OF MSM: Google & Facebook

A Journal of People report

Reports regularly expose the mainstream media (MSM) Following are two reports:

Israeli military contract. Google employees protest.

Google employees protesting the company’s Project Nimbus contract with Amazon Web Services and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have gone public with a week of protest actions set to culminate in a multi-city demonstration headlined No Tech for Apartheid.

A multiethnic, multireligious group of Googlers calling themselves Jewish Diaspora in Tech hopes to pressure the tech giant into dropping the mammoth $1.2 billion contract on moral grounds, arguing that by allowing Israel access to its most sophisticated machine learning and AI technology, Google is enabling heinous crimes against the occupied Palestinian population. 

National Security Search Engine: Google’s Ranks are filled with CIA Agents

Alan Macleod

MintPress News | July 25, 2022

Google – one of the largest and most influential organizations in the modern world – is filled with ex-CIA agents. Studying employment websites and databases, MintPress has ascertained that the Silicon Valley giant has recently hired dozens of professionals from the Central Intelligence Agency in recent years. Moreover, an inordinate number of these recruits work in highly politically sensitive fields, wielding considerable control over how its products work and what the world sees on its screens and in its search results.

Chief amongst these is the trust and safety department, whose staff, in the words of then Google trust and safety vice president Kristie Canegallo, “[d]ecide what content is allowed on our platform” – in other words, setting the rules of the internet, determining what billions see and what they do not see. Before Google, Canegallo had been President Obama’s Deputy White House Chief of Staff for Implementation and is currently Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security.

Spying On Users: Google, Facebook Hit With More Than $200M In Fines By French Regulators

Countercurrents Collective | January 07, 2022

A French privacy watchdog accused the tech giants Google and Facebook of making it difficult for users to opt out of tracking their activity.

France’s online privacy regulator has ordered Google and Facebook to cough up some €210 million ($237 million) between them, fining the firms for their questionable use of data-tracking ‘cookies’ on their sites.

A report by The Hill (https://thehill.com/policy/technology/588551-google-facebook-hit-with-more-than-200m-in-fines-by-french-regulators) said:

An investigation found the sites “offer a button allowing the user to immediately accept cookies” but they do not provide an option to “easily refuse the deposit of these cookies,” the CNIL data privacy watchdog announced on Thursday.

Google Employees and Other Alphabet Units Form a Union

WORKERS OF TECH GIANTS ARE FIGHTING BACK

teleSUR | January 05, 2021

The new labor group focuses not only on wages and benefits like most unions, but also aims to play a role in the tech giant’s ethical decisions and protection against arbitrary firings for activism.

Employees of U.S. tech company Google and other units of its parent company Alphabet announced Monday the creation of a union, intensifying a period of activism targeting the Silicon Valley giants.

According to a statement, the Alphabet Workers Union, affiliated with the Communications Workers of America, aims to represent well-paid workers in the tech sector and temporary employees and contractors.

Physicists in China Challenge Google’s ‘Quantum Advantage’

QUANTUM MECHANICS 

Philip Ball

Nature | December 03, 2020

This photonic computer performed in 200 seconds a calculation that on an ordinary supercomputer would take 2.5 billion years to complete.Credit: Hansen Zhong

A team in China claims to have made the first definitive demonstration of ‘quantum advantage’ — exploiting the counter-intuitive workings of quantum mechanics to perform computations that would be prohibitively slow on classical computers.

Empire of High Technology: Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook Achieve ‘Monopoly Power’

MONOPOLIES IN CAPITALISM

C. J. Atkins

People’s World | October 07, 2020

A new report from the House Judiciary Committee says that the four digital giants Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Google have achieved ‘monopoly power’ in their industries and should be broken up. Here, people participate in a giant game of Monopoly at an event in 2013. | Rick Rycroft / AP

In the middle of the last century, Marxist economist Victor Perlo described the U.S. economy as an “empire of high finance.” If he were writing today, he’d probably update his assessment to say U.S. capitalism has also become an “empire of high technology.”

The U.S. House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust essentially dances around that conclusion in a new 450-page report released Oct. 6 which declares that the digital giants Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Alphabet (Google) have achieved “monopoly power” in a variety of sectors. The report recommends a range of reforms, including breaking up the tech conglomerates.

The indictment of Big Tech is the product of a 16-month-long investigation that surveyed over a million documents, conducted dozens of interviews, and held seven hearings. The report presents extensive evidence concerning the extent to which the companies “have exploited, entrenched, and expanded their power over digital markets in anticompetitive and abusive ways.”

Russia Condemns Google Blocking of Cuban Accounts

IMPERIALIST AGGRESSION AGAINST CUBA 

Granma | September 03, 2020

Photo: Granma

The Russian Federation’s Foreign Ministry recently denounced Google’s blocking of this newspaper’s account and those of other Cuban news media by the U.S. digital media conglomerate Google.

Google Amazon Facebook and Investment in Real Estate

ECONOMY 

A Journal of People report

Google is planning to build a town-like campus near its headquarters in Mountain View, California.

The proposal for the new campus – Middlefield Park – near its Silicon Valley headquarters has been submitted this month.

The campus would span a 40-acre site and include public amenities like parks and sports field, retail space, restaurants, and affordable housing.

Google and Facebook pay way less tax in New Zealand than in Australia – and we’re paying the price

by Victoria Plekhanova

The New Zealand government’s recently announced NZ$50 million subsidy package to support local media was necessary and urgent – even if it came too late to save the Bauer magazine titles from closing.

But the injection of government cash did not address the underlying cause of the decline of New Zealand’s media, which predates the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the internet has created new opportunities for media and audiences alike, those opportunities have come at a price. Traditional media organisations now compete with giant digital platforms, not only for the attention of readers, but also for the advertising revenue that was once their lifeblood.

INTERNET MARKET: U.S. allows Google Internet Project to advance only if Hong Kong is cut out

A Journal of People report

Major efforts are going on in the global internet market. Google subsidiary agrees to pursue internet “diversification” in Asia to block China access to U.S. market. The global internet continues to disintegrate into regional internets.

The Wall Street Journal reported on April 8, 2020:

U.S. officials granted Google permission to turn on a high-speed internet link to Taiwan but not to the Chinese territory of Hong Kong, citing national-security concerns in a ruling that underscores fraying ties between Washington and Beijing.