First of all, "Nationalizing" corporations is not something that free societies do.
Second, the effect of this would be to further stifle competition from smaller businesses. Which is also not something that free societies do.
I question the motives of the author.
What is "freedom"? Market competition The way Amazon, Uber etc have been set up, using hundreds of millions in investment, able to operate against smaller competitors for literally years without breaking even until the opposition is crushed and consumers are herded into being customers... is that freedom? Maybe for the already established wealthy. For everyone else it's an unfair advantage. There is no freedom for the average Joe to start a publishing an distribution powerhouse
I agree it's a terrible idea to nationalize these companies, but citing 'freedom' as the reason why is not why it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea because it would lead to excessive bureaucracy, higher prices and is unlikely to benefit the competition much. It might help governments get those companies to pay some tax though.
I don't believe all ideologies and their definitions need to be given equal respect. Socialists shouldn't get to just redefine "freedom" to mean a government monopoly running major industries, by outlawing private citizens from owning productive enterprises in those industries, and have everyone else accept their definitions as equally valid as a classical liberal's.
Think about it practically for a moment: what is the government going to do when private citizens in another country fire up thousands of servers and begin providing web services to the people within the government's jurisdiction? Put up a firewall? Start raiding anyone running a relay node that bypasses the firewall? How is that congruent with any reasonable definition of freedom?
We can pretend that we're frameless and judging all perspectives as equally valid, but in actuality that will never happen, as it would make any sort of meaningful communication impossible. Someone could argue war is peace, slavery is freedom, etc, and there would be no way to reject their statements as unequivocally wrong. We would be uttering words to each other that mean completely different things to different people, because we would no longer follow the basic convention of language, which is that the widely observed and long established definition trumps the unorthodox one.
All nationalising would do is give the government a leg-up in having an existing user base. In practice government inertia would lead to the service atrophying and becoming outdated and overburdened with bureaucratic controls and costs. Page & Brin, Bezos and Zuckerberg (or someone new) would each raise capital, start their own competing services and in a few years time we'd be back where we started.
This whole idea is so utterly misconceived and pointless it blows my mind how many people here are trying to justify or defend it. Unless you actively regulated to prohibit competing private services, it would be doomed from he start and if such regulation was enforced - literally banning other search engines including Bing, banning other social networks, banning any other online retail businesses, the lurch towards dystopianism would create a very different world to the one we live in. Even China hadn't come even close to anything like that.
Uh... no offense intended, that's a failure of your comprehension abilities, and not my responsibility to satisfy. Your confusion amounts to "why is the sky blue?"
Because it's blue, Billy. Because it's blue.
But aside from that, 3 people at Google get to effectively dictate what the world will see on the Internet via the top 10 on the search. 1 guy at Facebook gets to dictate what is on my Facebook page. (I certainly don't get any choice in the matter, beyond banning people) This sounds a lot like a dictatorship, and is this what a free society does? Might a free society decide that it is in the society's best interest to have social media be governed by elected officials, and to not be scientifically designed (via A/B testing) to be addictive?
Rediculous, nobody is forcing you to use Google or Facebook.
But: (a) particularly with regards to social networking, the social pressure to use walled-garden sites like Facebook can be very, very strong (b) if you're a Normal Person(tm), it can be hard to know what else to do other than use the same services that everyone else uses and that are being actively marketed to you.
Sure, at the individual level, using Google and Facebook services (as I myself do) is still a voluntary, consensual transaction, but there may well be societal-level effects that look fairly close to those of traditional monopolies.
That's the example I had in mind when writing my comment. The utilities WERE nationalized, however they were de-regulated in recent years, and the market has not really recovered from when they were handed government endorsed monopolies.
Does this mean if you ever built a company, and it gets too big, it will get nationalized?
And what will keep the law from evolving to nationalizing slightly smaller businesses as time goes.
Why not? I guess it also has to provide some important infrastructure for other companies.
> And what will keep the law from evolving to nationalizing slightly smaller businesses as time goes.
That's a slippery slope argument. Do you want to nationalize nothing?
I meant where do we draw the line?
there are so many reasons it would literally fill hours of political philosophy and economics debate.
and has. These debates have been had. At length, and for many years.
Sure it is.
America does not hold a monopoly on freedom.
The current government in my state won on a platform of not privatising the main electrical utility.
If you spend any real time exploring the concept of freedom and how to measure it, America is in fact the most free nation in the world.
That doesn't mean America holds a monopoly on freedom, it means America is setting the example that others follow, and will continue to until another nation offers it's citizens quantifiably more freedom than America does. And examining the current geo-political climates, that isn't going to happen anytime soon.