of its users. Especially after the stratospheric acquisition of WhatsApp ("which adds a million new users every 24 hours" is winning its challenge against the telecom giants and against other social networks but Facebook is the expression of a singular "capitalism without profits" , celebrated perhaps too much on the Stock Exchange but not obsessed with immediate profitability, not because it is not interested in profits but because “the priority is to expand turnover, make a clean sweep of the competition and aim for semi-monopoly.” Profits will come later.
Particularly hard and well documented is what Rampini calls "the robbery of the century", i.e. the ability of Apple and the other big digital companies to evade taxes by seeking privileged tax treatments even if legal in the so-called tax havens on which sooner or later Europe it will have to wake up and begin to re-discuss tax competition which is absurd between states that are part of the same European Union.
But competition violations are also a very strong charge of the book which ruthlessly summarizes the ongoing debate between jurists on the relationship between Antitrust and big digital companies recalling what the "New York Times" wrote on May 2, 2014, namely that " If Steve Jobs were still alive, he'd be in jail today." Other than sanctification.
And what about the privacy violations of which Internet users are innocent victims on a daily basis and often unknowingly? “The advertising pie remains the real stake in the battle between the giants of the Net and to conquer it Google is ready to sneak into our heads in an ever more invasive way”. The Google Maps scandal is a sensational proof of this. “Google's camera cars didn't just photograph streets and squares to build and update the mapping of our cities. They were also spying on us and by intercepting the Wi-Fi signals in our home they took over passwords, emails, even bank accounts and medical information. Blatant espionage, invasion of privacy on a massive scale, with millions of unsuspecting victims: us." Discovered in 2010, Google first denied it but was eventually forced to admit its guilt and settle the sentence.
In short, the Internet has changed our lives but the digital giants, beyond the initial promises, have not done it for charity and are ready to do anything to achieve their goals. There are no scruples at all. Just know it and learn to defend yourself. But it's time to get out of the spell and understand that a great battle of civilization is being waged on the transparency of the Internet. Which is worth doing to grasp the best that the digital revolution offers us but without giving up one's critical capacity and one's personal freedom.
