No More Freedom for Tech (Companies)?

 Jack Ma is known to the world as a Chinese entrepreneur with a total of 41.2 billion dollars net worth, one of a few Asian businessmen who once reigned among the ten wealthiest people in the universe. Born on September 10th, 1964, he started his career as an English teacher and translator. However, he failed twice on the university exam entry test as he is less potent in Mathematics. During his visit to the United States in 1995, Ma soon realized that the lack of Chinese websites is an ample opportunity that inspired him to create some. Among them is Alibaba, a marketplace website that began its journey as an intermediary between small businesses in China. It later emerged as an e-commerce giant and a meticulous success for a Jack Ma.

More than many criticized, Ma’s success is primarily supported by his close relationship with President Xi Jinping. It’s not a secret that Ma led an internet company in Beijing during 1998-1999, backed by the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation. He left the company since he did not want to miss millions of opportunities offered by the internet. Ma expressed his reluctance against the Chinese government in his speech in Shanghai on October 24th, 2020. He said that Chinese banks are like pawnshops, as they have informal lenders of yore mentality “pledge and collateral” system. In short, pledge and collateral here mean confiscating your fiduciary item is ineluctable if you fail to pay off your debt. Chinese government considered these words a subversive attempt, and Ma had to pay its fatal price. A month later, the Chinese government suspended 37 billion dollars Alibaba’s IPO, which should have been a record-breaking offering on Earth.

 

A cash-cow called tech companies

Jack Ma and Alibaba are not the only victims of governments' insistences. Along with the COVID-19 outburst in 2020, 90% of people worldwide moved into the online sphere, including routine office work, entertainment, shopping, education, and social interaction. Around the same year, Big Tech (Google, Amazon, Apple, & Facebook) must deal with massive raids from all directions. Lawsuits, tighter scrutiny, and fines against various accusations of unhealthy rivalry, users' data leakage, and abuse, misinformation outspread, to hidden commission practice. An article assumed that the main reason for pressures against Big Tech is their superpower to control users' minds and behavior through a complex algorithm for ordinary people, including most policymakers.

On the one side, IMF is confident that tech companies are the most profitable source of national income for European Union governments (and the rest of the world, of course). Due to wide-scale lockdowns, world trade has suffered a recurrence fever with a blurry sign of recovery. Governments have soon realized that the cure for economic sickness should not solely depend on Quantitative Easing. This measure may bring unwanted consequences to national currency value in the long term (Why? Read this article). Stagnation has pushed governments to seek additional income from increased business taxes, especially from the brightest stars of the pandemic, Big Tech, and the gang. Hence, some have seen digital companies as the shining future of a country, considering a large amount of taxes they will pay to the state.  In other words, more digital companies mean more prosperous a country is, supposedly.

Furthermore, the higher taxes digital companies must pay these days should have prevented a country from falling into the debt trap. Digital companies did not take anything from the soil, sea, and air it operates in, no air and sound pollution. The inevitable environmental impact will be old computers waste. Even though they still have a chance to get recycled if we spend more time and effort on that matter.   

Some digital giants finally decided to pay taxes to the countries where they provide services through prolonged and tiring discussions. At the same time, the amount is more significant than the previous years. Big Tech has shown their support over global taxes mechanism to combat accusations of moving their profits to taxes haven or lower taxes countries. Their spoke person has proposed an idea to ax digital services levies. He said, higher taxes will result in higher costs users must pay. Higher digital taxes could mean more ads on your screen for those who choose to use free digital services. Less comfortable, indeed. However, digital service providers need higher revenue to keep you entertained and served and comply with their obligation simultaneously. Tax raise has forced companies' management to cut budgetary on research & development, a sector which is responsible for seeking and undergoing innovation to keep any digital service afloat amid tighter competition. Governments' support for technology innovation is a privilege for their own sake. It's not only because technology is where the money will come from, but also one reason explained below.

 

Governments hacking

While still being a major social network with the most users globally, Facebook is no longer favorite among youths. Many of its users are adults in their 30s above, once reckless young guns between 2009-2012. During Facebook's heyday, anyone could post about anything on their (and others') Facebook wall. Daily users used to blatantly reveal gossips, online hang-outs, social criticism, any forms of swear words to domestic issues, everything upon Mark Zuckerberg's 'wailing wall.' We have forgotten that according to its history, the US government used to be the one who invented the internet to facilitate information exchange between state researchers. Upon this fact, no one seems competent enough to reject when the US government decided to use the internet for its own interest. With the help of digital companies' heads and hand, Big Tech is not an exception.  

Commoners may use the internet as to how they see the whole world that might be unreachable forever. The internet keeps track of citizens' activities in secrecy, safe and accurate regarding the governments. A while ago, it was known that a particular country had designed malicious software (malware) to carry out covert actions against activists, journalists, and dissidents. We should not naively trust any digital service which claims that our digital data is encrypted, nor it's impossible to hack it.  Various legislation, litigations, or unofficial pressures have made digital services providers like Big Tech powerless to disobey any authority's order to unlock protesters' digital prints. They want to find clues about their friends, their lovers, their love affairs, their debts, the color of their underwear. Every dark secret and shameful story they wish to forget for good. As a hot chat between an Indonesian mass organization leader and his mistress was taken as evidence to put him in the courtroom, we should have realized that there is no such thing as absolute freedom in the digital sphere.

More often than not, digital platforms are to blame for taking advantage of users' content and chats as the feed to execute mass surveillance and data mining. The hackers are declared a group of intelligent guys who have chosen the dark side to gain fame and glory. How if digital platforms and hackers are raised as authority's tools to lure us into some traps, read our minds, control, and divide humans? If the answer is yes, then who is their creator(s)? Somebody out there badly needs tech companies' presence to contribute national income and watch over "naughty kids" all at once. From here, we may have a clue about who is the real mastermind of users' data privacy issues seemingly without end. (dy)