We live in a society where the power pyramid of merchants and nobles is twisting to inversion.
There's still situations where the nobles reign. Nothing they have really matches the flexibility that merchants do when wielding their power.
People are appealing to power when they ask that google disobey a country's sovereignty. It's probably a misappraisal of google's power in Russia. Google is neck and neck in search with Yandex. It's hard to wield a stranglehold you don't have.
In America, google is having lots of success positioning itself as the prime broker for commerce.
Amazon's trying to build a tower that subsumes commerce with depth vs. google's breadth. EC2 is attacking search's foundation from the other side.
If you host the majority of content, you have territorial advantages and ways you can undermine google's usefulness. The amazon market is their flank attack. If everything you want is in one place, no need to search.
Facebook tries to be the ultimate broker of human relationships, and maintain de-facto control over downstream commerce from that high hill.
The government has a de jure monopoly on use of force, but how useful is that against controlling relationships, and therefore elections -- or commerce, and therefore the economy? The government looks outmatched to me.
It makes sense the peasants, yeoman and burghers would address their geopolitical wishes to those with actionable global soft power.
Comments
We live in a society where the power pyramid of merchants and nobles is twisting to inversion.
There's still situations where the nobles reign. Nothing they have really matches the flexibility that merchants do when wielding their power.
People are appealing to power when they ask that google disobey a country's sovereignty. It's probably a misappraisal of google's power in Russia. Google is neck and neck in search with Yandex. It's hard to wield a stranglehold you don't have.
In America, google is having lots of success positioning itself as the prime broker for commerce.
Amazon's trying to build a tower that subsumes commerce with depth vs. google's breadth. EC2 is attacking search's foundation from the other side.
If you host the majority of content, you have territorial advantages and ways you can undermine google's usefulness. The amazon market is their flank attack. If everything you want is in one place, no need to search.
Facebook tries to be the ultimate broker of human relationships, and maintain de-facto control over downstream commerce from that high hill.
The government has a de jure monopoly on use of force, but how useful is that against controlling relationships, and therefore elections -- or commerce, and therefore the economy? The government looks outmatched to me.
It makes sense the peasants, yeoman and burghers would address their geopolitical wishes to those with actionable global soft power.