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As far as I understand VAT's role in the economy, the Value Added Tax is offset to the last link of a value-adding chain: the consumer.

This creates the incentive of further adding value to a product/service and thus creating more economic output.

Amazon may be paying other taxes, but VAT is paid by the consumer.

Concerning point one, could you please list the alternate software you had in mind? Especially the open source ones. Thanks!

Normally it is not patentable if it's obvious to a person skilled in the topic, if there is prior art, or if there is no business application. I would say this fails two out of three.

Yes. Through technical guarantees, I like to think that the benefit is not merely "perceived". And it applies to other actors as well, not only Google.

I'm a bit surprised, I was using the stock Android for Nexus and in my case the results were logged. Just as other people are reporting: every single application usage, call or what-have-you. I also had turned off everything I could find in Settings -> Google Account.

I think they know much more than they are showing in that dashboard. Simply staying a few steps ahead and not giving them the option to even link to your account is worth for me.

To give an example on desktop, even using separate Firefox profiles for Google and non-google activity, it is embarrassingly easy to see that the activity comes from the same person. Just cross-check the bonanza of information like screen size, plugins, fonts etc. I would be surprised if they didn't do it. I prefer to not run the risk. So I go to even greater lengths than I mentioned above, however it was getting long.

To come back to your point, it's inconvenient only in the beginning to document yourself and to set it up. Whether it is rooting the device, or setting up your own e-mail server. In the end it is about the freedom of computing whatever you want on the device that you own.

EDIT: If I may add, it's not like I'm going full Stallman. Everything is a compromise, it would be nice if we weren't forced to go to these lengths, or to compromise at all.

Ahh... It's so satisfying to see the stream of everything I was doing on Android suddenly stop when I switched to Cyanogenmod and not linked my e-mail account.

The trick was to use K-9 Mail. Otherwise, when configuring the e-mail (Gmail), the default mail application adds the entire Google account and the link to the mothership is reestablished. Although I have installed GApps, I transitioned to a dummy account per device plus Xprivacy, plus NetGuard.

Long before Android, the stream had dropped to a trickle when I started sandboxing the Google account to a special session for Gmail. Everything else, searches, youtube went on an incognito window or to a separate Firefox profile.

I knew it to be effective from the constant e-mails I was getting that "Google does not recognize your sign-on". Guess what, Google, I want it that way! Now myactivity.google.com confirms it.

> Is "operating at their highest capacity" a bad thing?

Yes, it's a bad thing. Internet traffic is bursty so usually you have to overprovision a lot to deal with the spikes. Operating at full capacity means that they get money for a service that they cannot fullfil. This is their intended goal such that later they can ask money from whoever wants to have priority.

I know for a fact that at least two major ISPs in France already do this (SFR, Free).

While the hardware part of the job is nicely done, I think there still remains the problem of how to convey the information to the users.

Once a toilet becomes free, everybody waiting will try to aquire the ressource (ie: do a costly walk to the bathroom).

There must already be some gaming theory or performance modelling result that solves this issue, though.

Just a simple idea would be to add a random delay for propagating the information to different users.