this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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Take some of that money you get fining surveillance-capitalists and use it to fund privacy-respecting libre alternatives
Fined Facebook €1.2 billion in May 2023
Fined Facebook €390 million in Jan 2023
Fined Microsoft €561 million in March 2013
"fined the company [Google] more than $9 billion for anticompetitive practices since 2017" (2019 article)
Nice idea, I love. But you have to remember, those investigations cost huge time and money. When you consider the cost of a full-time staff over the 10 years, you include. Plus the cost of building a case against some of the largest cooperation. All before any court costs are considered.
We are likely better off having that money reinvested in preventing other companies from these practices.
I don't think the issues you raise are valid.
It costs more than zero to levy a fine, but we are talking about many billions in income here. Your point would be valid if gathering staff and then fining Google 9 billion were a net zero. It isn't.
Which is what I suggested. The best way to prevent these practices is libre alternatives.
I got an idea: let's use their AI to do investigations.
All the cloud services are built on top of free software, and big tech just built user interfaces on top of them.
That wasn't the intended purpose of course, to support billionaries becoming multi billionaries. So maybe a percentage of the profits should go back to the makers.
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